Thursday, November 28, 2019

The Thankful One

"Then as He entered a certain village, there met Him ten men who were lepers, who stood afar off.
And they lifted up their voices and said, "Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!"
So when He saw them, He said to them, "Go, show yourselves to the priests." And so it was that as they went, they were cleansed.
And one of them, when he saw that he was healed, returned, and with a loud voice glorified God,
and fell down on his face at His feet, giving Him thanks, And he was a Samaritan.
So Jesus answered and said, "Were there not ten cleansed?  But where are the nine?"
Luke 17:12-17 (NKJV)

Often when people think about Thanksgiving, they think about all of the food and time with family, and that is a nice thing.  But it is easy to overlook the real meaning behind Thanksgiving.  Most people have some ideas about the origins of Thanksgiving and how that the day began because people wanted to give thanks for the good things that they had.  But it is easy to lose sight of the original intent of things and get caught up in our own lives and miss the point of something like Thanksgiving.

Sometimes we are not as thankful as we could and should be.  When something happens that we could be thankful about we often just feel good about it and move on.  But, if we would just take a moment to thank God for the answer to prayer, or the favor we just received on our job or with some person we had to deal with, or for another healthy day, or a positive outcome in a difficult situation, or even that we had a nice place to live and food to eat, it would help us.

Being thankful can change our outlook on things and help us to be more aware of the good things we have in our life.  We need to be the kind of people who don't take good things for granted and don't overlook something positive that happened.  By making a decision to be thankful for the things we do have it can help us to avoid a wrong attitude and instead be truly grateful for the good things in our life. We need to be like the one leper who came back to give thanks, we need to be the thankful one.

No comments: