Living with Gratitude
The following video transcript has been lightly edited
Hello. I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday because it's about people, it's about food, and it's about giving thanks. It's about being grateful. That's what I want to talk to you about today. I want to talk to you about the spiritual discipline of gratitude.
Gratitude is like a superfood for our spiritual and emotional life. All kinds of studies have shown that the more we practice gratitude, the more joy and happiness we experience, the more hope we have because it connects us to the infinite. It connects us to potential that's all around us. And so today I'm gonna look at a letter that Paul, the leader of the early church, writes to his apprentice Timothy.
To sketch out a few things to help us live lives of gratitude. And how do we build that super food, that super spiritual discipline into our life. Well, the way Paul begins the letter, as he does with always, he gives thanks for Timothy. He gives thanks for Christ and the role that Christ has given to Paul.
And he says, Hey, I want you to experience grace and mercy and peace. I love that. Grace, mercy, and peace. Each of those things are things that I think we crave in our life. Grace, of course, is everything from beauty to forgiveness. Mercy is recognizing that at times what we need is we need a second chance.
And peace, especially in the scriptures, is not just inner peace, but it's a sense of peace within the whole cosmos, within the whole universe. It's no war. It's a sense of contentment. All these things. And so, Paul is wishing these for Timothy. And the reason Paul wishes them is that he's experienced them himself.
He believes that in Christ, that grace and mercy and peace are abundant and he has them. So he wants to give them away. Think of it like this in your house, maybe in the midst of the pandemic, you had trouble because you had moved your office up to a bedroom and the wireless wasn't reaching very well. And so you were dropping your call. So what did you do? You put an extender in. And what that extender does is it takes the wireless signal and it replicates it. And so one of the things we want to do as a people, if we want to live with gratitude, if we want to incorporate that spiritual discipline in our life, is we want to replicate it.
We want to reflect on how we've experienced grace and mercy and peace, and then we want to offer that out to others. And so that action of recognizing where we've experienced it in our own life is really important because that's what's going to empower us to extend it or replicate it out. And so in order to do that, we need to have this practice of reflection.
Hey, what am I grateful for? What has happened in this past week? What are experiences of grace and mercy and peace that I can point to? Because that's going to give us the power to practice this discipline of gratitude. So if we want to live grateful lives, we want to be extenders of grace, mercy, and peace.
But we also want to give thanks to and for people. So what Paul does in this letter is he gives thanks. He gives thanks for Timothy. He also gives thanks for their friendship. He gives thanks to Timothy's Grandmother and mother, Lois and Eunice, and so Paul is sort of modeling for us this idea that we want to be people who give thanks for others, and not just for others, but to others.
It's really amazing they did a study, they took 300 people on a university campus that were all struggling with anxiety and depression, and each group, they divided them into three groups, each group got into some counseling. They had one group just go to counseling, they had another group write about their feelings, and they had another group that wrote letters to people, expressing their gratitude.
What they found is that after four weeks, that the group that had been writing letters of gratitude experienced a larger increase in happiness and contentment than the other two groups. And then again after 12 weeks, and that was even more pronounced, that increase of happiness and contentment. And the reason is, is the practice of gratitude of being grateful for others and to others shapes the way we see the world.
It connects us to each other because people love to be appreciated and it allows us to see the good gifts. Even in the midst of hard times, we can be grateful. We can be grateful for the people who show up and say, Hey, this is a hard thing you're going through. You're not going to go through this alone.
And so if we want to incorporate this in our life, we want to add a few practices. I think one helpful practice is getting up in the morning and doing a gratitude journal. Hey, here's what I'm grateful for. Here's who I'm grateful for and write it down. Second, act on that. So after you write some things down, maybe send a text message, send an email to tell people why you're grateful for them, what they've done, how you appreciate them.
And then finally, I think asking the question, Hey, what are you grateful for? Around the dinner table is a really healthy habit to add to your life. All right, so living with gratitude is this super food for our spiritual and emotional life. And we want to do that. We want to be extenders of grace and mercy and peace. And we want to give thanks to and for people.
And lastly, what we want to do is we want to embrace the gifts that we've been given. The purpose of Paul's letter to Timothy is to try to encourage him. See, Paul has apprenticed Timothy and he's empowered Timothy to be a teacher and a leader in the local church.
A couple things have gone awry. Timothy's young and Paul's now in prison. And so people are beginning to doubt. And so Paul's saying, Hey, no, no, no. Remember, you've been given this gift, this gift of faith and this gift of leadership. So I want you to rekindle it. I want you to share the gift you've been given, and this is a great reminder to us.
The people who are grateful share the gifts they've been given. Now we can share gifts in a variety of ways, certainly our resources, our time, and our money. And this season, this Thanksgiving, Christmas season, it's a great season to participate in that.
Here at Grace Community, we do a couple things. We adopt some young moms along with the ministry Young Lives, and we buy them gifts and participate and connect people to people. That's a way we can share the gifts we've been given. We also take 50 percent of what comes in through our December giving and we give it away. We give it to organizations like the Samaritan center who help feed and create community for those who have high need in Syracuse. We're also working with Young Life and a community in El Salvador this year to do some medical work and some community building. And then ultimately we, we partner with Young Lives year round. And so this is a way for our church to share the gifts, but we can share our gifts in all kinds of ways.
Some of us have the gift of optimism, some of us have gift of pessimism. And you say, Oh, that's funny, optimism, pessimism. Well, we need each other. The pessimists need the optimists to know that there's hope and potential. The optimists need the pessimists to know that everything isn't always great and we need to plan and watch out for some things.
But think through, how might you share the gifts that you have? How could you share the gift of relationship, or resources, or the different things that you have that are uniquely you, that you're good at, in the midst of your home, your workplace, or your community? Each of these things, whether we are extenders of grace and mercy and peace because of the grace and mercy and peace we've experienced, our ability to give thanks to and for people, and the ability to embrace the gifts we've been given will allow us to take this spiritual discipline of gratitude and work it into our life and reshape our brain and our emotions so that we can connect with the goodness and grace and mercy that's all around us. Hey, I hope you have a great week and I'll see you soon.
