Spiritual Rhythm: Being with Jesus Every Season of Your Soul by Buchanan Mark

Author:Buchanan, Mark [Buchanan, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Zondervan
Published: 2010-08-23T16:00:00+00:00

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TIME-IN 15

THANKFUL IN AND FOR ALL THINGS

When I first started reading the Bible, I thought the apostle Paul must have been half-mad. He’d write the most extreme counsel. I’m not talking about his controversial statements on women in ministry, or his apparent flip-flop on what to do with foods sacrificed to idols, or any of other many sundry things Paul gets blamed for.

I mean 1 Thessalonians 5:18 and Ephesians 5:20. There, he tells Christians to be thankful in all things and for all things.

That’s extreme.

But it’s not half-mad. It’s subversively wise.

Thankfulness can throw mountains into the sea. Thankfulness can overcome evil with good. Thankfulness can turn adversity into advantage.

Thankfulness is more than an act. It’s an orientation. It’s a reframing of reality—not in some whistling-in-the-dark way but in a fixing-our-eyes-on-what-is-unseen way. Radical thankfulness makes sense only if behind our touch-and-see reality another reality is hard at work. Which is exactly the case. If there’s one thing the Bible makes clear, cover to cover, it’s that what we see ain’t all there is. It’s not even half of all there is. It’s at best shadow and echo and rumor of what’s really going on.

So radical thankfulness is a way of hailing things unseen. It’s, in the root sense, a declaration that the unseen God is very much on the job, not surprised or dismayed by a single thing, and able to work it all to good.

I wonder if you would practice, right now, radical thankfulness.

Take a situation you’d rather not be in.

Spend time giving thanks in it. Thank God in spite of it. Thank God for all the good that still abounds regardless of it.

Now, take a further step: thank God for it. Do this not as an act of masochism but as an act of faith. Of course you’re not thankful for the specific grief, tragedy, mess, loss. But one day you’ll see that even the worst things in your life God used as raw material for some of the best things in your life.

You’ll be thanking him then.

Might as well get a head start.

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