Psalms 100:4, ‘4Enter His gates with thanksgiving And His courts with praise. Give thanks to Him, bless His name’.
Giving thanks to God always shows our expression of faith.
Colossians 2:6, ‘6Therefore as you have received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in Him, 7having been firmly rooted and now being built up in Him and established in your faith, just as you were instructed, and overflowing with gratitude.’
Humility is a Christian character; we need to clothe ourselves with humility. As the second chapter heading says, ‘You Are Built Up in Christ’ – The Colossian believers – ‘In the beginning, they were taught about Christ. They received Christ and they are built up in Christ’. When we go deep, as instructed here, after we are established in faith, we see, there is an overflowing of gratitude.
Colossians 2:2, ‘2that their hearts may be encouraged, having been knit together in love, and attaining to all the wealth that comes from the full assurance of understanding, resulting in a true knowledge of God’s mystery, that is, Christ Himself’,
We become mindful and intentional in small things around us. We become humble and start to give thanks, if we don’t take things for granted. Humility, increases our dependency on God. We need to become more grateful as we grow in humility. Be thankful and show gratitude to our God and the brethren. Never forget what God has done in our lives – especially in our spiritual growth, how much He helped us grow! Always remember how faithful our God is! Then we get established in our faith. Let us re-assess ourselves. Don’t be proud. The real condition of man is understood when he fasts for few hours or days, we start craving for food, we can understand our weakness of our flesh. We are nothing. We need our spiritual food every day, then we can be firmly built up and rooted in God and also our prayer life – also in humility, let us submit our supplications to God in gratitude, by showing our respect in humbleness, as we do it.
1 Thessalonians 5:16, ‘16Rejoice always; 17pray without ceasing; 18in everything give thanks; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus’.
We can rejoice with our prayerful attitude, believing in His time and giving thanks! Do not quench the Holy Spirit. When we do not show gratitude or reach out to God in prayer, we are quenching the Holy Spirit. Let the Holy Spirit work in our lives. We need to humble ourselves and pray. Believe in God’s supremacy. Jesus is our example.
Philippians 2:3, ‘3Do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, but with humility of mind regard one another as more important than yourselves;’ 4do not merely look out for your own personal interests, but also for the interests of others. 5Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, 6who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, 7but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men. 8Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. 9For this reason also, God highly exalted Him, and bestowed on Him the name which is above every name,’
We see Jesus as our example, always seeking His Father’s will in His life, through prayer and gratitude. Jesus was God, but did not regard equality with God, but He emptied Himself taking the form of the bond-servant, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, on a cross. Let us have this attitude which Jesus had, in our lives too. As a young generation, we tend to think we can do many things through our human strength, with our body favoring us, and as we don’t have many health issues, we take our strength for granted and do things with our own human strength! But we come to realize we are literally weak and it is only by God’s mercy, we are here! Let us be grateful to God and to others and trusting God’s Sovereign control and always submitting our supplications to Him in prayer with thanksgiving for all He has done and this personal relationship with our God will help us to grow in our Christian faith and walk with Him. Let us be humble and deny our self-will and submit our requests to God with thankfulness!
Praise God.
