Great Attitude of Gratitude

“In everything, give thanks; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you” (1 Thessalonians
5:18)
I. Introduction
 3 rooms in heaven, one for the praise and worship, one for the petitions/contrition and one for
thanksgiving.
 “A GRATEFUL HEART IS MAGNET OF MIRACLES” This means that when your heart is
full, incredible things come your way. Have you ever had a time in your life when everything is
just going especially well, and you’re so happy and grateful for all of it? Well, try that again, and
you may see a familiar pattern. Be thankful, and miracles will land at your doorstep. The only
way to test this hypothesis is to be grateful.
 If you have ever wanted to create miracles in your life, then gratitude is a major key to making it
happen.
II. So what, then, is gratitude?

a. Simply put, gratitude is a habit. It’s a way of looking at the world and all the good things in it
with a feeling of appreciation, regardless of whether or not your current situation is to your liking.
b. Many of us express gratitude by saying “thank you” to someone who has helped us or given us a
gift. From a scientific perspective, however, gratitude is not just an action: it is also a positive
emotion that serves a biological purpose.
c. Gratitude is a heart-centered approach to being at peace with yourself and with all you have.
When you practice this feeling of gratitude, it attracts even MORE things into your life for which
to be grateful.
d. Gratitude is a Fruit of our Relationship with Jesus, source of our Joy. When we give thanks, we
do so in faith, because it is the faith that will pave the way for God’s miracles. This is the attitude
with which we are called to live, and which compels us to share even the little that we have.
e. It comes from a heart that recognizes and gives thanks to the things received, and having the kind
of faith that realizes that it is the Lord who gives them.

 The beautiful story about this kind of gratitude is the healing of the ten lepers: Luke 17:11-19
Now on his way to Jerusalem, Jesus traveled along the border between Samaria and Galilee.  12  As he
11 

was going into a village, ten men who had leprosy[a] met him. They stood at a distance  13  and called out
in a loud voice, “Jesus, Master, have pity on us!”
When he saw them, he said, “Go, and show yourselves to the priests.” And as they went, they were
14 

cleansed.
One of them, when he saw he was healed, came back, praising God in a loud voice.  16  He threw himself
15 

at Jesus’ feet and thanked him—and he was a Samaritan.

Jesus asked, “Were not all ten cleansed? Where are the other nine?  18  Has no one returned to give
17 

praise to God except this foreigner?”  19  Then he said to him, “Rise and go; your faith has made you
well.”
Gratitude, it would seem, is inevitable if only we recognize it. Living this kind of attitude becomes a way
of life the more we recognize how truly blessed we are by the Lord. Through this recognition, we are
creating a culture of gratitude. People innately see the many sources of our being grateful in life, be it
small or great
But the story of the ten lepers is a reminder for us that while there are those of us who are like the one
leper who returned to give thanks to God upon recognizing that he was healed, there are also those who
are like the other nine, who did not realize at all or maybe did but did not go back to give thanks. We
could be one of those two, or we could be both in one way or another.
III. The Culture of Ingratitude

This is the culture of 9 lepers. Ingratitude begins when we lose the sense of recognition that we have
Jesus in our lives, manifestation of “throw-away attitude”. Because when we begin to lose sight of Jesus,
then everything else becomes unsatisfactory, frustrating, complaining, and just not enough and our idea of
having becomes conditional and calculating

Conditional gratitude- if it satisfies our hunger for self-gratification

 Grateful if certain conditions are met; example, what I receive meets my expectation, solves my
problems, convenient for me in any way
Comparative gratitude- when we begin to look at our glass being half-empty instead of half-full
 We tend to focus on the things that we don’t have rather than on the things we do have
 (Our basis on being grateful) become dependent on how much we have in comparison to what
others have.

IV. Culture of Gifts

This is our counter to the culture of ingratitude. To instill a deeper understanding of what gratitude
is, we are called to adopt the culture of gift. This comes from a growing relationship with God
which enables us to be joyful and grateful because in faith we believe that all good things are
blessings from Him.
This is a culture that Christ himself adopted when He himself, with deep faith in the generosity of
the Father, give thanks for the little fish and loaves they had, that paved the way for the miracles to
happen. (Todays Gospel) “A GRATEFUL HEART IS MAGNET OF MIRACLES”

If we only open the eyes of our faith, we are able to see that both the good and the challenging things in
life are beautiful gifts from God, that even the little that we have will multiply because we are able to
GIVE THANKS with faith, and that even in times of nothingness, we will still find reasons to give thanks
beyond conditions and beyond comparison!

Gratitude beyond condition

 That despite what we have, no matter how simple the packaging is, we see it as something of
great value and importance
 We go beyond what is hard to understand and accept it as God’s will (brokenness in our
relationship with families, friends and more than friends, physical sickness and the pandemic
crisis, financial constraints.)
 We will continue to trust and put our hopes in the Lord believing that this too shall pass and that
the Lord will not give us something that we could not experience His Victory
Gratitude beyond comparison
 Recognizing that what we have is unique and incomparable to other, each having its own
purpose
  Shifting our focus to what is lacking and imperfect about us and relying more on god’s
abundance. (Mt.25:29 “for to everyone who has, more shall be given, and he will have
abundance”)

Today I have a short story for you about gratitude. A blind boy sat on the steps of a building with a
hat by his feet. He held up a sign which read, “I am blind, please help.”
There were only a few coins in the hat – spare change from folks as they hurried past. A man was
walking by. He took a few coins from his pocket and dropped them into the hat. He then took the sign,
turned it around, and wrote some words. Then he put the sign back in the boy’s hand so that everyone
who walked by would see the new words.
Soon the hat began to fill up. A lot more people were giving money to the blind boy. That afternoon,
the man who had changed the sign returned to see how things were. The boy recognized his footsteps
and asked, “Were you the one who changed my sign this morning? What did you write?”
The man said, “I only wrote the truth. I said what you said but in a different way.” I wrote, “Today is
a beautiful day, but I cannot see it.” Both signs spoke the truth. But the first sign simply said the boy
was blind, while the second sign conveyed to everyone walking by how grateful they should be to see

 When your life seems full of troubles, it seems difficult to maintain an attitude of gratitude,
doesn’t it? All we see are our problems, like a blackened storm cloud casting a dark shadow over
our lives.
 And the times when everything just seems to be going smoothly? We often take these precious
moments for granted too, don’t we? Caught up in the bliss, comfort, and familiarity of it all, we
can simply forget to be thankful.
 Go ahead, try it out right now. What or who do you have in your life to be thankful for?

 Take the 30 Day Gratitude Challenge!

I encourage you to give the exercises a try for 30 days and see what effect it has on your own life:
Write down three things each day for which you are thankful. These should be specific, not general. For
example, “I am grateful for the way my toddler likes to hug me”. (Rather than, “I am thankful for my
kids” … or my job or my house, etc.)
The key with the exercise is to express genuine gratitude and appreciation for specific things you already
have in your life and not to think like a victim who ‘deserves’ more or who wishes they had more of
something.

And the positive effect is multiplied when you share the gratitude with others – especially family – but
also friends, colleagues, clients and others.

We may appear hopeless before or even up until especially now, especially this the pandemic crisis,
but as we go back, we see our journey, our faithfulness to God, our story, actually His story, later on
we discover God’s plan that indeed is HE IS WORKING IN OUR LIVES, a god that is slow in anger, a
father who loves us so much and will never leave us alone! For this mga Kapatid, Let us BE GRATEFUL
in everything, for this is the will of our God!