Hey everyone, John Mark Comer here. Happy Monday and welcome to the Bridgetown Daily for February 15th.

It is cold outside at least in Portland. Any of you listening from Southern California or Australia where it is summer,

hard to believe right now or wherever, not for you, but for those of us Portlanders, it is cold and snowy and there is ice all over and this is

all over and the city is shut down. And I woke up this morning and my first thought or maybe not first thought, but very early on when I sat down on the couch with my morning coffee was just

good. Thank you that I'm warm and I'm dry and I'm indoors and I'm safe and we have power. A lot of Portlanders are without power due to the storm and I have food in my belly driving into the office this morning.

Houseless people intense under a foot of snow and I just thought man the pain God have mercy but I just felt a deep kind of well in my spirit of gratitude. And that got me thinking about the writer Paul and the New Testament and the theme of gratitude in his writings Paul is the most prolific writer in the New Testament and gratitude is all over his corpus.

Let me read you a small sampling just from the beginnings the intros of a few of his letters one Corinthians I always thank my God for you because of his grace given you in Messiah Jesus for in him you have been enriched in every way or Ephesians chapter one.

Ever since I heard about your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all God's people I have not stopped giving thanks for you or Philippians one I thank my God every time I remember you and all my prayers for all of you I always pray with joy then of course is Colossians just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord continue to live your lives in him.

Rooted and built up in him strengthened in the faith as you were taught and overflowing with thankfulness what a great line over flowing like you just spill over with thankfulness he goes on let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts since as members of one body you were called to peace and be thankful.

Let the message of Christ dwell among you richly as you teach and it monish one another with all wisdom through Psalms hymns and songs from the spirit singing to God listen with gratitude in your hearts and whatever you do whether in word or deed do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus giving thanks to God the Father through him.

That is just a sliver of the pie of all that Paul has to say about gratitude several centuries ago the reformers in the west put Paul's theology of faith at the center of Protestant theology as a whole solar feed or by faith alone that is kind of the rally cry of the Protestant church of the last half a millennium in the west and beyond.

And to be sure faith is a major theme in Paul's writing but I did not realize until I don't know a year or two ago that gratitude is I would argue just as major of a theme and my theory is they are linked they mutually reinforce each other my theory is that gratitude for Paul is the practice by which we cultivate a heart of faith in all of the world.

And then we can also cultivate faith in all of our life all the time after all practices or spiritual disciplines in more traditional language are the way that we practice what is not in our power to do in order to become the kind of people who can eventually do what is currently not in our power meaning you let use an athletic metaphor right you lift weights that are 20 pounds in order to eventually become the kind of person who can lift weights that is not in our power to do.

You can lift weights that are a hundred pounds you do what you can to eventually do what right now you can't for us translation if you want to grow in faith practice gratitude you don't have enough faith to believe in God or believe for God or live with confidence for your future step out or risk or to live by faith OK start right now with gratitude.

Make a list of one or two or three things that you are grateful for say a prayer before the meal any of you can do that as you fall asleep on your pillow just thank God for a few things in your day any and all of us can practice gratitude because any gratitude or through the practice of gratitude we realize that life is a gift that everything as Paul writes in another spot what did you what do you have that you did not receive.

All of it the Lord is our shepherd I lack nothing in the language to Psalm 23 meaning somebody else is in charge of us somebody else is our protector and our provider and we are under his care we're not all alone this isn't social darwinism this isn't survival of the fittest this isn't look after number one this is we live on a Psalm 23 world life is a gift from his hand.

Every meal every glass of water and we're OK we're here right now if you're listening you're OK at some level in gratitude we focus on what we do have in the present the opposite of fear where we focus on what we don't have in the future and through the practice of gratitude we ground our mind and our body in the now of gratitude we are going to do that.

Oh, of God's love and care and we take on the inner posture of a Psalm 23 kind of life and just to remind you as we wind down gratitude is both a practice and a posture practice it's something we do you write it down in your rule of life or you put it on your I call every morning I start by writing out three things that I'm grateful to God for literally number one number two number three on a

little piece of paper inside my Bible every night after dinner before we clean the kitchen we go around the table and say something that we are grateful for at the end of every Sabbath what are you grateful for from this week like it's something you do you literally schedule it in if you are that kind of a person it's a practice but it's also a posture it's something intangible and interior where we receive our life as it actually is and we're going to do that.

So it actually is not as we wish it was not as we are working to make it change to be but as it actually is as a gift Christians psychologists talk a lot about two basic postures gratitude or grasping grasping is where we're either kind of grabbing for something that we want in life or the

inverse is true kind of pushing away something that we don't want so much of our thoughts so much of our speech so much of what we do with our body our money our time is either grabbing for what we want or pushing away what we don't want I want this I

don't want that get closer to me get away from me that's so often how we run rough rough shot through life and even over other people and it's not all bad to wake up in the

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