Hello, welcome to the Excel Stillmore podcast.

I am your host, Chris Emerson, and we are here to talk about tips and strategies that you can employ to deepen your faith, improve your relationships, and just get the most out of your life.

Thank you for joining. Let's get started.

All right, so today we're going to be putting all of our focus on the idea of gratitude.

That's actually a pretty big deal. People talk about it all the time. We use words like being

thankful for what you have, appreciating what you have, counting your blessings.

Gratitude is kind of a word that wraps all of that together.

And you probably already know that the New Testament is filled with passages on that about being thankful.

I mean, Philippians 4 is a verse we read a lot, how you overcome anxiety, you do it by looking at the things that you being thankful. I mean, Philippians 4 is a verse we read a lot, how you overcome anxiety,

you do it by looking at the things that you're thankful for and letting that help and strengthen

you. There's just tons of principles on gratitude. Colossians 2 talks about overflowing with gratitude.

There's a lot of benefit there. Here's the thing, though, our episode is titled

Level 3 gratitude, and I want to be very clear on that. The gratitude that the Bible talks about

that genuinely makes a daily difference in the life of the Christian is not some level one

generic flat type of gratitude, which I'll be talking about in a minute.

And it's not level two where you add one important element to it.

If you really want to understand the power of gratitude, you have to graduate past those lower level insufficient efforts in thankfulness and graduate to absolute full conviction

gratitude. So by the end of this episode, you will have a clear picture on what that looks like.

But let me begin by talking to you about level one gratitude. Here's where it comes from.

Those of you who are familiar with this program,

you know how it came together. I've been preaching a long time 18, 19 years. That's a lot of

Bible study, a lot of scripture, working from the Word of God outward. But also, in the last few

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