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Today, we are going to be focusing on how to live a life of gratitude. This is the best way to motivate us to live out our purpose well. It’s also the best way to fight discontent in our lives.
Motivation for Living: Our Purpose
In the last post, we talked about how we battle between two types of motivations: Extrinsic and Intrinsic. This battle is what makes it so difficult to complete those New Year’s resolutions or finish the final paper before 11:59 p.m. When we wait to be motivated by extrinsic motivations, we tend to procrastinate on what we need to accomplish or wait until we are ‘in the mood’ to get things done. This is where the importance of setting smart goals comes into play. We have to work on making sure that we are planning what we need to do to accomplish things wisely. For instance, if I know that I need to get the house clean for company by Friday, I can make small, manageable goals for each day of the week and schedule them into my day. As long as I practice the self-discipline to get these things done and nothing seriously derails my plans, I can plan on achieving that goal using my intrinsic motivations and smart planning.
That’s all good and well and can be very useful when I am trying to get caught up on chores, errands, and work assignments. But, what about those drifting times? The times when I feel purposeless in life, like I have no direction, and because of that, feel like I am moving about in a fog. I can try in these times to ‘fake it till I make it.’ In those moments, I can write out a principled plan to find purpose in my life and work diligently to accomplish daily things that make me feel I am doing something. I can manufacture my purpose… but only for a little while. If I am driven by the voices in my head that say I have to do something because “it’s the right thing to do,” I will come to recognize eventually that I am leading a hollow and legalistic life. This is because I am driven by those extrinsic motivators that never really lead to a heart shift.
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An Example of Gratitude
In the book of Luke, there is a story in chapter 17 about 10 men with leprosy or a serious skin disease. These men cried out to Jesus and begged him to heal them. Jesus saw them and told them to go and show themselves to the priests, as was commanded in the Mosaic Law (Lev. 14). The ten men acted in faith and left to go to the priests, and on the way there, they were healed! Let’s pause there for a minute. Think of a time when your prayers were clearly answered. You had been crying out to God and almost couldn’t take it anymore, but you heard his still small voice and were comforted by it. How did you respond when you recognized that the thing that you had been crying out for from God had been given to you?
Luke 17:15 picks up with one of the men returning to Jesus and giving thanks and glory to God. The rest of the men may have done what Jesus told them to do, to go and see the priest, but they never stopped to thank God for what he had done. All too often, I’m afraid that we do the same. Sometimes we recognize immediately when we see God working in our lives, and stop to give him the glory for the answered prayers. More frequently, we end up going about our days just like the 9 men who were healed. Which person are you?
Earlier in chapter 17, Jesus had been teaching the disciples and asked them an important question in verses 7-10. When we are working for God, we tend to think that we are entitled not only to the original costly grace of Jesus’ death on the cross but also to the grace that we receive daily from God. Jesus says in v. 10, “When you have done all that you were commanded, you should say, ‘We are good-for-nothing slaves; we’ve only done our duty.” Every display of grace is a gift. How should we respond to the gifts when we receive them? Like the one man who returned to Jesus, we need to respond with thanks, giving glory to God.
Living a life of gratitude involves recognizing that all the good things in life are the gifts of God and because of that giving glory and thanks to God for those things. Where can you see the display of the grace of God in your life this week? Have you given thanks for those gifts yet?
***This post is the second in a series on gratitude. You can find the first post here and the next post here.***
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