Gratitude For God’s Care

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What can motivate us to follow in Jesus’s footsteps? What helps us know we are okay to express our faith boldly? We can express gratitude for God’s tender care for us and Jesus’s example of suffering which ended with glory. As Jesus suffered and was glorified, so the same is true for us. We will suffer in this life but be glorified in the next.

So be truly glad. There is wonderful joy ahead, even though you must endure many trials for a little while. These trials will show that your faith is genuine. It is being tested as fire tests and purifies gold—though your faith is far more precious than mere gold. So when your faith remains strong through many trials, it will bring you much praise and glory and honor on the day when Jesus Christ is revealed to the whole world.

1 Peter 1:6-7 NLT

When you review the whole history of the Savior in his life and death; his nights of care and prayer; his agonies in the garden; the stressful night he endured before his crucifixion; his despairing cry, “My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me!” (Matthew 27:46). Think how faithful he was to you; many nights alone in some cold mountain he persisted in solemn prayer to God. He suffered all this not for himself, but for you who were ruined. It was for you he toiled all his life of care — it was your miserable sins that crushed him in the garden.

Gratitude for God’s Attention to Detail

Oh, Christian! Christian! Remember with gratitude that you are not your own, but that you are bought with a price, and that price was the life of the Lord Jesus; therefore, glorify him in your body and spirit, which are his.

Make your home with Him. Tell your wants often to him in prayer, and when you are worried, tired, and distressed, cast all your care on him, for he cares for you. His all-seeing eye is always upon you, and he never will leave nor forsake you. He feeds the sparrows that have neither a barn nor a storehouse. There is not a living thing but that he keeps it, and why should we fear that he will not keep us? The very hairs of your head are numbered.

Again, we have been created in Christ unto good works, and these good works God has before ordained that we should walk in them. I am sure we should love God all the more and serve him all the better, when we feel that he is a fire around us and that he is engaged to save us, despite all our foes whether inside or outside of us.

Gratitude for Christ’s Example

Christ’s example motivates us. He pointed our feet in the way he would have us go. Yes, even more, he showed us by example the way.

There is gratitude even in a dog when you give him no more than a bone. Then let us think that we were poor, starved, rebellious dogs, who have been fed on the very flesh and blood of Christ, who has stooped to bind and heal all our wounds. When we were lost, poor, starving, and friendless, he hunted us from every place where we had wandered, took away all our grief and made our eyes overflow with tears of joy, astonished us with tokens of his wonderful love, forgiving, sweetly forgiving all our sins.

Dear reader, have you forsaken him, or left off following him? Are you tired of his service or company? Let me exhort you; I need it as much as you. Christians should never complain; why should servants complain when the Master complains not, though his suffering be greater than all the suffering of all his servants? Let us learn patience by looking at the sufferings of Christ. Homeless, often tired and wearied, and yet not a complaint escapes his lips — these are the best thoughts to stir us up to duty and not the fear of apostasy.

Instead of fear, we focus on gratitude for Jesus’s finished work and the assurance that our suffering provides as it confirms our faith.

This is post 7 in a series; you can read the previous post. This post started as the public domain works of J. H. Oliphant. While sections are the same in many ways, I modernized the language and added my thoughts to provide greater clarity for my readers.
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