Quotes about Gratitude

If gratitude for the gospel is not rooted in the glory of God beneath the gift of God, it is disguised idolatry.

So I arrive at this definition of gratitude. Gratitude is a species of joy which arises in your heart in response to the goodwill of someone who does or tries to do you a favor.

Rejoicing without the content of Christ does not honor Christ.

By nature, we get more pleasure from God's gifts then from Himself.

He once said that "there are but two lessons for Christians to learn: the one is, to enjoy God in everything; the other is, to enjoy everything in God.

God is not glorified if the foundation of our gratitude for the gospel is the worth of its gifts and not the value of the Giver. If gratitude for the gospel is not rooted in the glory of God beneath the gift of God, it is disguised idolatry. May God grant us a heart to see in the gospel the light of the glory of God in the face of Christ. May he grant us to delight in him for who he is, so that all our gratitude for his gifts will be the echo of our joy in the excellency of the Giver!

It is radically humbling to confess that the source of all our joy resides outside ourselves.

all the gifts of God are given for the sake of revealing more of God's glory, so that the proper use of them is to rest our affections not on them but through them on God alone. What I mean by resting our affections is that the desires of our hearts find their end point-their goal, their resting place-only in God, even though, as it were, they ride up to God on a thousand gifts.

In other words, in all my rejoicing over all the good things that God has made, God himself is the heart of my joy, the gladness of my joy. In all my rejoicing in everything, there is a central rejoicing in God. Every joy that does not have God as its central gladness is a hollow joy and in the end will burst like a bubble. This is what led Augustine to pray, "He loves thee too little who loves anything together with Thee, which he loves not for thy sake."2

I should interweave my theology with prayer. I should frequently interrupt my talking about God by talking to God. Not far behind the theological sentence, "God is generous," should come the prayerful sentence, "Thank you, God." On the heels of, "God is glorious," should come, "I adore your glory." What I have come to see is that this is the way it must be if we are feeling God's reality in our hearts as well as describing it with our heads.

True gratitude must be rooted in something else that comes first, namely, a delight in the beauty and excellency of God's character.

If we are not captured by his personality and character, then all our declarations of thanksgiving are like the gratitude of a wife to a husband for the money she gets from him to use in her affair with another man.