This Gratitude Fact Will Change Your Life

What's up guys? This is Ben from Provoke and Inspire. And if you're listening to this, on the day that it came out, it's Black Friday. I think that's a worldwide thing. At the very least. It's definitely an American thing, which is a day where we buy more than we already buy. Yay, consumerism! Uh, anyway, we are releasing something a little bit different today because it is a holiday week, Thanksgiving, here in the US. I hope you all had a great time with family and food and football, and more importantly, we're genuinely grateful for a long time. Gratitude has been core to my faith. It's something that I've written about a lot. I've talked about it a lot. And so more than just some platitude or something that's been absorbed into a secular holiday, I think gratitude is core to what it means to be a follower of Jesus. And so today, I wanted to release just a short monologue on gratitude, and I focus on the idea that our worldview, the Judeo-Christian worldview, gives us tremendous reasons to be grateful. And although you may not have thought about it like this, it gives us someone to be grateful to. And so I think you'll find this short little episode interesting, and I'd love to know what you think. So if you do listen to the whole thing, go ahead and send us a DM on Instagram. If you don't follow us on Provoke and Inspired podcast, you can find it there and send us a direct message. Otherwise, you can always send us an email at podcast at npr.org. And before I get on to it, I would be remiss to not thank you. Look, for those of you who have consistently, faithfully listened to and supported this podcast, I am genuinely grateful for you. It has been a pleasure to do this for over ten years. Six hundred plus episodes, hundreds of guests. It's been a really amazing part of my life for a long time now. And then when I hear from you that this has encouraged you, that this has provoked and inspired you in the right way, to be faithful for Jesus to grow in your faith, it is really overwhelming that God would use me and Chad and David and Luke and the guests that we've had to have that kind of impact on your life. It's truly extraordinary. So thank you. Thank you for supporting this. Thank you for telling other people about it and sticking with us. I am more excited about this than ever, truly. And I believe the next season is going to be awesome. We are already filling up twenty twenty six with incredible guests. We have all sorts of new passion and vision for how to make this more effective. And most importantly, we just keep asking God that he would use it to help us be more faithful to him and to bring others along for the ride as well. So thank you. I hope you enjoy this episode. I hope you have a great holiday week for those in the US. For the rest of you, you know you can have a good time too. That's cool. Uh, all right, check it out. You're listening to the Provoke and Inspire podcast. I came across a study recently that honestly surprised me. Researchers compared three ways people practice gratitude. One group prayed their gratitude to God. Another group wrote it privately in a journal, and a third group wrote it down and shared it with another person. So spoiler alert the ones who prayed to God experienced the far greater spiritual, mental, emotional, and physical benefits than the other two approaches. The lead researcher put it this way gratitude is not only about what you're grateful for, it's about to whom you're expressing it. It turns out that when gratitude is directed beyond yourself, specifically God, something sacred happens. Your perspective widens. You feel less alone. You sense that you're part of something larger than you. But that instinct, feeling grateful to someone, runs into a massive cultural problem because belief in God is declining fast. More people than ever feel grateful but have no clear place to direct it. Which brings us back to a really old idea. America's whole tradition of gratitude started with that exact tension when Abraham Lincoln established Thanksgiving in eighteen sixty three, right in the middle of the Civil War. He framed it with unmistakable Christian language. He said the nation's blessings were so abundant that even the most hardened heart should be moved by the ever watchful providence of Almighty God. Gratitude in Lincoln's mind always had an object. You didn't just feel it, you directed it. Doctor Aronson, a humanities professor, describes hiking one day, stepping into a beautiful lakeside clearing and feeling this overwhelming sense of gratitude, but he couldn't direct it towards anyone. It was gratitude with no object, gratitude floating in the air. And look, he's not alone. Many people feel that same thing. This gratitude, this sense of awe wells up. But naturally we want to ascribe that to something. We want to point that to someone. G.K. Chesterton said the worst moment for an atheist is when he feels truly thankful and has no one to thank. Professor Aronson expands on that, saying that living without God means facing life and death in a way no generation before us has done. The old secular stories of progress have collapsed without God, and without the belief that history is moving somewhere meaningful. Gratitude becomes thin. It becomes vague. You're thankful. But to whom? Some people push back. I came across this blog and it said, the real tragedy is when our gratitude expands in every direction, but then is squeezed back into a tidy box labeled God. This is ultimately a false choice. I can acknowledge God as the source of all good things, and I can acknowledge that in everything, in every direction. I can not only direct my gratitude to God as the source, but to all of the things and all of the people that embody that. I can thank the people in my life who are generous and kind as an extension of the generosity and kindness of God himself. Some people may argue, well, we don't need to thank God. We can just thank all gods or all forces or all spirituality, but replacing one God with an infinite number of some gods or some vague spiritual entities still reveals the same fundamental instinct you're trying to reach beyond the material world. Which brings us back to why the research matters so much. When people direct their gratitude upward, it transforms them more deeply. It strengthens their relationships. It grounds them. It makes them less lonely in a culture that is drowning in loneliness. You might not need God to feel grateful, but without him it's just limited, vague and detached. And maybe we need to see this as an opportunity. When you have a conversation with someone outside of the church, ask them when you feel that swelling sense of gratitude for beauty, for love of art, or just the very fact that you're alive. Who do you think evolution, chance? And then ask, does that actually satisfy you? Gratitude is one of those instincts, like our longing for justice or meaning. It points back to the existence of God. It's not definitive knock down proof, but it's a powerful signpost, a quiet reminder that the world is not empty and that your life is not an accident, and that there is someone behind all of this who deserves your thanks.

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