I encourage you to take time to give thanks to God on this Thanksgiving Day 2011...
....not only for His providence for another year including the gifts he has given you to steward in the work place,
....but also for the beauty and excellency of his character.
John Piper develops the true meaning of thankfulness in a posting at http://www.desiringgod.org/resource-library/articles/how-not-to-commit-idolatry-in-giving-thanks which starts out as follows:
Jonathan Edwards has a word for our time that could hardly be more pointed if he were living today. It has to do with the foundation of gratitude.
True gratitude or thankfulness to God for his kindness to us, arises from a foundation laid before, of love to God for what he is in himself; whereas a natural gratitude has no such antecedent foundation. The gracious stirrings of grateful affection to God, for kindness received, always are from a stock of love already in the heart, established in the first place on other grounds, viz. God's own excellency.1
In other words, gratitude that is pleasing to God is not first a delight in the benefits God gives (though that is part of it). True gratitude must be rooted in something else that comes first, namely, a delight in the beauty and excellency of God's character. If this is not the foundation of our gratitude, then it is not above what the "natural man," apart from the Spirit and the new nature in Christ, experiences. In that case "gratitude" to God is no more pleasing to God than all the other emotions which unbelievers have without delighting in him.
>>>for more thoughts on topic, continue reading at the link above.
Have a Happy Thanksgiving!
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