Gratitude and Faith

So they removed the stone. Then Jesus raised His eyes, and said, "Father, I thank You that You have heard Me." (John 11:41)

Jesus is our example. One of the reasons that He came to this earth was to live life as a human being to show us how we were originally designed to live, except that He was doing it in the context of pervasive sin all around Him as we now have to live. In this story Jesus was surrounded by an oppressive atmosphere of unbelief and doubt that made the situation even more intense. And in the middle of all of this He modeled what it looks like to have simple and total faith in God when everything is going wrong.

After raising His eyes to turn away from the depressing circumstances around Him, Jesus begins His prayer to His Father with gratitude. Thankfulness and praise to God is the most powerful weapon at our disposal that Satan is terrified we will learn about and utilize in our lives. Far too often it seems to us that gratitude and praise are side issues and the real problems that consume our focus require petitioning God or working harder to get our problems straightened out. But gratitude is one of the most essential ingredients of the atmosphere of heaven and Jesus practiced it regularly.

Another common mistake that we make in reference to gratitude is the assumption that we need something tangible to be grateful about before we are ready to express it. I know that most of my life I have operated with this subconscious assumption so when people talked about expressing more gratitude and praise I secretly resented their urging because I could see very little to be grateful for and much for which to complain. Thus this mistaken assumption has molded my mental wiring to gravitate me toward fault-finding than toward appreciation. I now have a great deal of remedial work to occur in my heart and mind to be restored to the design God has for me.

What I have been learning over recent years is that my praise and thankfulness must be primarily based not on what God has done for me or even necessarily what I hope will happen but must be rooted solidly on who God is irregardless of what circumstances may suggest about Him. I have been coming to focus my attention far more on choosing to believe the truth about what God is really like from what He has been showing me in His Word rather than basing my opinions and feelings about Him on how things are going in my life. As I have done this it has become more apparent that this issue is one of the most effective areas that the enemy has used to keep me in doubt and unbelief about God.

If I allow my gratitude to rest more on what God does for me instead of on the real truth about Him irregardless of what happens, then simply by manipulating circumstances around me the devil can jerk my feelings about God around to keep me from living in freedom, rest and trust. I become a puppet subject to the whims of circumstances that influence and shape my views about God rather than depending on the Word of God about Himself alone.

Jesus throughout His ministry consistently demonstrated the importance of basing faith on the Word of God instead of on feelings or on miracles or any subjective foundation. When He was severely tempted in the wilderness experiencing extreme hunger He relied solely on the Word of God as His defense against the subtle suggestions of the enemy rather than depending His own authority as God incarnate. All through His ministry He urged people to remember what was written in the Scriptures and even after His resurrection when He joined two of His disciples who were terribly discouraged, He did not rely on personal revelation or authority by revealing Himself to them immediately but rather spent time carefully explaining to them from Scripture the foundation that their faith needed to rest on before confirming it by allowing them to realize who He really was.

In His discussion with Martha Jesus led her to keep her faith rooted in what she already knew from Scripture without trying to move her away from that to trusting only in His current words to her. He did encourage her to think beyond what she already understood so that she might be open to an expanded understanding, but He wanted her to connect what she knew about Scripture already with the fresh revelations about Himself from what she was learning about Him.

I say all this because what I see in this story is Jesus thanking God before there is any spectacular physical evidence of God's power or intervention in the situation. Jesus is demonstrating what He wants each of us to do, to base our gratitude and praise to God on the reality that God always hears us whether we can see any evidence of it or not. Jesus did not wait to see if Lazarus might come back to life before thanking God but confidently and publicly declared His appreciation for God's interest in their situation before any thing else was mentioned. Then after laying down a foundation of praise to God and expressing openly His complete confidence that God was intimately interested in every detail of life, Jesus was ready to act on the reality of how God viewed the situation and moved forward in harmony with the promptings of God's Spirit.

The core issue of doubt in this story was whether God was paying attention to people's problems and whether He cared about them or not. In His public prayer Jesus addressed head-on these core questions by stating unequivocally that God always hears no matter what circumstances may suggest. This is the stark difference between belief and unbelief. Faith is not something we have to muster up, an intense attempt to believe that God will answer some prayer while trying to eliminate every feeling of doubt in an atmosphere of fear. The kind of faith that Jesus demonstrates here is a spontaneous expression of gratitude and confidence that God is genuinely and seriously interested in our circumstances no matter what our feelings may be telling us. This kind of saving faith is always rooted in a choice to believe the Word of God over our feelings and often against the conclusions we are tempted to draw from surrounding circumstances.

In the book of Revelation which was recorded by the same author that wrote this book, the people who are shown to be saved in the end are described as having the 'faith of Jesus'. In this story I catch a glimpse of the faith of Jesus in His confident expression of gratitude to His Father that no matter what is going on around or within Him God can be trusted to care. The faith of Jesus chooses to express gratitude and praise to God irregardless of what is going on or the seeming lack of evidence of God's intervention in our situation. The faith of Jesus is believing that God cares and hears because that is what God is like and who He is, not based on whether He comes through for me the way I want Him to. The faith of Jesus relies on God's superior wisdom and defers everything to His will while trusting that God always has my best interest at heart.

I want to have much more of that kind of faith. I want this story to soak into my psyche and permeate my thinking and alter my reactions under difficult circumstances. I want to be transformed through spending more time meditating on how Jesus related to difficult situations so that my own reactions will began to reflect the faith that I see Him exercise even as He dwells within me.