Unconditional Thanks

For a time during my childhood, I lived with my grandparents, Mama Stella and Daddy Charles. Every day seemed like Thanksgiving Day at their house because Mama Stella was a great cook. She made everything from scratch.

Of all the things that Mama Stella made, her biscuits were her crowning achievement. And although many in my family have tried to replicate them, no one has been able to.

Now, I never would have thought of eating any of the biscuit ingredients separately. None of them were appealing in and of themselves. But mixed by Mama Stella’s expert hands, those ingredients resulted in the most amazing biscuits.

In the same way, God in His sovereign wisdom has a way of working all things together for good “to those who are the called according to His purpose” (Romans 8:28 NKJV). We may not fully know what the good or the bad things are until we get to Heaven.

But God can take all the events of our lives—the good things and the so-called bad things—and put them in the oven of adversity. And when it’s all done, we can say, “That’s good!”

It’s easy for us to give thanks for what we perceive as good things, but it’s not so easy to give thanks for what we perceive as bad things. Yet I’ve discovered that the difference between the two isn’t always clear, at least in this side of Heaven.

I know people who wished for certain “good things” to happen in their lives, and when they did, those so-called good things destroyed them. Sometimes they included even success. I also know people who lamented over bad things that happened in their lives, but with the passing of time they realized that those bad things were actually good things.

To give thanks to God, we must first realize as Christians that God is in control of all the circumstances in our lives