The Amazing Multi-tasking Tool of Thankfulness

While normally I can only accomplish one thing at a time, I do enjoy the killing of two birds with one stone. It makes me happy when I can turn one errand into the accomplishment of three or four. It doesn’t always work like that, but it is nice when it does. The magnificent smart phone has given us a help with this. It has made listening to books or sermons while we jog, mow grass or drive a car incredibly easy. And yet, I think there is an even greater multi-tasking tool.

When it comes to godliness, we often have to battle a certain sin all by itself. You need certain scriptures to be applied in a certain area with the help of a certain person. Sure there are other areas of sin but today you are dealing with this particular one. Praise God. Fight the good fight with that nasty germline of the soul.

But what if there was one activity you could do that would give you advances in a handful of other areas. Could there be a kind of spiritual multi-tasking; killing several sins with one stone? I think there is something like that, and I want to walk you through it.

What I want you to think about is a kind of inter-connectedness in godliness. Take the list of the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5:22: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control. You can see some of this inter-connectedness. Can you really have joy with no peace? How about kindness without gentleness? Certainly there is a distinct feature within each one. They are not all the same thing, but there are connections within them.

The godly attribute that has really got me thinking is thankfulness. The more I think about thankfulness, the more I see it as a kind of godly multi-tasking, an A-bomb of virtue that wipes out a massive amount of sin. Think through this with me.

If you are always thankful in everything, as God calls you to be in three separate places (Ephesians 5:20; Colossians 3:17; 1 Thessalonians 5:18), you instantly have patience along with it. As you are stuck driving behind the giant tractor on the curvy road, you are thankful for a country with abundant food, thankful God’s providential perfect timing, thankful you have time to pray, thankful for just having a car. This list could go on. And each reality concurrently produces patience. What about thankfulness in the midst of waiting on a job or healing or relational uncertainty? If you develop thankfulness that God is at work in each, your thankfulness also creates patience. In every one of those thoughts of thankfulness, you have patience right at its side. You can’t have patience without thankfulness, and you can’t have thankfulness without patience.

If you are always thankful in everything you instantly have peace. You are thankful that God is at work in the most traumatic, stressful, and/or disastrous situations, and you can rest. You can’t have peace without thankfulness or thankfulness without peace.

If you are always thankful in everything, you instantly have joy and rejoicing. When you are thankful for something, you also rejoice either in seeing the beauty/power of what God has done or you take joy in knowing that you will see it someday. You can’t have joy without thankfulness, and you can’t have thankfulness without joy.

We have probably always heard that love is the greatest godly attribute. There are plenty of scriptures to back that up. I am not arguing that thankfulness is greater than love. But I am pointing to the interconnectedness of all of this. Are you really loving a person if you are not thankful for them? You might go through the actions, but we all should know that love is more than actions as 1 Corinthians 13 so powerfully teaches. When you view a person as made in the
image of God, put into your life by sovereign design, and someone in whom God is going to be glorified, how can you keep from being thankful for them and loving them accordingly?

I think you can also find thankfulness working within endurance, faithfulness, and self-control. These attributes have grit in them. They are the attributes that get you through the tough stuff. But how do they work? They work because there is a prize promised for those who endure, a crown waiting for the faithful, and rewards energizing self-control. It is not hard to see thankfulness for promises, crowns, and rewards dwelling under the surface of those gritty
attributes.

Thankfulness not only empowers, it also kills. It kills greed, grumbling, lust, jealously, substance abuse, and more.

Sadly, sinners are painfully inconsistent. We can be thankful and still fall into sin, because we are not realizing all the implications within thankfulness. But this is a problem with us. Our thankfulness is faulty. If we loved the way we were called to, with the thankfulness we should have, what radical changes would happen.

Let me remind you one last time that God commands us to always give thanks in everything (Ephesians 5:20; Colossians 3:17; 1 Thessalonians 5:18). This is a comprehensive command that is thrice repeated, to boot. Give attention to this one and you will most likely see growth in others areas as well. What a tremendous multi-tasking attribute!