Welcome to the Food for Your Soul podcast, where we apply the Word of God to the hearts of men and women to stoke the fires of your delight in Christ. On Friday's podcast, we began a study of how gratitude solves the emotional aspect of the problem of anxiety, if you understand what gratitude is. Do you remember the definition? Gratitude is enjoyment of the love that inspired the gift and the response of love back to the giver. And the best picture to encapsulate all that is a really happy hug. Remember that? And I ask you to start each day expressing that kind of gratitude towards God for 10 blessings. Hopefully you were doing that over the weekend. Did you find that difficult? If you're going through something really hard right now, you might find your heart resisting gratitude. How can I feel thankful when I'm miserable? Self-pity is the absolute enemy of gratitude. It's cold water that douses every spark of thankfulness in the heart. So today, let's look at what we can do about the problem of self-pity. My first thought would be that if you have anxiety and you're praying and you're not getting peace, the missing ingredient is probably faith, right? And trust. Trusting God and His goodness and His wisdom and His power and His love, that's essential to overcoming anxiety, no question about that. But it's not what he focuses on here. He says, do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with what? Thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God. Thanksgiving, that's the missing ingredient. When you're fighting anxiety, faith is essential, but so is gratitude, and here's why. It's because anxiety is mainly an emotional problem. God wants your prayers to be like a kid on Christmas morning. What would Christmas be like if it were just a matter of asking? No receiving. So you're a little kid, you go downstairs, you sit down by the tree, you read off your Christmas wish list, and then Christmas is over. Okay, that's all it is, is just reading your list. Wouldn't be quite the same, right? It just wouldn't be the same. The reason mom and dad ask you for a list is because they want to see your face light up when the box opens, right? They want to see that joy. They want that tight hug around their neck when you get that gift that just blows you away. God wants that too. And so he teaches us here that your prayer time should be a time of both hopeful asking and happy receiving. Prayer should not just be reading off your list, it should also be opening the boxes. And you can tell that happy receiving is going on in your prayer time when there are feelings, not just words, but feelings of gratitude. And that's especially important in times of stress and anxiety. This is the solution to anxiety. Praying about your anxieties with gratitude will give you peace. Praying about your anxieties without gratitude will make your anxiety even worse. A lot of times people do that. They think they're praying about their problems, but in reality all they're doing is continuing their anxious thoughts and throwing the word God in and closing their eyes and calling it prayer. But all they're doing is fretting. They're not really praying. There's no relational interchange going on, and so the peace never comes. It's really hard to overstate the importance of gratitude in Scripture. We could do a whole series of Bible studies on it. It's one of the healthiest, most profitable things you can ever do. It's the solution to so many spiritual problems. It's the antidote to self-pity. It's the cure for depression. It's the solution for joylessness. It improves your prayer life. It makes you get along better with people. It gives you energy. It's the cure for greed. It's the cure even for sexual immorality. It's the solution to so many things in Scripture, so many wonderful benefits that come from it. But the one particular one in this passage that we're focusing on is it's a cure for anxiety. And here's how it works. You have anxiety when things are going bad, right? You have anxiety when your world is just going to pop and the whole world is going down the tubes and you're overrun, your life is overrun with trouble, and that's when anxiety cranks up. But the reality is, if you're a child of God, your world is never overrun with trouble. It's never even halfway full of trouble. It's never even a quarter of the way full of trouble, right? The reason it feels like your life is 80-90% trouble is because you've chosen to fix your attention on the trouble you do have and turn a blind eye to the blessings of God. And again, this is what self-pity makes you do. Just ignore the blessings of God. Think about it. How many problems, significant problems, do you have in your life? 10? 20? 50? How many blessings from God do you have? Let's just forget about all the little ones for now. Just focus on the really big ones. If you were to count all the big blessings and gestures of God's love that he's given you in your life and he's giving you right now, when you're done with all the counting, what do you think the number would be? Do you think there's any chance it would be less than a thousand? No? Definitely more than a thousand, right? So if we just have 10 or 20 major problems and hundreds or even thousands of blessings, why does it feel like everything's going wrong in my life? How can I have a thousand blessings and walk around thinking, woe is me, poor me? How can that be? It's because we blind ourselves to God's kindness and love and blessings and just stare intently at our problems until we become convinced that all we have is problems, right? Doing that will damage you. It'll damage your mind. It'll damage your heart. It'll damage your emotions so much that when you finally do try to acknowledge God's blessings and God's love, you'll do that intellectually, but you won't feel anything. You won't feel any joy, happiness from it. You can do so much damage to your heart, so much damage to your mind. You can really foul things up. You can get so that even when you try to focus on God, you don't feel anything. But here's the good news. That can be turned around in a day. In a day. All you have to do is make a habit of doing this. Just stop and enjoy God's gestures of love towards you enough times throughout the day to start to warm up your emotions. Stop and open one of the Christmas presents under the tree multiple times a day. So just try this. Just try this. I'm offering you a free, no obligation, no risk trial. Try this tomorrow. It'll work. Shoot for 20 times. Tomorrow. And it might just be like 10 or 15 seconds each time, because you're busy. You've got your job, you've got your work, you've got stuff going on. You can't do this all day long. But just each time, just 10, 15 seconds, just stop 20 times during the day and enjoy a gesture of God's love and respond back to Him. with some kind of emotional favor. Just enjoy it. Say, yeah, I love you too, God. Something back to him that means I love you too, God. And even if you can't hit 20, even like a dozen times tomorrow, if you stopped and enjoyed God's emotional favor towards you, expressed in some blessing, and you respond back an emotional favor back to him, try that and see if you don't have more joy than you've had in a long, long time. If you get stuck on this, it might help to realize that you don't deserve anything good. That's a stumbling block in this, is thinking that we deserve... Ungrateful people are ungrateful because they think they deserve all the gifts that they get from God and more. They just think they somehow have it all coming. They think the norm in life should be that everything turns out the way they prefer. That's just like the norm, that's the, you know, even, and any deviation from that means something's wrong with the world. And that's sort of the way their mentality. So God gives them a thousand blessings and good gifts, and one thing doesn't go the way they want, and they freak out. What did I do to deserve this hardship? What's going on? It's good to just stop and remind yourself once in a while, you don't deserve anything God ever gave you. You don't deserve anything God ever gave you. We don't deserve a single breath of air that we breathe, not one donut, not one good night's sleep, not one drink of water, nothing. What we deserve is the opposite and if we could just think very long about that, you'll find gratitude popping up in your heart. I already gave you today's godliness training exercise. Over the next day, pause 20 times to enjoy God's love and respond in gratitude. You'll have to carry a piece of paper and put tick marks on it to help you keep track in order to make sure you hit 20. What I've found is, in order to get 20, you have to be doing it all day long. I promise you, if you get to 20, at the end of the day, it really will feel like you have been doing this all day long. You spend the whole day doing it, even though the total time spent doing it might add up to just a couple of minutes. And this will be even more effective if you share those feelings of gratitude toward God with people. Verbalize it out loud. That assists in lifting the heart towards joy. Do that, and let's add one more verse to our memorization, Matthew 6.33 now, so keep reviewing all the others, Matthew 6.25 through 33. Now, there's one more problem we have to address. What if you're praying with gratitude about what God has already done, but your anxiety is about the future? You see some storm looming and you're begging God for some outcome or another. Please God, let it be this, let this happen. But you don't know if he's gonna say yes to your prayers. So how can you be grateful? We'll cover that in tomorrow's podcast. Thank you for listening! We pray these principles from the Word of God are helping you find the peace of God as you draw near to the God of peace. Maybe there's someone in your network who would enjoy these podcasts. You never know how posting a link on Facebook might change someone's day, or their whole life. Please remember to pray for this ministry, and remember that we're a crowdfunded ministry, so every gift helps. Just go to treasuringgod.com. Until next time, rejoice in the Lord always and set your mind on things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God.