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5 Things You Can Always Give Thanks For

No matter how hard your life is and how difficult things get, there are always 5 things you can thank God for, according to Pastor Rick Warren. No, you don’t thank God for the suffering, but you can thank God during the suffering. How can you possibly be thankful even in bad times?

Pastor Rick Warren of Saddleback Church (in Lake Forest, California, and over a dozen other locations) shared this very personal message about how he learned to feel God’s comfort and experience God’s strength during the hardest time in his life.

Watch the video at saddleback.com/watch/media/being-thankful-even-in-bad-times

Scroll down below this image of the sermon notes to see the list of 5 things you can always thank God for.

5 Things I Can Always Thank God For

1. For the grace He’s shown to me.
2. For the plans He has for me.
3. For His promise to never leave me.
4. For the changes He’s making in me.
5. For the home He’s prepared for me.

3 Great Studies about Thanksgiving in the Bible

There are a good number of web pages that have lists of Bible verses about giving thanks, not that there’s anything wrong with that. Those are easy to find by typing in those keywords in a search engine.

But sometimes you’re looking for more, something more substantial, yet not wanting to get weighed down by theological nuances or to scroll through long paragraphs of explanations.

When we came across this blog post from Overview Bible by Jeffrey Kranz—Thankfulness in the Bible: the Top Scriptures on Gratitude—this caught our attention for 3 reasons:

First, this post was written in a format that’s easy to read on the web, in contrast to many other articles that appear to be written for print.

Secondly, this post was meaty with 3 studies in 1. Through his diligent study of the Bible with some help from a Bible software, he published these 3 goodies:

  1. 13 biblical examples of thanksgiving
  2. Four things the Bible tells us to be thankful for
  3. The top books of the Bible on thankfulness

Third, this post has the results from a technology-powered study of thanks and giving thanks throughout the entire Bible, book by book. This chart presents the ratio of how many mentions of thanks or thanksgiving appearing in each book of the Bible:

(This chart will make a lot more sense when you click over to read about the background for how he created it, similarly to how he had done with a previous study to surface the Bible books with the most commands and instructions.)

Thank you, Jeffrey, for your diligent work in crafting and sharing these 3 valuable Bible studies!

And thank you for clicking over to read the blog post, Thankfulness in the Bible: the Top Scriptures on Gratitude.