1 Thessalonians 5:16-18 “Be joyful always; pray continually; give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.”

A dear friend of our family graduates from college with a degree in nursing…at the age of sixty! My wife receives a big promotion at work. My daughter and her husband close on the purchase of their first house. These are all examples of happy times. It’s not hard to be joyful, prayerful, and thankful when things are going right.

But look again at Paul’s commands. “Be joyful always.” “Pray continually.” “Give thanks in all circumstances.” Paul doesn’t suggest that joy, prayer, and thankfulness are responses to good things. For the believer in Jesus, they are a way of life, a more or less constant inner attitude, an unwavering positive spirit no matter what is happening to us or around us on any given day.

I don’t have to tell you that such an idea is counter-cultural. Some might say it is counter to reality. If Paul had said, “Be angry and resentful always. Worry continually. Complain in all circumstances,” at least that feels more like a reasonable response to life as we experience it.

Outrage seems to have become the fashionable way for people to react to things they don’t like. They follow with pinning the blame on the people who don’t share their values or immediately jump to address their unhappiness. Many let loose with a long line of obscenities and insults to express their displeasure. Temper tantrums have become an acceptable way to behave in public. What used to be called “acting like a grown-up” somehow has fallen out of style.

Not for the follower of Jesus Christ. Christians may engage in the same negativity, the same don’t-mess-with-me-I’ve-been-short-changed-and-I’m-furious attitude. But today the Apostle Paul is calling us to repent of the negativity. It is incompatible with faith.

Can we sincerely sing God’s praises while bitterness keeps fueling grudges against his other children? Can we trust God’s care and wisdom while essentially living in a constant state of criticism against the way he runs the world? If we are waiting to become joyful, prayerful, and thankful when the people around us change, or the situations and circumstances that make us unhappy change, we are going to die waiting. The change doesn’t have to start out there. The change has to start with me.

It’s not that the Lord asks us to pretend things are better than they are. It’s that we have been the beneficiaries of some incredible blessings. They accompany us every moment of our lives. They overshadow all the garbage if we honestly consider their value.

I exist, I am alive, only because God knit me together in my mother’s womb. He continues to support me, though he doesn’t owe me anything. In spite of my rather constant rebelling, questioning his decisions, defying his commands, he has never stopped loving me, not even for a minute.

No, he left heaven, adopted a human body and soul, endured the same painful life I suffer, only worse, to save me. He served the sentence for my crimes against him on the cross. Love drove him to seek me, pursue me, find me, and claim me with the sweet words of the gospel.

He poured salvation into my heart by faith. He didn’t expect or ask me to earn it. He promises, he promises, that joys and pleasures without end are going to be my eternal fate when he returns. And I think I have something to complain about?

“Be joyful always; pray continually; give thanks in all circumstances.” That’s the only reasonable response to the goodness God shows me every day.