My Vision of Gratitude for What is Given-Lent 6, 2020

Prayer Focus: Gratitude

Lord God, loving Father, Lord of all creation, we praise You and offer thanks to You for the wonders of creation. Not only that You would delegate responsibility to care and nurture the created world You have made, but also, Lord, for the way our creation provides for us as Your provision to us. Back in the Garden of Eden, caring for creation was no real work at all. No sweat of the brow until after the fall of mankind. No weeds or thorns or thistles. The trees and plants just yielded their fruit for man to eat. On this side of the fall, the land still produces and the miracle of provision remains because it was designed by You in the beginning to yield food for us as a gift of Your grace. Though now we must work for it as all creation groans under the burden of human sin, nevertheless, we ought to remain grateful because there’s no reason our work should be profitable at all. There is nothing we bring to the table, no amount of earning we could do to make it happen apart from You. Everything in all creation is Yours. Every good and perfect gift comes from You. You provide for the lilies of the field and the birds of the sky. You provide for the sparrows and for mankind. Help me, Lord, to value my work no more highly than it deserves and to value Your gift of provision with deep and humble gratitude. Thank You, Lord Jesus. Amen.

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If you’re already signed up on my Home Page sidebar to receive posts, you’ll get the 2020 Lent Devotionals automatically. Or you can “Like” Seminary Gal on Facebook and they’ll be delivered to your Facebook news feed. If you haven’t signed up, today is a great day to do so. Advent and Lenten devotionals remain among my most popular offerings. You don’t want to miss this encounter with God to prepare your heart for Easter! Understanding that prior years’ devotionals remain popular, you may want to have access to a full series ahead of time:

Lent 2013 looked at The Letter to the Romans: Paul’s Masterpiece to reclaim foundations of our Christian heritage and began February 13, 2013.
A very special and ever popular offering was Lent 2014’s Be Still and Know that I AM God which can be obtained through the archives beginning in March 2014.
Lent 2015 began on February 18, 2015 with a series entitled With Christ in the Upper Room: Final Preparations. We explored what is often called “The Upper Room Discourse” found in John chapters 13-17.
ReKindle, the Lent 2016 series, began on February 10, 2016 and encouraged us to rekindle our spiritual lives.
Light: There’s Nothing Like It was the 2017 Lent series and explored this metaphor often used to portray Christ. It is archived beginning March 1, 2017.
Lent 2018, we explored the questions of Pi and Chi (the Greek letter beginning the word Christos, which means Christ, Messiah, the Anointed One). We asked and answered the questions “Why?” from the movie Life of Pi as we discovered the uniqueness of Jesus Christ in a world of many faiths.
Lent 2019 gave us a deeper window into Easter “More to the Easter Story” since we miss so much when we rely only on a superficial understanding of the work of Christ. These devotionals are archived beginning March 6, 2019.