Magnify the Good with Thankfulness

“Something always comes to fill the empty places.  And when I give thanks for the seemingly microscopic, I make a place for God to grow within me.  This, this, makes me full, and I ‘magnify him with thanksgiving’ (Psalm 69:30 KJV), and God enters the world.  What will a life magnify?  The world’s stress cracks, the grubbiness of a day, all that is wholly wrong and terribly busted? or God?  Never is God’s omnipotence and omniscience diminutive.  God is not in need of magnifying by us so small, but the reverse.  It’s our lives that are little and we have falsely inflated self, and in thanks we decrease and the world returns right.  I say thanks and I swell with Him, and I swell the world and he stirs me, joy all afoot.”  ~One Thousand Gifts, p. 59, by Ann Voskamp

Whatever you focus on gets magnified.  Whatever you magnify, fills you.  God can not fill you if you’re already full of yourself.  Focusing on the little things and thinking of each one as a gift from God makes your life feel full of gifts.  With your hands full of gifts from God, you will feel loved by him and you won’t be able to stop praising him with your thankful heart.

“…this magnifying of the Lord is an occupation to be taken up by all Christians, do not let us think little of it.  To magnify the Lord seems to me the grandest thing we mortals do, for it is the occupation of heaven… We cannot make him really greater, but we can reflect his greatness.  We can make him appear greater.  We can make others have greater thoughts of him, and that’s we do when we are praising him… When God is praised, we have come to the ultimatum.  This is the thing for which all other things are designed.  We are to be saved for this end, for the praise of his glorious grace… Have you been during this day murmuring and complaining and grumbling?  End that, and begin praising… Let us cease from all criticism of what he does, and say, ‘My soul does not grumble.  My soul does not complain; I have taken up a better business than that.  My soul doth magnify the Lord.‘”  ~Sermon by Charles Spurgeon, Jan. 8, 1880.  Text from Luke 1:46 The Magnificat of Mary My soul doth magnify the Lord.