By Rick Ashlock

“If you take a dog which is starving and feed him and make him prosperous, that dog will not bite you. This is the primary difference between a dog and a man.” Mark Twain (1835-1910).

A couple of years ago, I was visiting a very good friend of mine in Tennessee. He likes to ride four-wheelers and his young son loved nothing more than riding with his father. My friend tried in vain to convince his wife that their four-year-old was ready for a four-wheeler of his own. Evidently the lad learned of his father’s scheme but did not know that it had been, fortunately, unsuccessful. While I was there, the boy found out that his father was bringing him a surprise gift and he had his hopes sky high. You’ve never seen a little boy more disappointed to get his first bicycle in your life.

Ingratitude is, perhaps, the ugliest of all human faults. It certainly is one of the most difficult to overlook yet it is one we all display at some point in our lives. We’ve all received some gift that we felt was inadequate and failed to muster even the appearance of gratitude. This gift probably came from someone very close to us, someone we felt knew what we needed and wanted and we were shocked to see how badly they had miscalculated.

Whenever someone with whom we’re not particularly close gives us a gift, we do not usually have much of an expectation therefore they can hardly disappoint us. However, someone close to us, who knows us, and has given us many things before, like a father, well, that person has to work pretty hard simply to meet, much less exceed, our expectations. When our expectations are merely met, it is easy to see the gift as nothing more than that to which we were entitled and if it was our right to get it, it was not really a gift and we do not need to be grateful.

No one has been more generous and yet received such ingratitude as our Heavenly Father. James tell us that everything good in our lives comes from Him. Every good thing. Nothing in your life that helps meet your needs, gives you genuine happiness, or generally makes life better comes from any source other than God. He is the author of life and He is only life.

When we trust in Him to meet our needs and to provide for our happiness, we receive countless blessings and in return He only asks for our gratitude. He calls upon us to express our gratitude by sharing the blessings He has given us with others so that they will come to know the source of those blessings as well.

Of course, the greatest blessing He has given us is the hope of eternal life found only in His Son. It is this blessing that God most wants us to share with the people in our lives. It is this blessing which will exceed every expectation they could ever have.

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