Samantha: Why aren’t children more grateful? Barbara Rainey says, “It’s simple: Because they’re selfish, just like their parents.”

Barbara Rainey: My daughter, Ashley, called me and said, “Mom, I’ve figured out what my problem is.” I said, “Okay?” She said, “It is Daniel!” I laughed—Daniel was her 14-month-old, at the time—and I said, “Oh! Why is Daniel the problem?” She said, “Well, I have realized that I have been—when he fusses, I just pick him up to make him quiet because I can’t stand all the noise.” Well, the reason Daniel is her problem is because he was born selfish. He wants what he wants, when he wants it. It is our job, as parents, to train our children to be grateful. They are not born naturally grateful, and neither are we.

Samantha: Welcome to the Barbara Rainey Podcast from Ever Thine Home, where we want to help you experience God in your life and home. Thanks for listening!

You know, we live in a critical, sarcastic, and ungrateful society. I mean, whether it’s on social media, or in the news, or people you run into when you’re shopping… I think we can all use an extra dose of gratitude.

Well, Thanksgiving is just around the corner, and today on the podcast Barbara’s gonna be talking about how parents can nurture a more grateful heart in their children… and in themselves! She gave this message to a group of moms. Let’s listen.

Barbara: Even though I love the reason for the Christmas season—I love a lot of things about Christmas—Thanksgiving really and truly is my favorite holiday. I love the fall season. I love Thanksgiving because it is a time for family, and it is uncluttered by a lot of the stress of the Christmas season.

I also love Thanksgiving season because it calls us to practice a biblical command that we don’t do nearly often enough—especially in America—and that is to give thanks. In 1 Thessalonians 5:18, it says this: “In everything, give thanks for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.” It is a command; and it says, “In everything give thanks.” That is pretty hard to do; isn’t it? It is pretty hard to give thanks in a lot of things in our lives.

Well, we are going to talk about why we should give thanks and how we can improve our gratitude quotient.

When my kids were growing up, I began to read them stories in the Thanksgiving holiday about the Pilgrims. I was a history major in college, and I wanted my kids to know the truth about the beginning days of our country. I wanted them to know the true facts about our Christian heritage.

So, I began reading them little stories that I would find here and there about the Pilgrims and about the founding of our country; but I also wanted my kids to become thankful. I wanted them to focus on something besides football and food at Thanksgiving. So, I began to teach my kids to be grateful and to talk about what they were thankful for. In the early days, when my kids were still really little, I would pull out ruled notebook paper, or construction paper, or whatever we would find. I would have them practice, on Thanksgiving Day, writing what they were thankful for.

Then, as I began to find more and more of these stories, I began to read them. Here is one of the ones that my kids loved the best—it starts like this:

The Mayflower, a small wooden ship with billowing sails, was the vessel that God used to bring a group of Christian believers to an unseen land far over the Atlantic. These Christian men and women, called Pilgrims, believed that God was leading them to establish a new community where they could worship freely.

As Americans, we celebrate Thanksgiving every year because of the profound faith and uncommon courage of these English men and women. And it is good for us to read their stories and to hear what they did and to hear how they believed God because it will inspire us to be courageous as well.

So, in September of 1620, after enduring many delays and difficulties, these Pilgrims finally said their last goodbyes and boarded the Mayflower and set sail for the New World. The food was terrible—brine-soaked beef and pork in salt.

The rooms for passengers were crowded and below deck. Conditions were miserable—cramped quarters / seasick people vomiting into pails, if they were able to find a pail in time. A foul mixture of odors grew in such an environment.
Those kinds of stories of the deprivation and the difficulties that they went through really helped my kids to be grateful because, all of a sudden, as they listened to this story and they listened to these conditions, it made them realize how much they had and how much they had to be grateful for.

Well, I want to give you three things for why we struggle with gratitude—“Why do we, as people struggle, with having gratitude?” I think the first reason is because we have so much. Our prosperity is breeding a nation of ungrateful people.

Secondly, I think we are ungrateful because, by nature, we are just selfish. We are born that way.

By nature, we all want what we want when we want it. We want to control our own lives. We believe we are entitled to so much; and when we don’t get what we want, we complain about it.

My daughter, Ashley, called me—I picked up the phone, and she said, “Mom, I have figured out what my problem is.” I said, “Okay?” She said, “It is Daniel;” and I laughed—Daniel was her 14-month-old, at the time—and I said, “Oh! Why is Daniel the problem?” She said, “Well”—she said—“I think he’s the one that is driving me crazy.”

And then, she began to talk about how—she said—“I know he has got allergies, and I know he is the last one—so, he has to be louder to be heard,”—she has five boys, by the way. So, she said: “I realized that I have been—when he fusses, I just pick him up to make him quiet because I can’t stand all the noise, and I need a break. So, rather than training him to wait or be patient.” She said: “I just pick him up. I realized that he is running my life, and he is my problem.”

Well, the reason Daniel is her problem is because he was born selfish. He wants what he wants when he wants it. And it is our job, as parents, to train our children to be grateful. They are not born naturally grateful, and neither are we.

Then, the third reason, I think, gratitude is difficult—why it is so hard for us to be grateful, as people—is because we are often disappointed in life. Things don’t work out the way we would like for them to—and it makes us sad, makes us disappointed, and it causes us to be ungrateful.

This came home to our family in a real dramatic way when our daughter, Rebecca, who is my fourth child, had a little girl named Molly. Molly only lived seven days. In the midst of those seven days of Molly’s life, I realized how important it was to give thanks for everything because God is in control and we are not.

There was nothing we could do for little Molly. There was nothing the doctors could do for little Molly. And we were left knowing that we had no other choice but to give thanks to God and to take from His hand what He had given us—what He had given them—and what He had given us, as a family.

That is the attitude that the Pilgrims had. They suffered much, but they knew that God was in control. They took what God gave them with great gratitude.

I have to say that—while giving thanks to God in that week of Molly’s life wasn’t really difficult for me—and I can’t explain it except that I had no other choice—complaining would have changed nothing. It wasn’t what my daughter needed; it wasn’t what my son-in-law needed. And there just wasn’t any other choice but to give thanks to God for what He was doing, even though we didn’t understand it and we didn’t like it.

So, I think being grateful is hard for us because we are naturally selfish, and because we have so much and expect so much, but also, because we are often disappointed in life.

We don’t like being disappointed—it doesn’t fit our plan. It is not what we had in mind. And so, our tendency—our natural inborn tendency—is to complain and to gripe instead of giving thanks. But God calls us to be a grateful people and to take everything from His hand with thanksgiving.

Well, why is gratitude so important? I have three reasons for this as well. First of all, gratitude is important because, at its core, gratitude is a heart that trusts God. It is an expression of faith in Him. There is a verse that I wonder how many of you know, and it goes like this: “Do all things without grumbling or disputing.” How many of you know that verse?—grumbling means murmuring in discontent. It means arguing. It means disputing. It means disagreeing with.

Well, I want to show you what it looks like. We have a wall of children’s photographs at our office. And this photograph is my very favorite, partly because it looks a lot like my grandson, but partly because it really is an image of what I do so often in my heart toward God. And this is the photograph. [Laughter] Don’t you love it? I just keep looking at this little guy—and his little furrowed brow and his squinty eyes—and you can just see he is just stomping his feet at the same time. But this is a picture of what griping and complaining looks like.

How many of you have seen it in your house more times than you would like? And while we think this picture is really cute and this little guy is just adorable in the photograph, it is not so cute when it is your child. It is not so cute when he is doing this to you; is it?

It makes me wonder: “What must God feel when I do this to Him—when I cross my arms, and I furrow my brow, and I stomp my foot at Him and say, ‘That’s not what I wanted in life! That is not the way I wanted it to be!’”?

Maybe, I don’t do it so physically and dramatically—maybe, in my heart, I am just unhappy and I am not grateful. You don’t have to do this and stomp your feet. You can be ungrateful in your heart and not express thanksgiving to God. I don’t think God likes it with us any more than we like it with our children.

Philippians 2:14—the verse I just quoted—“Do all things without grumbling or disputing,” is a verse that I make my kids memorize. I thought, if I got them to memorize the verse, it would cure some of the griping and complaining in their lives; but it didn’t work. It wasn’t the miracle cure I hoped for.

I realized that the reason why is because gratitude is a choice. They were choosing to complain and gripe. They were choosing to be upset about the way things were. Being thankful is a matter of the will. It is a matter of obedience. It is a muscle that needs to be exercised in our hearts.

Our hearts choose thankfulness or they choose complaining. So, even though I had my kids memorize the verse, it was still their choice—if they were going to complain and gripe or if they were going to be thankful. And the same is true for us.

Secondly, gratitude is so important because God commands us to be grateful and to express thanksgiving to Him. Ephesians 5:20 says, “…always giving thanks for all things in the name of Jesus Christ.” It says, “always”—not just when we feel like it; not when it feels good and circumstances are the way I want them to be—but always. Always covers everything.

Then, it says in that verse, “for all things”—not just the good things, not just the pleasant things—but the things we may not like, the things we don’t understand, the things that are difficult and hard and disappointing. God wants us to give thanks.

Why does He want us to give thanks? Because it expresses faith in Him that He knows what He is doing and that He always acts in good toward us.

His intentions are always good—they are always kind / they are always loving. So, everything He gives us—everything He allows into our lives—is because He loves us. He wants us to trust Him and say, “Thank you, Father, for what You are doing and for what You are allowing in my life.”

Then, third—because God regards complaining as a serious offense. In the book of Numbers, Chapters 13 and 14, there is the story of the Israelites and how the Israelites did not believe God but instead complained against Him. They chose fear instead of faith, and they rebelled against Him. As a result, God allowed them to wander in the wilderness for forty years.

I wrote about this in my book, too, in a section titled, “The Difference Between Grumbling and Gratitude”: “Does it ever seem surprising to you that God made the Israelites wander in the wilderness for forty years because they grumbled?” Anybody think that?—that has always puzzled me. Grumbling just seems like such a minor offense compared with murder and some of these bad things. Why would God make them wander for forty years for just complaining? I mean—really.

My kids may have spent thirty minutes in their room for complaining—but forty years? Wow! What a severe discipline. Ouch! It seems really harsh to us from our perspective; doesn’t it? Clearly, God is not pleased with grumbling. It does not make Him happy to hear his children to complain constantly.

Being grateful is a choice. It is not a feeling dependent on our circumstances, as we clearly see in the Pilgrims’ lives. They believed that God was in control—“Providence” they called it. They responded to the circumstances of their lives with the perspective that said, “God has allowed this for our good.”

John Piper has said this:

“Gratitude is past-oriented dependence, and faith is future-oriented dependence. Both forms of dependence are humble, self-forgetting, and God-exalting. If we do not believe that we are deeply dependent on God for all that we have or hope to have, then, the very spring of gratitude and of faith runs dry.” You see, they’re connected. If we are not grateful, then, we are not expressing faith—they go together.

Gratitude is an expression of faith in God, and who He is, and what He is allowing in our lives. Grumbling is evil because it says my wishes and my desires are more important than God’s wishes and God’s desires. That is why God punished the people of Israel for forty years because their intentions were: “I want my way. I want what I want / I don’t want what You want.” And He had to make an example of them.

It even says in 1 Corinthians that they are an example to us of how God feels about grumbling and complaining. Grumbling is a complete lack of faith in God’s providence and His goodness.

Samantha: Well, that’s Barbara Rainey, sharing with moms why grumbling is so serious, and why gratitude is so important. And it starts with you as a parent. We can’t expect kids to be grateful if we’re not living it out ourselves!

So a key part of parenting is praying that God will change our children’s hearts, then training them to express their thankfulness from hearts of gratitude.

Well, Thanksgiving will be here before you know it. On our next episode of the Barbara Rainey Podcast, we’ll take you on a cruise. I’m not talking about a huge ship with swimming pools and restaurants on it.
Narrator: The Mayflower, a small wooden ship with billowing sails, was the vessel God used to bring the group of Christian believers to an unseen land far over the Atlantic.
Samantha: And it wasn’t exactly a smooth ride.
Narrator: The first days of the journey hinted at difficulties to come. The winds were unfavorable. The passengers, bounced to and fro by the rough waters…
Samantha: We’ll hear portions of the dramatized audio book by Barbara Rainey, titled Thanksgiving: a Time to Remember. I think you’ll find it’s going to inspire you to start a new Thanksgiving tradition.
I hope you’ll join us for that. Be sure to share this podcast with others. And if you subscribe, you’ll be notified in your inbox when each new podcast episode is available.
To subscribe go to everthinehome.com and click the Subscribe tab at the top. Again, the website is https://everthinehome.com/#subscribe.
I’m Samantha Loucks saying, “Thanks for listening today!” Join us next time for the Barbara Rainey Podcast, from Ever Thine Home.