With Veteran’s Day just behind us and Thanksgiving Day just ahead, we are certainly in a season of gratitude and honor.  Even the poorest of us are incredibly rich living in this nation compared to so many around the world in this moment!  We have so much to be thankful for and have been so incredibly blessed by God!

It’s very easy to get distracted in life and to allow discontentment and comparison with others to steal away our gratitude.  This causes our praise to be replaced with grumbling and joy to be replaced with discouragement.  God invites us into a better way of living where joy and peace persist through all circumstances and can never be stolen!

1 Timothy 6:6-12

6 godliness with contentment is great gain. 7 For we brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it. 8 But if we have food and clothing, we will be content with that. 9 Those who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. 10 For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs. 11 But you, man of God, flee from all this, and pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance and gentleness. 12 Fight the good fight of the faith. Take hold of the eternal life to which you were called when you made your good confession in the presence of many witnesses.

Jesus is not concerned about whether or not He will find gratitude or thankfulness when He returns, though!  He was concerned about whether His people would be giving thanks not only for what has already been received, but for what is yet to come. 

Thanks in advance, or as it is commonly referred to, faith!  Faith is thanks in advance, praise in expectation, confidence in what is coming, trust in the God who promised it!

Luke 18:1-8

1 Then Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up. 2 He said: “In a certain town there was a judge who neither feared God nor cared what people thought. 3 And there was a widow in that town who kept coming to him with the plea, ‘Grant me justice against my adversary.’

4 “For some time he refused. But finally he said to himself, ‘Even though I don’t fear God or care what people think, 5 yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will see that she gets justice, so that she won’t eventually come and attack me!’”

6 And the Lord said, “Listen to what the unjust judge says. 7 And will not God bring about justice for his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night? Will he keep putting them off? 8 I tell you, he will see that they get justice, and quickly. However, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?”

There is a purpose behind Jesus using a judge as a parable for faith.  A judge must make judgments in accordance with the text of the law regardless of their personal feelings toward a case or the people involved.  The judge in this parable didn’t care at all about people nor about God.  Yet the law required him to administer justice and to show favor toward the relentless widow’s case.

Of course, God is compassionate and does care about people.  However, He is bound by His own covenant.  Jesus came not to abolish or to change the law of God, but to perfectly fulfill the entirety of it on our behalf.  That is the new covenant.  Not abiding perfectly by the law so that we can stand before the judge and found righteous, but pleading our case through Jesus who did it for us.  Jesus, our only righteousness.

Will Jesus find faith on the earth when He returns?  Will He find faith; thanks in advance? 

Will He hear prayers that plead, “God, give us justice against our adversary!”?  Do we even view our needs in this way, as attacks from the devil?  Our enemy’s desire is to kill, steal, and destroy and he has done so to us.  Give us justice against our adversary!  Make him r