Abounding in Thanksgiving: Why Gratitude Is Not a Personality Type

Read Colossians 2:7 slowly and you notice Paul doing something slightly odd.

He is in the middle of a serious warning. False teachers have arrived at Colossae. The church is being told that Jesus was a fine start but that real spirituality lies somewhere beyond him. Paul is about to say see to it that no one takes you captive. The stakes could hardly be higher.

And right there, in the middle of it, he writes this:

“rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving.”

— Colossians 2:7

Abounding in thanksgiving. The New American Standard renders it overflowing with gratitude.

It reads almost like an afterthought. It isn’t. Paul has just listed the marks of a believer whose roots have gone down — rooted, built up, established — and then he names the thing that shows it. Gratitude is not decoration on the Christian life. It is evidence.

Which raises an uncomfortable question, and it is the one Pastor Kent Keller pressed on Sunday at Christchurch Miami: what if gratitude is not something you either have or don’t have?

The creed of a miserable life

Kent put the opposite of gratitude in two sentences, and they land harder than a definition would.

Very few things are more draining than being around someone who complains constantly. You know the type. He isn’t happy unless he’s unhappy. She wakes up looking for something to be aggrieved about, finds it by nine, and has told four people by noon.

Their whole philosophy, Kent said, comes down to this:

“Whatever you do for me is not enough. Whatever you ask of me is too much.”

That is a formula. A guaranteed, sure-fire formula. Adopt those two sentences and you may confidently expect a miserable existence — and, as Kent noted, so may everyone within about fifteen feet of you.

Here’s what’s worth noticing. Nothing in that creed is a statement about circumstances. Both sentences are statements about the self. The complainer isn’t primarily reporting on the world; he’s reporting on the position he has taken toward it, which is the position of a creditor. Everything that arrives gets measured against what was owed, and it always comes up short, because a creditor’s arithmetic never balances.

Which is exactly why Paul puts thanksgiving in a sentence about roots.

”What do we have to be thankful for?”

Kent raised the objection himself before anyone else could, and he didn’t wave it off.

What do we have to be thankful for? There’s a war in the Middle East. Prices at the pump are high and prices at the grocery store are higher. Our politics are so divided that some families have quit discussing them at Thanksgiving dinner — which is its own small tragedy.

He took it seriously, because it deserves better than a pious dismissal.

His first answer was historical: there is nothing new under the sun (Ecclesiastes 1:9). War is the common denominator of mankind — you would be hard-pressed to find a century without one. Prices are high; go look at what they are elsewhere in the world. And on toxic politics, Kent — who has spent the better part of two decades reading early American history — offered a gentle corrective: a country whose sitting vice president once shot and killed a former Treasury Secretary in a duel has seen worse days than this one.

None of that makes any of it painless. It simply means we are not the first, and we will not be the last.

But the second answer is the one that actually matters, and it has nothing to do with the news cycle.

Christian gratitude is not a verdict on current events.

Thanksgiving rests on something already finished

Look where Paul goes a few verses later in the same passage:

“And you, who were dead in your trespasses… God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross.”

— Colossians 2:13-14

There is the ground of it.

Paul is describing a legal document — an itemized record of debt with your name at the top. Most of us keep a copy. We can produce it on short notice. The thing said in anger that can’t be unsaid. The year we’d like back. The pattern we’ve confessed so many times we’ve stopped believing our own confession.

God’s answer to that document was not to argue about the line items. It was to cancel it, and to cancel it publicly. Nailing it to the cross. Driven through. Held up where everyone could see. Settled somewhere it cannot be quietly reopened later.

Now: what has this week’s news done to that?

Nothing. Not one thing. The debt was cancelled before you woke up this morning, and it will still be cancelled when the current crisis has been replaced by the next one.

That is why Christian thanksgiving is not the same thing as optimism. Optimism is a forecast, and forecasts can be wrong. Thanksgiving is a response to a completed transaction.

Gratitude is a conclusion

G.K. Chesterton — worth reading on almost anything — put it about as well as it can be put, and Kent quoted him Sunday:

“Thanks are the highest form of thought, and gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.”

Thanks are the highest form of thought.

Sit with that, because Chesterton is making a claim most of us have never considered. He isn’t saying gratitude is a warm feeling. He calls it thought — and not merely thought, but the highest form of it. Gratitude, on his account, is what happens when a mind finally reasons all the way to the end of the question of where everything came from.

Which means it can be learned.

That matters practically. If gratitude were a temperament, some of us simply drew the short straw, and the rest of the New Testament’s commands about it would be cruelty. But Paul commands it — abounding in thanksgiving — and nobody is ever commanded to feel a personality trait.

You are commanded to reach a conclusion. And you reach it the way you reach any conclusion: by looking honestly at the evidence, in this case at a cancelled certificate of debt, until the fact of it does its work on you.

That is why gratitude grows in hospital rooms, and in prison cells, and in the letters of a man under house arrest in Rome writing to a church he had never met.

Where this lands

The complainer’s creed and the Christian’s creed are answers to the same question — what am I owed?

One answers: more than I have received.

The other answers: nothing, and I have been given everything.

Only one of those two people can be thankful, and it isn’t because of what happened to them. It’s because of what they concluded about themselves.

Here’s a small experiment for this week — an experiment, not an inspirational suggestion. Take one thing you would normally file under what I am owed and deliberately re-file it under what I have been given. Don’t fake a feeling about it. Just move it, honestly, and see what happens over a few days.

That isn’t positive thinking. It’s what Chesterton called thought — following the evidence to the end.

And the evidence, for anyone in Christ, is a piece of paper with your name on it, nailed to a cross, cancelled.

Abounding in thanksgiving.

Kent Keller preached Greater Than Every False Hope (Colossians 2:6-15) at Christchurch Miami on August 2, 2026. Watch or read the full message.

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