20 Day Gratitude Challenge

For the next 20 days, I want to invite you to do this Gratitude Challenge in order to foster a more thankful heart.

For every day leading up to Thanksgiving, I will post the challenge for the day on our Facebook page, in our free Facebook group, on Instagram, and on Pinterest If you happen not to be on social media, you can also follow along just from this webpage, so be sure to bookmark this page for the rest of the month!

Let me tell you how VITAL it is to work on a lifestyle of gratitude. A grateful heart is less stressed, less anxious, less fearful, and less angry. Gratitude cleanses those awful feelings from us, because it places our eyes on what, or rather WHO is important.

Gratitude is essential for our lives and helps us keep our eyes on everything we have instead of the things we don’t have or the things we wish were different. Gratitude helps cleanse us and enables us to receive more joy and peace, two Fruit of the Spirit.

Please follow along on Instagram, Facebook page and my Facebook group Becoming like Jesus, Pinterest – I will be sharing the challenge there daily. If you’re not on social media, bookmark this page so you can check it daily to see what the current challenge is for the day.

Stay committed to this challenge. Create a daily notification on your phone to remind you to check-in with the day’s challenge.

It’s really important to cultivate gratitude in our lives, and I’m telling you, the more genuinely thankful we are the more at peace we will be.

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DAY 1 Gratitude Challenge

Day 1 of this challenge calls you to evaluate with the Lord the current state of gratitude in your life.

• How often do you feel grateful? Do you find yourself complaining a lot?
• Do you often want too much of… (fill in the blank: too much shopping, too much eating, too much indulgence…)?
• On a daily basis, how grateful are you (assess on a scale of 1-10)?
• Finally, how much do you pray in thanksgiving to God? Are your prayers more about wants or prayer concerns, or do they have a blend of thanksgiving, praise, and requests?

All of this information should point you to the current state of gratitude in your heart.

To take the challenge a step forward, journal your feelings and what came forth. Invite God into your journaling time too!

I’ll see you tomorrow for Day 2 of the gratitude challenge!

Day 2 Gratitude Challenge

I’m overwhelmed by this verse! It’s like you can’t even catch your breath because you have some much praise to give to God. Praise is essential for cultivating a grateful heart and is a key component to this Challenge.

What would your life look like if your mouth was filled with praise, glory, thanksgiving, and honor to God?

Attitude is everything, right? That’s why we are focusing on praise today for the gratitude challenge. I don’t know about you, but fixing my attention on all that I have instead of all that I want or do not have has shaped my perspective positively.

This is what holy attributes do. They bring peace. They bring patience. They bring joy.

Reflect on the words you use throughout each day. Do they represent bringing glory and honor and thanksgiving to God?

See what we say represents how we feel inside. And when our hearts are filled with gratitude we will bring honor to God because we just can’t stop feeling joy for how He provides.

Take some time and journal and reflect on today’s challenge with the Lord and talk to Him about what stirs up in you.

See you tomorrow for Day 3 of the Gratitude Challenge!

Day 3 – Gratitude Challenge

Please Read Today’s Description in order to do the challenge for today. There’s more to it than you might think 🙂

Today’s Challenge – What is the thing/person/event/etc. you are SECOND most thankful for in your life?

God’s love, our relationship with Jesus, and the presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives is what we should be most thankful for. Nobody has done more for us or given us more than God.

So with God as our number one choice – your Challenge today is to reflect on what you are second most thankful for in your life.

Even more so, I challenge you to think of a very specific moment from your past that changed your world in a good way, and you continue to be thankful for it to this day.

For example, you could be thankful for meeting your husband, the birth of a child, finishing school, finding the right job that changed your career, overcoming a serious health issue, a mentor or teacher or pastor who dramatically shaped your life. Etc.

So that’s your Challenge – What Are You Second Most Thankful For In Your Life?

Day 4 – Gratitude Challenge

It takes intentionality in order to be thankful to God. Oftentimes, we become grateful to God when we are directed by others, like pastors or ministry leaders OR in times of realization. For example, when the birth of a child comes, many people are usually thankful to God without being prompted or reminded to be thankful to Him. Other milestones or victories and overcoming in life usually lead us to spontaneous thanksgiving and praise.

But we are called to more than spontaneous thanksgiving to God. We are called to a lifestyle of praise and gratitude to God.

How we achieve this is by making it a priority in each and every day of our lives to give thanks to God. We grow in our gratitude lifestyle by adding more and more moments of thanksgiving. For instance, you might begin by intentionally adding morning praise and thanksgiving prayer to God. Over time, once you form that spiritual habit, you may feel prompted to add another moment of praise to God at lunch and so forth. Eventually, as you create spiritual habits of intentionality, it spills over in your life and you find yourself now spontaneously thanking God throughout many moments of your day.

In closing for today, I invite you to just ponder this concept of slowly adding gratitude and thanksgiving to your daily routine. Thinking about this process today will equip you for tackling tomorrow’s Challenge.

Day 5 – Gratitude Challenge

Today’s challenge is working off of yesterday’s challenge. If you missed it you can find it by clicking the hashtag above.

We need practice-just like all people do to develop skills and patterns in life. So it is with gratitude. In order to create a more grateful life, you need to intentionally create patterns or rhythms in your day that help you to stop and remember to give thanks.

Maybe it’s by creating a wonderful tradition of sharing a thankful moment around the dinner table each night. Possibly you could start a gratitude journal. An incredibly easy one to start is to dedicate a specific amount of time each day to thank God.

Once you decide on which intentional spiritual habit you are going to add, commit to it for at least a week and see what happens.

God does much with a grateful heart. Gratitude is life-changing and helps get rid of anxiety, fear, depression, and the like. But you must be active in your pursuit to be grateful.

So what intentional spiritual habit of gratitude are you planning on adding to your life?

Day 6 Gratitude Challenge

Our praise and thanksgiving are part of the way we show our thanks to God. Also, our actions and spreading God’s light in the world are other ways we show our gratitude to God by joining in the work of the Kingdom of God in the world.

Our relationship with God is not reserved for our betterment but also for the betterment of the world. We share smiles, open doors, extend help – we see people and we respond just like Christ did. We become like Jesus to the world through our loving actions and our words.

We give God ultimate thanks when we embody His love, peace, patience, joy, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control.

How do your actions with others in the world reflect your gratitude to God for all that He has done in your life?

Day 7 – Gratitude Challenge

I do not share the following story in order to entice anger or feelings of injustice, but rather to portray an example of the challenges of real life.

One of the crafts I love doing is hand embroidery, and yesterday I saw a beautiful hand embroidered project in one of my Facebook groups. Upon seeing it, I thought, “Well, that’s a beautiful design and phrase!” It read, “Begin each day with grateful heart,” and I was immediately struck by how relevant this design is for the gratitude challenge.
But as I started to read the comments on the post, I saw that this design had been stolen by a big company from a small artist trying to make a living. The person who shared the project had no idea it was a stolen design because she bought it on Amazon. The creating artist happened to be in the group, saw the post, and responded in kindness and truth that this was her design and it had been stolen from a big company. Unfortunately, people’s designs are stolen A LOT in hand embroidery, and in other areas of digital media. In this world we live in, bad things happen and people do wrong things.

In moments like these, and other hardships in life, it can be difficult to be thankful. That is why we must create gratitude rhythms in each of our day, like the one from the devotion today, to help combat the hardships we may face.

Gratitude builds a barrier in our lives that, even when difficult things happen, we have a strong base to stand on. Then we’re able to recognize that despite trials, God is good and that He will provide.
Build a strong ground of gratitude by starting each day by being grateful to God for your life, for the breath in your lungs, and for anything else you want to acknowledge and give thanks to God for.

By starting your day off with gratitude, you are building solid and good ground to walk on for the day. And if you want to increase the challenge, create a schedule of gratitude from morning to night to praise and thank God when you wake, at noon, 5, and 8pm.

Imagine what your life would be like if you were that thankful! Wow!

Day 8 Gratitude Challenge

Check out my Instagram or Facebook for today’s Video Challenge

Day 9 Gratitude Challenge

Day 10 Gratitude Challenge

Day 11 Gratitude Challenge

Notice the quote doesn’t say hope for these things, rather Spurgeon simply states let these things happen. Gratitude, humility, and yes even love are all choices. They are intentional decisions we make. We choose who we love, we choose when or if we will be humble and we choose to be grateful…

Gratitude. It’s something we choose.

Sometimes we confuse gratitude as a feeling. But if we are living for the feeling of gratitude (a spontaneous feeling of being thankful) we are missing out on so much.

For gratitude is not to only be experienced or lived out spontaneously, rather gratitude should be a stance we live in every day.

But unfortunately, much like the first humans, we can often choose to focus on what we don’t have instead of what we do. Adam and Eve chose to want what they could not have and ate from the forbidden tree. How everything would have been different if they just focused on all that God had provided them instead of their wants or desires.

We have this choice every single moment of every single day, to fix our gaze on the things that God has already provided instead of looking and coveting what we don’t have.

Gratitude is a choice and to help you foster a gratitude lens better in your life I am currently hosting a gratitude challenge. Hopefully, you have been following along with our current gratitude challenge, if not I have shared all previous days on this platform.

So today’s challenge is for you to think about how often you choose gratitude over complaining. How often do you want or desire instead of being content with what God has already given you.

We all need to do these cleansing exercises because they help us stay firmly rooted in the Lord and help keep us away from behaviors and things that rob us from God’s peace and joy.

Day 12 Gratitude Challenge

I love the challenge of this verse. When things are tough or life is stressful, it is hard to turn to God in thanksgiving, right? We naturally want to complain or have our attention on other things than gratitude.

Of course, there is wisdom in turning to God in gratitude in all circumstances. It’s the hidden secret because when we choose to be thankful we cant hold on to stress, worry, or fear. We don’t have the space to.

Choosing gratitude is a way to filter out unwanted behaviors and thought patterns. It’s a way to make space for God in your heart and mind. For a heart filled with thanksgiving is a fertile ground for God to work. So let Him work and choose gratitude today and all days!

Day 13 Gratitude Challenge

Day 14 Gratitude Challenge

Today’s challenge is: plan to reach out to someone who has made a positive impact in your life and tell them how grateful you are for them.

If you are having trouble figuring out who pray to God and ask Him to reveal. If you are afraid to reach out to them pray to God asking Him to give you the courage.

People love hearing the positive impact they have had on someone. Even if you haven’t talked to them in a long time it will be heartwarming and good 👍

Day 15 Gratitude Challenge

Blessings come in all shapes and sizes and sometimes we can miss God’s blessing because we don’t have eyes to see them.

By doing challenges like today’s, it helps you more easily recognize how God works, particularly in your life.
If you have a hard time recalling how God has blessed you recently, pray and ask Him to help you see His movement and work in your life.

Make this challenge a frequent quiet time objective as it will help you have amazing and strong roots in the Lord and His movement in your life!

Day 16 Gratitude Challenge

The people who are closest to us are often those who we take for granted. We forget how special they are, how much we love them because life is fast-paced and demands are never-ending. Today’s challenge is to stop and truly reflect on the people in your family, those you live with or are closest to you. Why do you love them. Why are they special to you? Why are you thankful for them? Bring all of this to the Lord and thank Him for those people. For an added challenge let those in your family know how you feel about them. What a way to prepare for thanksgiving!

Day 17 – Gratitude Challenge

Reflect on Colossians 3:16

“Let the message of Christ dwell among you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom through psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit, singing to God with gratitude in your hearts.”

Colossians 3:16 I absolutely love this verse. What richness. The whole verse says: let the word of the Anointed One richly inhabit your lives. With all wisdom teach, counsel, and instruct one another. Sing the psalms, compose hymns and songs inspired by the Spirit, and keep on singing—sing to God from hearts full and spilling over with thankfulness (The Voice).
I love worship. I feel as though it sets me free. Singing with other believers in the Body of Christ can do wonders and can help connect you deeper to God.
Worship consistently does this for me and for many other Christians. So keep on singing and praise our good God in thanksgiving!

Day 18 – Gratitude Challenge

Pray Philippians 4:6-7

“Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”

Day 19- Gratitude Challenge

Make your own Gratitude Journal or a Gratitude Journal Station For Thanksgiving. For more instructions check out my post on how to make your own Gratitude Journals.

Day 20 – Gratitude Challenge

Look back over the past 19 challenges and adopt one challenge for your life. It could be a Scripture you say daily or dedicating time each day or week to journal in your gratitude journal.

Congrats we have finished the Gratitude challenge I truly hope this was a great challenge for you! Happy Thanksgiving!

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