Bible verses of gratitude, and how to keep a record that lasts
Thirteen verses on giving thanks, arranged for the ordinary morning, the answered prayer, and the hard season when thanks is an act of will. With a prayer to write for each.
Gratitude is the easiest prayer to recommend and the hardest to sustain. Everyone agrees you should give thanks. Almost no one does it past the third day of a gratitude journal. The problem is not a lack of things to be thankful for. It is that thankfulness, unlike worry, does not remind you of itself.
The verses below are quoted word for word from the World English Bible and arranged for the three situations where thanks actually gets prayed: the ordinary morning when nothing is wrong, the day a prayer is answered, and the hard season when giving thanks is a decision rather than a feeling. The last group is the one that matters most and the one gratitude journals never mention.
Each group ends with a prayer you could write. The ordinary ones are worth keeping most, because they are the ones you will not remember.
The ordinary morning
These are the verses for a day with nothing in it. Rain, coffee, the garden, the fact that everyone is home. Scripture treats the ordinary as a gift with a giver, and that is the whole shift.
This is the day that the LORD has made. We will rejoice and be glad in it!
Psalm 118:24 · WEB
This is the day. Not a special one. Whichever one you are reading this on.
Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom can be no variation nor turning shadow.
James 1:17 · WEB
Every good gift. The small ones count, and they all have the same source.
You visit the earth, and water it. You greatly enrich it. The river of God is full of water. You provide them grain, for so you have ordained it.
Psalm 65:9 · WEB
Rain, rivers, grain. A verse for anyone with a garden, or a window.
It is a good thing to give thanks to the LORD, to sing praises to your name, Most High,
Psalm 92:1 · WEB
A good thing. Giving thanks is not only a duty. It is good for the one doing it.
A prayer to write
Thank you for a quiet morning. For the rain, for the coffee, for the fact that nothing is wrong today. I am writing this down because I will not remember it, and I want to.
When a prayer is answered
The moment of an answered prayer is the moment gratitude comes easily, and also the moment it evaporates fastest. Within a week the answer feels like it was always going to happen. These verses are about telling what God has done, out loud and on paper, before the memory softens.
I will give thanks to the LORD with my whole heart. I will tell of all your marvelous works.
Psalm 9:1 · WEB
Tell of all your marvelous works. Telling is the verb. An answered prayer is meant to be recounted.
Praise the LORD, my soul, and don’t forget all his benefits,
Psalm 103:2 · WEB
Don't forget all his benefits. The psalmist knows you will. That is why the verse exists.
Give thanks to the LORD, for he is good, for his loving kindness endures forever.
Psalm 107:1 · WEB
The refrain of a psalm that lists, one after another, the people God rescued and what they were rescued from. A model for your own list.
Enter into his gates with thanksgiving, and into his courts with praise. Give thanks to him, and bless his name.
Psalm 100:4 · WEB
Thanksgiving at the gates, praise in the courts. Thanks is the way in.
A prayer to write
You answered. The scan was clear. I am writing it down today, while I still feel it, so that six months from now I cannot pretend it was luck. Thank you. I will tell someone.
The hard season
In everything give thanks, Paul writes, and he wrote it from a life that included prison and shipwreck. This is not gratitude as a mood. It is gratitude as a decision made in the dark, and these verses are the ones people hold onto when the feeling has gone.
In everything give thanks, for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus toward you.
1 Thessalonians 5:18 · WEB
In everything. Not for everything. The thanks is given inside the hard thing, not about it.
It is because of the LORD’s loving kindnesses that we are not consumed, because his mercies don’t fail.
Lamentations 3:22 · WEB
From the book of Lamentations. Not consumed is the whole thanksgiving. Some seasons, that is enough.
And let the peace of God rule in your hearts, to which also you were called in one body, and be thankful.
Colossians 3:15 · WEB
Peace rules, and be thankful is attached to it. The two are given together.
In nothing be anxious, but in everything, by prayer and petition with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God.
Philippians 4:6 · WEB
With thanksgiving, in the same breath as the request. You can ask for the thing you do not have and give thanks in the same sentence. Paul did.
giving thanks always concerning all things in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ to God, even the Father;
Ephesians 5:20 · WEB
Always, concerning all things. The most demanding verse on this page, and the one that means the most in the year you can finally pray it.
A prayer to write
I do not feel thankful and I am going to give thanks anyway. We are not consumed. That is what I have today. Thank you for that. Thank you for being here in the middle of this, since you have not taken it away.
Keep a record of what he has done
The Psalms keep telling the reader to remember, and they keep telling it because remembering does not happen on its own. The ordinary mornings are forgotten. The answered prayers turn into things that were always going to work out. The hard seasons are survived and then the surviving is forgotten too.
The fix is not a gratitude journal, which most people abandon. It is a prayer journal that remembers for you. Prayed brings each written prayer back to you at three days, a week, a month and a year, so the thanks you wrote on a quiet Tuesday comes back in a hard December, and the prayer you marked answered builds into a timeline you can scroll on the days you cannot think of anything to be thankful for. Nothing you write leaves your phone.
Write one thank-you tonight, for something small. Date it. Let it come back to you when you need it.
Write the prayer. Prayed finds the verses.
Prayed is a private prayer journal for iPhone. Write what you're praying for and it matches three verses from the same Bible quoted above, on your phone, then brings the prayer back to you at three days, a week, a month and a year so you see what came of it. No account, no server. Writing is free forever.
Get Prayed on the App Store