Many good things don’t get done because we forget; nothing reminds us to do them. Thanking the Lord for everything, rejoicing always, and praising Him continually is a significant emphasis in the Bible. Considering all the blessings in my life, I don’t thank the Lord nearly as much as I ought to. My only excuse is I forget. Thanksgiving is a day that reminds us to be thankful, but one day a year hardly meets the need to be grateful. In church, we have worship times that are supposed to lead us into worship each week, but as Jesus said, “They honor me with their words, but their heart is far away.” We seem to need that string around our fingers, and we mustn’t forget what the string is there for. I want to be a grateful person who continually thanks the Lord for every blessing in my life, so I do three things religiously to help make that happen.

1. Every morning, I pray a prayer of commitment, and one of the commitments is, “Today, I will grumble about nothing and rejoice about everything.” Praying that prayer every morning begins to push me toward actually doing it.
2. I read the Bible daily; part of my reading is five chapters in Psalms. Much of Psalms praise God, and I use those passages to remind me to think of things that happened that day for which I am thankful.
3. I journal daily and include things I am thankful for.

A significant advantage I have over many people is that I have established daily disciplines over the years. I rarely don’t get them done. We all have disciplines and habits of some sort. When I began my daily morning prayer of commitment, I wrapped a bunch of masking tape around the handle of my toothbrush. I always brush my teeth in the morning. On the tape, I drew a cross with a felt pen, reminding me of Jesus’s words, “Pick up your cross daily,” so I committed to Him to do the same.

You brush your teeth, take showers, go to work, change the oil in your car, and a whole host of other habits and routines you have established hook up a new discipline to an old one. It works for me.