True gratitude is unstoppable.

Here is something I read this morning that made we want to say, "Thank You Father."

One of the great hymns of gratitude was written Martin Rinkart (1586–1649), a pastor in the city of Elenberg in Saxony, during the Thirty Years War. During that horrible time, all the other pastors in the city left, leaving him with 4,500 funerals to conduct, among them his wife’s. As the war drew to a close, the city was overrun by the Austrians once and the Swedes twice. The Swedish general levied a heavy tax on the beleaguered people. Rinkart and his congregation pleaded for the general to show mercy, but he refused. Rinkart then turned to his people and said, “Come, my children; we can find no mercy with man—let us take refuge in God.” There, before the general, they knelt in prayer. The general was so moved by what he saw that he relented and lowered the tax to one-twentieth of what it had been.

Martin Rinkart, the man who saw so much grief and endured so much loss, could still say gratitude’s defiant “nevertheless,” and write the great, “Now Thank We All Our God”:

Now thank we all our God
With heart and hands and voices,
Who wondrous things hath done,
In whom His world rejoices;
Who, from our mother’s arms,
Hath blessed us on our way
With countless gifts of love,
And still is ours today.
All praise and thanks to God
The Father now be given,
The Son and Holy Ghost,
Supreme in highest heaven;
The one eternal God,
Whom earth and heaven adore;
For thus it was, is now,
And shall be evermore.

(Excerpted from "Deepening Your Relationship With God: The Life-changing Power of Prayer" by Ben Patterson)