Every Breath You Take

SYNOPSIS: I take 23,040 breaths each day and will breathe in and breathe out the breath of life 8,409,600 this coming year. God willing, that will be over 8 million gifts of life from my Creator in 2022, who will have graciously and mercifully supplied every single one. If I have no other cause to offer thanks to God this year, I will still have at least 8,409,600 reasons. Let everything that has breath praise the Lord!

New Beginnings // Claim: Genesis 2:7

Then the Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground. He breathed the breath of life into the man’s nostrils, and the man became a living person.

If you have begun a “Through the Bible in One Year” program, you likely started in Genesis 1. And in the midst of many extraordinary aspects of the creation account, as you come into chapter 2, you find this amazing verse in Genesis 2:7,

Then the Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground. He breathed the breath of life into the man’s nostrils, and the man became a living person.

Interestingly, the phrase “breath of life” is used twenty-four times in the Old Testament and it not found in other ancient literary creation accounts. In the Book of Job, this phrase is plainly connected to the Spirit of God:

The Spirit of God has made me; the breath of the Almighty gives me life. (Job 33:4)

Into every human being, God deposits something of Himself. While all living creatures have breath, which gives them life, they do not have the living Spirit of God as do humans. Among other things, this makes human life sacred above all the different life forms. What a special gift: God has implanted His very breath, His Spirit, in you and me.

Now I don’t know how you react to that, but for me, it causes gratitude for the Creator’s gift of life to well up and overflow from within me. God didn’t have to form man out of the dust of the ground as the highest, most treasured work of creation, but He did. O, how he must love us! And again, I am simply undone with thanks for the amazing gift of life.

Fundamental to a life of gratitude is the recognition that even my very breath is a gift from my Creator.

I take 23,040 breaths each day and will breathe in and breathe out the breath of life 8,409,600 this coming year. If I live to be 80 years of age, I will have taken about 672,768,000 gifts of life from God, who has graciously, mercifully supplied every single one.

If I had no other cause to offer thanks to God today, I would still have 23,040 reasons. Tomorrow is a whole different matter!

Let everything that has breath praise the Lord!

Of course, authentic gratitude requires that I demonstrate it in how I live. It is not truly thanksgiving unless it becomes “thanksliving.” I love how Philip James Bailey puts it:

Let each man think himself an act of God,
His mind a thought, his life a breath of God;
And let each try, by great thoughts and good deeds,
To show the most of Heaven he hath in him.

That is my glad assignment for this day through every 23,040 breaths that I will take: to show the most of Heaven that I have in me.

I hope you will join me.