Thanksgiving, the offering of gratitude to God for blessings received, is a fundamental element of religious devotion across the traditions, standing alongside petition, praise and confession as one of the basic movements of prayer. Where petition asks and confession repents, thanksgiving acknowledges what has been given, returning to the divine source the recognition of its gifts. The impulse to give thanks pervades the scriptures and worship of the biblical religions: the Psalms overflow with thanksgiving, the Apostle Paul instructs Christians to give thanks in all circumstances, and Jewish tradition surrounds the whole of daily life with blessings that acknowledge God as the giver of food, of natural wonders, of life itself, so that gratitude becomes a nearly constant discipline of awareness.
Gratitude is treated in many traditions not merely as a fitting response but as a spiritual discipline that shapes the one who practises it, cultivating humility, contentment and a recognition of dependence on the divine, and countering the pride and forgetfulness that take blessings for granted. Islam gives thankfulness, shukr, a central place, contrasting the grateful servant with the ungrateful and promising increase to those who give thanks; the traditions of India cultivate gratitude to the divine, to teachers and to all that sustains life. Communal harvest thanksgivings, days set apart to acknowledge divine providence, and the constant small thanksgivings woven into daily religious life all express the conviction that a right relation to the divine begins with the recognition that what one has is received rather than merely possessed. In recent times the religious discipline of gratitude has also been taken up in secular and psychological forms, studied and cultivated for its effects on wellbeing, in a partial migration of an ancient practice into new settings.