Romans 1:21 Meaning Because Knowing God

The trouble does not start in ignorance. These people knew God and still would not honor Him as God or thank Him for anything. The fault lies in that refusal, a turning away from the One already known.

Their thinking ran empty, chasing ideas that led nowhere, and the inner self went dark. The heart, the center where a person understands and chooses, lost its light because it had first lost its God. Cut off from the source of clear sight, the mind dims into the foolishness it thought was insight, and does not grow wiser on its own.

A man who will not give thanks ends up living in a world that keeps getting worse while nothing in it changes.

The mind cannot hold a gift and no giver at once, so it goes to work inventing reasons nothing was ever given, and those reasons harden into a way of seeing. Expectation deletes the giver and leaves a world that owes and underdelivers, so the emotional return on unchanged circumstances keeps falling.

A darkened heart is a state, and states run on what a person keeps in focus and what they refuse to say out loud. Thanks given holds the focus on what arrived; thanks withheld swings it onto what is missing, and from there a man has to explain away every good thing he owns to keep his reasoning consistent.