Echoing God's Grace

Mark this, then, you who forget God, lest I tear you apart, and there be none to deliver! The one who offers thanksgiving as his sacrifice glorifies me; to one who orders his way rightly I will show the salvation of God! (Psalm 50:22-23 ESV).

Please excuse the cartoon today. I know it is not typical of what I usually choose, however, it was something of what I wanted us to look toward today. We are created to echo God’s grace in our gratitude. Thanksgiving “exults in grace,” writes John Piper. We were created by God to echo his grace, and we’ve been redeemed by Jesus to echo his astounding grace all the more. Piper continues, “I exalt gratitude as a central biblical response of the heart to the grace of God. The Bible commands gratitude to God as one of our highest duties.” This is what Asaph writes in our reading today: “He who offers a sacrifice of thanksgiving honors me” (v. 23). There it is again. Note the close connection between thanksgiving and the massive biblical reality of honoring and glorifying God. Thanksgiving is one of the key ingredients of expression in our spiritual lives. However, we cannot ignore a significant danger. The Bible doesn’t have much, if anything, to say about obeying out of gratitude. Giving thanks to God for what he has given to us is precious and essential, and, so is trusting him for his ongoing provision in the future. Thanksgiving is beautiful, but it can go bad on us, if we try to give it the task of faith. There is an impulse in our fallen humanity to forget that gratitude is a spontaneous response of joy to receiving something. When we forget this, what happens is that gratitude starts to be misused and distorted as an impulse to pay for the very thing that came to us “gratis” (free). This terrible moment is the birthplace of the “debtor’s ethic.” The debtor’s ethic says, “Because you have done something good for me, I feel indebted to do something good for you.” This impulse is not what gratitude was designed to produce. God meant gratitude to be a spontaneous expression of pleasure in the gift and the good will of another. He did not mean it to be an impulse to return favors. If gratitude is twisted into a sense of debt, it gives birth to the debtor’s ethic—and the effect is to nullify grace. Today I would encourage you to think about being grateful because you can, not because you must. It need not be lavish expression. It merely needs to be expressed. Use these next days to do that in response to the grace God has extended to you.