Back to School Resource Guide
Back to School Resource Guide
Our Motive for Obeying God Shouldn’t Be Gratitude
What Is Gratitude?
Like most precious things, gratitude is vulnerable. We easily forget that gratitude exists because sometimes things come to us gratis—without price or payment. When that happens, we should feel a pleasant sense of the worth of what we’ve received and the goodwill behind it. This pleasant sense is what we call gratitude. Then, spontaneously rising from this pleasant sense, come expressions of delight. We feel constrained with joy to acknowledge the gift and the goodwill behind it, and to express how good we feel about the gift and the heart of the giver.
Gratitude corresponds to grace (gratis). This is true even when we feel thankful for something we paid for. We sense that what we bought might have been disappointing in spite of our having enough money to buy it. It might not have been in such good condition; or it might not have been the exact one we wanted; or someone might have bought it before we could; or the transaction might have been harsh; or the timing might have been wrong for our intended use; or the price might have gone down just after we bought it. In other words, gratitude is not the feeling that we have been shrewd in how we get things. It is the emotion that rises joyfully in response to something gratis, even in our purchases.
The Danger of Debtor’s Ethic
But danger lurks right at this point. There is an impulse in the fallen human heart—all our hearts—to forget that gratitude is a spontaneous response of joy to receiving something over and above what we paid for. 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. 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 goodwill 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.
Future Grace
John Piper
In Future Grace, John Piper offers meditations grounded in solid biblical reflection, helping readers defeat the power of sin by banking on the promises of Christ.
Don’t misunderstand me. Gratitude itself does not nullify grace. It exults in grace. It was created by God to echo grace. Even the thought that it can be twisted to serve evil shocks some people and makes them shrink back. Make no mistake: 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:
Enter his gates with thanksgiving,
and his courts with praise!
Give thanks to him; bless his name! (Ps. 100:4)
God says that gratitude glorifies him: “The one who offers thanksgiving as his sacrifice glorifies me” (Ps. 50:23). In spite of being vulnerable to misuse in the debtor’s ethic, gratitude is not guilty.
In the debtor’s ethic, the Christian life is pictured as an effort to pay back the debt we owe to God. Usually the concession is made that we can never fully pay it off. But “gratitude” demands that we work at it. Good deeds and religious acts are the installment payments we make on the unending debt we owe God. This debtor’s ethic often lies, perhaps unintentionally, beneath the words, “We should obey Christ out of gratitude.”
This appeal to gratitude as a way of motivating Christians is so common that it may come as a shock when I question whether it has much biblical support. But consider this for a moment: How many places in the Bible can you think of where gratitude or thankfulness is explicitly made the motive of moral behavior? I mean behaviors like treating people with love, doing your business with integrity, and taking risks in obedience of missions. Does the Bible tell us that these things are to be done “out of gratitude,” “in the power of thankfulness,” or “because we owe Jesus so much”?
This is not nitpicking or incidental; it is amazing. If you ask Christians today, “What is the biblical motive for Christian obedience?” great numbers would say, “Gratitude to God.” And yet this way of thinking seems almost totally lacking in the Bible. The Bible rarely, if ever, explicitly makes gratitude the impulse of moral behavior or ingratitude the explanation of immorality.
This is stunning when you let that sink in. This most common way of talking about motivating Christian obedience is scarcely mentioned in the Bible. This fact should come like a punch in the belly; it takes your breath away. Is this really so? You will need to search for yourself just to be completely sure.
True gratitude exults in the riches of God’s grace as it looks back on the benefits it has received.
Faith in Future Grace
Faith in future grace is the secret that keeps impulses of gratitude from turning into the debtor’s ethic. True gratitude exults in the riches of God’s grace as it looks back on the benefits it has received. By cherishing past grace in this way, it inclines the heart to trust in future grace. We might say that gratitude has a strong appetite for the enjoyment of looking back on the outpourings of God’s grace. And since God enlarges the past reservoir of grace by pouring out more grace through faith, therefore, for the sake of this accumulation, gratitude sends its impulses of delight into faith in this ever-arriving future grace.
This is expressed in the words of Psalm 116:12–13,
What shall I render to the LORD
for all his benefits to me?
I will lift up the cup of salvation
and call on the name of the LORD,
In other words, what the psalmist will render to the Lord for so much past grace is the call for more future grace. Gratitude exults in the past benefits of God and says to faith, “Embrace more of these benefits for the future, so that my happy work of looking back on God’s deliverance may continue and increase.”
The True Foundation of Obedience
In the New Testament the prevalence of faith in future grace as the impulse of Christian obedience is even clearer and more explicit than in the Old Testament.
For example, in Hebrews 11 we find the saints of the Old Testament commended again and again because their obedience was motivated by faith. “By faith” Abraham “obeyed” (Heb. 11:8); “by faith” Noah “constructed an ark” (Heb. 11:7); “by faith” Moses “left Egypt” (Heb. 11:27); “through faith” others “enforced justice” (Heb. 11:33). But we find no expression in the Bible like “by gratitude they obeyed” or “by thankfulness they enforced justice.”
Furthermore, we find Christian obedience called the “work of faith,” never the “work of gratitude” (1 Thess. 1:3; 2 Thess. 1:11). We find expressions like “live by faith” (Gal. 2:20) and “walk by faith” (2 Cor. 5:7), but never “live by gratitude” or “walk by gratitude.” We find the expression “faith working through love” (Gal. 5:6) but not “gratitude working through love.” We read that “the aim of our charge is love that issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith” (1 Tim. 1:5) but not “from sincere gratitude.” We read that “faith apart from works is dead” (James 2:26) but not that “gratitude apart from works is dead.” And when Jesus deals with the disciples’ hesitancy to seek the kingdom first because they were worried about food and clothing, he did not say, “O you of little gratitude”; he said, “O you of little faith” (Matt. 6:30). Faith in future grace, not gratitude, is the source of radical, risk-taking, kingdom-seeking obedience.
As I said before, this is not nitpicking or incidental; it is amazing. Gratitude is not set forth in the Bible as a prominent motive for Christian living. Gratitude is a beautiful thing. There is no Christianity without it. It is at the heart of worship. It should fill the heart of every believer. But when it comes to spelling out the spiritual dynamics of how practical Christian obedience happens, the Bible says that it does not come from gratitude but from the profoundly and pervasively future-oriented gaze of faith.
This article is adapted from Future Grace: The Purifying Power of the Promises of God by John Piper.
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