Great are Your tender mercies, O Lord; Revive me according to Your judgments. - Psalm 119:156.
This week also, we continued to meditate on the theme of gratitude. The gratitude attitude—and what a difference it makes in our lives.We'll look at what it means to be a grateful person, and the difference between a grateful heart and an ungrateful heart. We'll look at how we should give thanks, when we should give thanks, what we should be thankful for, and what it means to offer a sacrifice of thanksgiving. We'll talk about how to cultivate, in a practical way, an attitude of gratitude in our lives.
When we go back to the Greek language, the original language in which the New Testament was written, we find that there is a similar root word for several words that we read in English. The same root word is used for the words thanks, thanksgiving, gratitude, gift, and grace. All of those words come from a very similar Greek word, and they’re all connected: gift, grace, gratitude, and thanks.
Let’s think about some of those words. When we think about the word "grace," it suggests something that is a gift given to people who don’t deserve that gift. It’s a gift bestowed on undeserving people. That’s God’s grace. He gives us what we don’t deserve.
Gratitude has to do with my response to God’s grace, my response to His gifts. It’s that feeling of appreciation and thankfulness that I have when I think about what God has given me.
It’s interesting that they’re both two very similar words in the original Greek language in which the New Testament was written. God’s gifts to us, His grace to us, and our gratitude back to Him all are closely related.
Both grace and gratitude are freely given. They’re not something that you can manufacture or work up. They have to be freely given.
Gratitude is really recognizing and expressing our appreciation for the benefits that we’ve received from God and from others. Let me say that definition again, what it means to have an attitude of gratitude. It’s recognizing and expressing appreciation for the benefits that I’ve received from God and from others; recognizing those benefits—benefits I’ve received from God and benefits I’ve received from others. But not only recognizing those benefits, also expressing appreciation for them, communicating gratitude.
When we read the gospel, which is really the whole story of the Bible, three words that summarize the gospel. They all start with “G.” The first word is the word guilt. We stand before God; we are born into this world as guilty sinners deserving the wrath and the judgment of God for He is a holy God, and He has to judge sin. So we are guilty. That’s where our story starts. For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. Romans 3:23. We are under the wrath of God; we are under the judgment of God, and we have no hope of ever being able to please God. We have no hope of ever having a right relationship with God because we are guilty. Our guilt has separated us from a Holy God. That’s the first word of the gospel: guilt.
Then there’s the word grace—the grace of God, where He steps down from heaven and bridges the gap between Himself, a holy God, and us, as fallen, desperate, hopeless sinners. The Scripture says, “But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. (He sought us out) Rom. 5:8. We never sought after God. We would have never chosen God. He chose us. He sent Jesus Christ to be His solution for our sin, to pay the penalty for our guilt. That’s all grace. “For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God” (Eph. 2:8 NKJV). Grace—a gift for guilty sinners. So the gospel is my guilt, and God’s grace—God’s gracious gift of Jesus Christ to pay the penalty for my sin.
But there’s another word that makes up the gospel, and that’s the word gratitude—guilt, grace, and gratitude. Our natural response when we realize what God has done for us, how undeserving we were, and are, and how gracious He’s been to us and all that He’s poured out upon us in Jesus Christ, not only in giving us salvation but in giving us sanctification and the promise of ultimate glorification. All of God’s gifts. And let the peace of God rule in your hearts, to which also you were called in one body; and be thankful. And whatever you do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through Him. Colossians 3:15, 17.
Guilt, grace, and gratitude—that’s the gospel. That’s the story of the gospel.
When we partake of the Lord’s Supper, we recognize these three elements: guilt, grace, and gratitude. In fact, in some of our liturgical traditions, they use the word Eucharist when they talk about the Lord’s Supper or communion. That word Eucharist is very similar to the Greek word, that is the word for gift and grace and gratitude.
The Eucharist is a celebration, a communion supper where we celebrate together the fact that God poured out His grace upon our guilt; that Jesus gave His body and His blood for our redemption; that He purchased forgiveness for our sins when He went to Calvary to die for us. So we celebrate the death of the Lord, the gift of His grace, and we give thanks.
Remember when Jesus celebrated the Last Supper in the Upper Room with His disciples? The Scripture says He took the bread in His hands, and He gave thanks. Then He took the cup, and gave thanks, and said, “Take this and divide it among yourselves; 18 for I say to you, I will not drink of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes.” And He took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to them, saying, “This is My body which is given for you; do this in remembrance of Me. ( Luke 22:17–20). So as we take the Lord’s Supper, as we look back on Calvary, look back on the cross and what He has done for us, we give thanks—guilt, grace, and gratitude.
Now as you think about those three words, you realize that our guilt before God was absolutely overwhelming and abounding and yet how much grace has God given us for that abounding guilt? We read in Romans 5:20, “Where sin abounded, grace abounded much more”
God has given us grace greater than all our sin, grace sufficient to cover all our guilt. Our gratitude should be as great as the grace we have received.
I think that’s why Paul says to the Colossians 2:7, “Be abounding in thankfulness”—be abounding in gratitude. The word is, the word overflowing. It’s a word picture here of a river that’s overflowing its banks in flood season. You just can’t contain the flood waters. That’s how great our gratitude should be. Overflowing gratitude as God's grace has been toward us and abounding.
In fact, I think of that passage in Psalm 36 where the Scripture says, Your mercy, O LORD, is in the heavens. Your faithfulness reaches to the clouds [greater far than we could ever imagine, abounding faithfulness]. Your righteousness is like the great tall mountains; Your judgments are a great, deep [unfathomable greatness of God]. How precious is Your loving kindness, O God! The children of men . . . are abundantly satisfied with the fullness of Your house, and You give them drink from the river of Your pleasures (vv. 5-8 NKJV).
You see the abounding grace of God, the fullness of God’s mercy, and His love and His kindness toward us? So Paul says, “Take a measure of how great was your guilt, and then measure how great is God’s grace, His mercy, His kindness, His forgiveness, His faithfulness.”
Whatever you’ve done in the past, however far you were from God, however great an enemy you were against God, He’s forgiven. He’s wiped the record clean. He’s given you a new life, a new start, a clean heart. It’s abounding grace, and Paul says, “Take a look at God’s grace and see to it that you abound in gratitude.”
In 1860 a ship went aground (touching the ground) on the shore of Lake Michigan, near Evanston, Illinois, and there was a life-saving crew that was based at Northwestern College there in Evanston.
One of the young men on that team was a ministerial student at the University of Northwestern. His name was Edward Spencer. He waded into the freezing cold waters of Lake Michigan again and again and rescued seventeen people from those waters, people who had been on that boat.
In the process his health was permanently damaged, and he was not able to enter into the ministry as he had planned. Some years later at his funeral, someone pointed out that not one of those seventeen passengers that he had rescued had ever come back to say, “Thank you.” He risked his life, but no one came back and said, “Thank you.”
Thankfulness seems to be a lost art today. We’re talking about the attitude of gratitude and how important it is that we express gratitude for the benefits and the blessings we have received from God and from others.
Let us see today's passage of Scripture that will be familiar to most of you. It’s found in the gospel of Luke, chapter 17. It’s a story of the ten lepers who came to Jesus for healing. Let’s begin reading in verse 11: Now it happened as [Jesus] went to Jerusalem that He passed through the midst of Samaria and Galilee. Then as He entered a certain village, there met Him ten men who were lepers, who stood afar off (vv. 11–12 NKJV).
Now the Scripture says that these men were lepers and they stood afar off. We know that they had to stand afar off because they were ceremonially defiled. According to the Old Testament law, they had to live outside the village, and they could not have normal relations and communication with non-lepers. So they were separated by their leprosy.
In the Scripture leprosy is a picture of sin. This doesn’t mean that these men had sinned more than other people because they had leprosy, but leprosy, a contagious disease, destroys a person and their immune system deadly. It’s a picture of what sin is, a picture of our guilt before a Holy God.
The picture here is that these men were separated from normal people, from others—separated from Jesus, separated from others in their town, separated from their families because of their leprosy. That's a picture of what our guilt, our sin does separate us from a holy God.
The Scripture says that when we were in sin, we could not approach God; we could not come near to Him. We were separated from Him, and that was an infinite gap between us and God because of our guilt (see Rom. 3:23).
Verse 13 says these ten lepers lifted up their voices and said, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!”
Apparently they knew that Jesus had supernatural power, and that He had grace available to meet them at their point of need. That’s what God’s grace is—His resources, His riches applied to our needs. They had a need—that was their leprosy. They knew Jesus was God and had grace to meet their needs. So they cried out to Him for grace, and sure enough Jesus extended grace to them.
Verse 14: “When He saw them, He said to them, ‘Go, show yourselves to the priests.’”
That’s a reference to the Old Testament law that these lepers would have known well—that is, when a leper was healed, though it never happened, the law said if he ever was healed, he should go to the priest who would pronounce him clean. And the Scripture says, “As they went, they were cleansed.”
So they did what Jesus said. They obeyed; they went to the priest. There was some level of faith here to believe that something would happen as they went, and as they did, they received grace. They were cleansed. They were healed.
Now this was a miracle. Leprosy is an incurable disease. They had never known a leper who had been healed. They had never heard of a leper, except for a couple of incidents in the Old Testament that were miraculous, divine interventions; there was little record of lepers ever having been healed, but they experienced the grace of God as they went on their way.
Then verse 15 tells us, One of [the ten], when he saw that he was healed, returned, and with a loud voice glorified God, and fell down on his face at [Jesus’] feet, giving Him thanks. And he was a Samaritan.
Now there were ten lepers who were healed; ten men who were enjoying their new-found health; ten men who’d experienced the miraculous grace of God beyond their wildest hopes and dreams. I guarantee you these men were not being quiet about this. I guarantee you that as they were healed, not only were they going to the priests, but they were going to their family, and the people they had been estranged from for all these years. They were telling everyone.
Nine of them forgot to say something to the One who was the source of their blessing. Only one stopped to consider the Source of the blessing, the Giver. Only one stopped to thank and worship the One who had given him back his life.
As I see this one coming back to Jesus, it’s a beautiful picture to us of overflowing, abounding gratitude. We can sense, this man had no inhibition. It says, “With a loud voice he glorified God.” He fell down on his face at Jesus’ feet.
It’s interesting that these ten lepers had all lifted up their voices when they were in distress and need. They had all cried out, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!” They all cried out when they were desperate, when they were needy, but only one came and cried out and lifted up his voice when he’d received that grace. Only one showed gratitude, and when he showed gratitude, it was abounding gratitude. He lifted up his voice. He recognized the source of his healing. He recognized his debt, and this is a spontaneous, natural outburst of praise.
This was not a private little, “Thank You, Jesus, for what You did for me.” This gratitude was public. It was loud, and I’m so glad that word was in there because it gives us a picture of the kind of gratitude we ought to have to the Lord Jesus for the grace He has poured out on us as guilty sinners.
Let me ask this question: Is your giving of thanks as obvious and as expressive as your sharing of needs? We tell others what we need. We tell the Lord what we need. We cry out to Him.
Are you as expressive in communicating your gratitude as you are in communicating your needs?
“He fell down on his face at the feet of Jesus, giving Him thanks.”
This is a picture of worship and humility. I like the contrast here because we read in the beginning of this passage, these ten men, when they were still lepers, "stood afar off," but now, having been healed, having been the recipient of the grace of Christ, he came near to Jesus. He fell on his face right at His feet.
Who’s the one who got the closest to Jesus? Who’s the only one who got close to Jesus? It’s the one who was grateful. It’s the one who expressed his gratitude.
I think the others must have felt it, but they didn’t express it. They didn’t come back to say it. When you and I express gratitude to Jesus, we can get closer to Him than we ever have been able to be before.
It’s interesting that the Scripture gives us that little phrase, “He was a Samaritan.” Apparently the others were Jews. Isn’t it interesting that often those who’ve been the most exposed to the truth of God are the least likely to come back and say, “Thank you”?
I’ve never known anything but the grace of God in my life. I grew up in a home where I was always hearing the ways and the Word of God. I’ve always known about the grace of God, and I find that sometimes people who didn’t grow up in that kind of environment and came to know the grace of God later in life are a whole lot quicker to express gratitude because they don’t take God’s grace for granted. They remember what it was like not to have the grace of God.
Sometimes you see these new believers, and they’re so excited about their faith, and they’re so expressive about their gratitude to the Lord. Sometimes we who’ve been around too long kind of want to tone them down, like, “They’ll get over it.” Well, they will if they sit next to us in church.
They’re so grateful, and they don’t care who hears them or what people think about them when they’re expressing gratitude to the Lord Jesus with a loud voice. They don’t know any better in church than to sing when it’s time to sing songs of praise. Some of us just sit there or stand there and mumble the words, but sometimes those who’ve had the least are the quickest to express gratitude and thanks. So, verse 17, Jesus answered and said, "Were there not ten cleansed? But where are the nine? Were there any found to return to give glory to God except this foreigner?" And He said to him, "Arise, go your way. Your faith has made you well" (vv. 17–19 NKJV).
Literally, the translation there is “your faith has saved you.” The other men got physical healing, but this man got physical and spiritual healing—physical healing and spiritual salvation—because I believe he was placing his faith in Christ, recognizing that Christ was God and was the Savior.
Jesus expressed amazement that only this one foreigner had returned to give God glory. I wonder if from His place in heaven today He might not be expressing amazement still that there are so few who come back and say, “Thank You.”
We’re so quick to enjoy the gift and so quick to forget the Giver.
Edward Spencer pulled seventeen passengers out of the icy waters of Lake Michigan and not one ever came back to say, “Thank you; thank you.”
Grace has abounded toward us as guilty sinners. May our gratitude be as overflowing as God’s grace. Amen.
