Today, Leslie Wiggins of Lux Venit and I began a month-long series on the 31 chapters of John Piper's book The Purifying Power of Living By Faith in Future Grace, better known as Future Grace. Earlier today I posted on the Preface and Introductions, and now move on to Chapter 1, entitled "The Debtor's Ethic: Should We Try to Pay God Back?"
Mere Gratitude Versus Godly Gratitude
Which one these things is not like the other?
We worship God because it is our duty.
We worship God because we are grateful for past mercies.
We worship God because we are full of faith for the future, based on past mercies.
They all sound true, don't they? And they all are to a point, but only one of them empowers and energizes the Christian with godly impetus for the pursuit of holiness on the path to heaven. What does not propel Christian faith is a sort of "mere gratitude" that stems from and results in a legalistic orientation towards God and His promises. In the first chapter of Future Grace, Piper sets his sights set on dethroning mere gratitude as the primary propulsion system in the Christian's fight of faith. While he concedes that gratitude for bygone grace (i.e., thankfulness for God's provision in the past, and ultimately for extending His hand of salvation) provides the "impulse of delight" into faith in future grace, he maintains that gratitude divorced from hope in the ongoing provision of God results in spiritual sentimentality at best, and the debtor's ethic at worst.
So what does all that mean?
I can't improve upon Leslie's paraphrase of The Debtor's Ethic: "[It] develops when one feels the need to repay another for a gift; turns gifts into legal currency. For the Christian, living with a debtor's ethic means that we strive to obey God in order to repay him for salvation or other gifts given in the past. This is the most common way we speak of our motivation for obeying God."
But are we quite sure this is totally biblical? Thanksgiving, thanksgiving, thanksgiving - that's what I was taught in Sunday School.
To start, the past provision/future grace relationship is woven through the book of Psalms. For example, "His steadfast love endures forever" is the repeated refrain in Psalm 136. Following every line in which an act of God is rehearsed, the faith-forward chorus echoes the eternal nature of God's promises.
But that's the Psalms, you say. That's David and Moses and Asaph and the Sons of Korah speaking. They were spiritual giants. What about me?
I can only share a bit of my own story here. Growing up in a legalistic Baptist church, I performed out of duty. I was a happy child and teenager, and happy to be dutiful, but this duty-based motivation was not godly; I can see that now. After marrying my beautiful wife in the church where we both grew up, our early twenties found us attending a church that preached Christ crucified, not only as the basis of our justification, but as the motivation for our continuing sanctification. Every Sunday we sang of the finished work of Christ on the cross, and how we could never repay Him for the price He paid on our behalf. Again, all true. The problem was, I got really good at "mere gratitude." My everyday obedience didn't seem to match up with my feelings of gratitude. So what gave?
Slowly I became aware that merely looking back doesn't fully match up with the tenor of the Scriptures. As Piper explains, gratitude is only a means - a springboard - to propel us into faith and trust for future grace. It doesn't end with gratitude, because godly gratitude needs to ricochet us from bygone grace to future grace. In other words, in the present we need to be mindful of God's faithfulness in the past, so that we can place our hope and trust in God for the future.
I realize - as does Piper - that this discussion begs the question, "How do we then respond to God?" Using the terminology of Psalm 116, Piper explains that we show the greatest gratitude for God's past faithfulness by embracing the same for the future. Thankful for deliverance? Approach Him for deliverance. Did He answer your call? Call upon Him again.
Surely we can get even more specific and relevant. Did He provide rent last month? Plead for nutritious food to place on the table for your family. Did He soften your supervisor's heart about giving you Sundays off? Pray to God that she would agree to attend with you one of those Sundays. And on it goes...
