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Responding to the Christmas Gift
Hebrews 12:28
The Gift of Christmas
December 29, 2002
What was the favorite gift you received this year? You might say you like all your gifts the same…Oh how politically correct! You know and I know that there was one gift that you were especially pleased with. You didn’t let on, though. You made it look like you were just as happy with those putrid socks as that gift that you were really excited about.
But there was one gift that was especially nice.
What do you do when you receive a gift that is extremely expensive or very nice or just out-and-out above and beyond what you expected? Some of us kick into the “I didn’t get you anything this nice!” and we feel indebted to the person...”Maybe I should run out and buy a quickie present so that our accounts are balanced.”
But here is the question: Should we feel that we must pay back a gift?
On Christmas morning, an unexpected thing happened, something wonderful. My neighbor Pete came over and cleared our driveway with his snow blower. We had received a heavy snow over Christmas Eve, and before we could leave for visiting family, we would have had to shovel our driveway—but Pete had done us a wonderful favor in clearing the way for us. I opened the garage door, and said, “Ho Ho Ho! Thank you!” Pete simply said, “Don’t worry about it!”
But deep inside me somewhere there was this itch to try to figure out a way to pay back the favor.
But again, the question: Should I feel indebted to Pete for the favor he did me? Or should I accept the favor as it was intended—a free gift?
A third example: At a previous church, we decided to give a good chunk of money to a family that was really down and out. They could not even pay their gas bill, let alone buy presents for the kids for Christmas. When we presented the parents the check, their immediate response was, “But we don’t know how we could pay this back!” We had to explain to them that it was a free gift—gratis—and that they should not feel obligated to the church in any way for the money. We did not give the Christmas gift in order to make this family feel indebted to the church, but to simply show our love for them. To this, they said, “We can pay back some of it when we start getting back on our feet.” Again, we had to reiterate that this was a free gift and that they should not pay back ANY of it. They then said, “Well we will definitely start coming to your church, and you better believe that we will put money in your offering plate!”
Once again, the question: Should they feel indebted to the church? Should they feel obligated to the church in any way for a free gift?
This is the subject of today’s message. Now that we have been talking about the Gift of Christmas for a month, we need to understand the proper response to receiving this gift.
To review, the First and Ultimate Gift of Christmas is Jesus Christ Himself. Christmas gift-giving is the result of God giving us the unique, one-of-a-kind gift of His Son.
“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” (John 3:16)
This gift of Jesus Christ, the one and only Son of God, thus God Himself, brings about many benefits to us. In this series, we looked at several aspects of the benefits of the Gift of Jesus
Christ—the Gift of Salvation, the Gift of
Righteousness, the Gift of Eternal Life, and
the Gift of Everything Good including God continuing to work in our lives for our good.
All of this flows from the ultimate gift—Jesus Christ Himself. On Christmas Eve, we said that Jesus is called the “one and only” because only he reveals the glory since only he is God, only he can die on the cross for my sins since he is God—able to bear the punishment for my sin on the cross.
And Jesus gives his life to us while we are still sinners, as a gift of grace—gratis.
Gratis is the Latin word for “grace.” I give this to you, gratis. Free. With grace. As a favor. Out of kindness.
Now the proper response to something gratis is gratitude. We should be thankful for a wonderful priceless gift given to us. I should be grateful for the gifts I received on Christmas day. I should be thankful to Pete for clearing my driveway. That family should show gratitude for the gift they received.
Hebrews 12:28 says, “Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us be thankful, and so worship God acceptably with reverence and awe.” In other words, since we have received the gratis Christmas Gift of heaven, lets be grateful!
That is a proper way to respond to the Gift of Christmas: Be Thankful, or Show Gratitude. The verse says,
“…let us be thankful…”
Let’s define “Thankfulness” or “Gratitude.”
John Piper writes, “Gratitude is a species of joy which arises in your heart in response to the goodwill of someone who does or tries to do you a favor.”
(John Piper, Brothers, We Are Not Professionals, p. 36)
When we receive something that we esteem as really valuable, a feeling wells up inside us that is good. This feeling is joyful. This feeling is gratitude. And when you are really joyfully thankful because what you received is really valuable to you, you cannot contain your excitement. You want to at least smile. Even the worst scrooge will smile when he receives a Christmas gift that he highly values! But more often than not, you want to tell others about how great the gift is. You want to gather around you others so that they too can enjoy the value of what you receive as well! When you receive something wonderful, just try not to tell others about it—it’s nearly impossible!
C. S. Lewis understood this. He wrote in Reflection on the Psalms,
“Just as men spontaneously praise whatever they value, so they spontaneously urge us to join them in praising it: ‘Isn’t she lovely? Wasn’t it glorious? Don’t you think that magnificent?’…the delight is incomplete until it is expressed.”
Think for a moment, Lewis says, of when you are delighted about something. When you see a great movie, don’t you want to tell others about it? You go on vacation and witness God’s wonderful creation in some far-off exotic location, don’t you feel that you can’t wait to tell your friends about it.
So it is with a gift that we receive. When we receive something that highly valuable to us, we well up with joy, and therefore we want to respond in a way that is proper.
Back to Hebrews 12:28. “Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us be thankful, and so worship God acceptably with reverence and awe.”
We must learn to “worship God acceptably with reverence and awe.” What does that mean?
I know what it does NOT mean, and from that we can learn what it DOES mean.
What it does NOT mean is that we should turn our gratitude into a feeling that we are indebted to God.
This is very important for us to understand, let me repeat it: We should never turn our gratitude into a feeling that we are indebted to God.
We should never take that which we received gratis and feel that we must try to pay God back someway. This teaching has crept into the church. You’ll hear teachers and fellow Christians say things like, “God has done so much for you, now what will you do for him?” Or, “He gave his very life; now how much will you give him?”
It is what John Piper calls the “Debtor’s Ethic.” He writes, “In the debtor’s ethic the Christian life is pictured as an effort to pay back the debt we owe 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.”
(John Piper, Future Grace, p.33)
He continues, “The effort to repay God, in the ordinary way we pay our creditors, would nullify grace and turn it into a business transaction. If we see acts of obedience as installment payments, we make grace into a mortgage payment.
“Picture salvation as a house that you live in. It provides you with protection. It is stocked with food and drink that will last forever. It never decays or crumbles. It’s windows open onto vistas of glory. God built it at great cost to himself and to his Son, and he gave it to you. The ‘purchase’ agreement is called the ‘new covenant.’ The terms read: ‘This house shall become and remain yours if you will receive it as a gift and take delight in the Father and the Son as they inhabit the house with you. You shall not profane the house of God by sheltering other gods nor turn your heart away after other treasures.’ Would it not be foolish to say yes to this agreement, and then hire a lawyer to draw up an amortization schedule with monthly payments in the hopes of somehow balancing the accounts. You would be treating the house no longer as a gift, but a purchase. God would no longer be the free benefactor. And you would be enslaved to a new set of demands that he never dreamed of putting on you. If grace is to be free—which is the very meaning of grace—we cannot view it as something to be repaid.”
When we begin to see the Christian life as trying to repay God, we may very easily slip into a life of legalism. We think, “Good Christians do
this and not that, because this pays back God better than
that.”
And when we see the Christian life as trying to repay God based on our gratitude, we mistakenly place too much trust in the power of gratitude. We certainly should be thankful, but thankfulness for a benefit in our past can only take us so far into our future.
So, we are not to try to live an obedient life on the basis of trying to pay back God for something we are grateful for—Jesus Christ and our salvation through him.
If my motivation for living the Christian life is not primarily paying God back, then what is the right response to receiving a free gift?
Let’s look at Hebrews 12:28 again:
“Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us be thankful, and so worship God acceptably with reverence and awe.”
The first step is obviously to have a thankful heart—“let us be thankful.”
And then to allow this gratitude to well up into a response that is appropriate
to the giver of the gift—we are to “worship God acceptably with reverence and awe.”
That, in a nutshell, is the Christian life. Believers live their lives in worship, in reverence and awe of the God who has given us eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.
And we know that worship is not just singing songs on Sunday mornings. Romans 12:1 tells us, “Therefore I urge you, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice,
acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship.”
Worship is an every-day sacrifice to God of our entire lives—lived for him by his constant mercy. We are to live lives that are sacrificially obedient to God.
But how do we do that? We all want to know what the greatest power for living the Christian life is. Some good-intentioned teachers say that the power is in being thankful; if you are thankful then you will try to pay back God for the gift he has given you.
They have the first part right, but the conclusion is wrong. You will fail to find a passage in Scripture that says that we are to obey God out of our gratitude to him.
What really carries us into deeper and deeper obedience is just this: Deeper and deeper
faith.
Piper writes, “There is a divine power for future obedience. But gratitude is not designed for carrying this high voltage current of future grace. Faith is. When gratitude is thrust into this role, what tends to happen is that a debtor’s ethic emerges that tries to produce future obedience with the power of past grace. It won’t work; it is past. So poor gratitude does the best it can, although out of its element…If faith in future grace does not come in to rescue gratitude at this point, the debtor’s ethic takes over and subtle forms of religious self-reliance develop. We call them legalism.”
Here are the commands of Scripture:
“We continually remember before our God and Father your work produced by faith” (1 Thes 1:3)
“With this in mind, we constantly pray for you, that our God may count you worthy of his calling, and that by his power he may fulfill every good purpose of yours and every act prompted by your faith.”
(2 Thes. 1:11)
We
“live by faith” (Gal 2:20), we “walk by faith” (2 Cor 5:7), but we never see an expression like “live by gratitude” or “walk by thankfulness.”
Sanctification is by faith in the truth:
“But we ought always to thank God for you, brothers loved by the Lord, because from the beginning God chose you to be saved through the sanctifying work of the Spirit and through belief in the truth.” (2 Thes. 2:13).
When Jesus dealt with his disciples hesitancy to seek the kingdom first because they were worried about food and clothing, he did not say, “O men of little gratitude.” He said, “O men of little faith.” (Matthew 6:30).
Now, don’t get me wrong. Gratitude is a beautiful thing. When we think of what Christ has done for us, we are indeed grateful! Gratitude is the heart of worship!
But there is a right path and a wrong path from gratitude to obedience. The wrong path is to turn our gratitude into a need to repay God for what he has done for us.
The right path is this:
Remember the grace of God for what he has done for you and turn that into faith that this same God will continue to show you grace and mercy and the power to overcome in the future.
In other words, turn gratitude for past grace into faith in future grace.
Piper writes, “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.’” (Future Grace, p. 38)
“With true gratitude there is such a delight in the worth of God’s past grace, that we are driven on to experience more and more of it in the future. But this is not done by ‘payments’ of a debt in any ordinary sense. Rather, it is done by transforming gratitude into faith as it turns from contemplating the pleasures of past grace and starts contemplating the promises of future grace.”
(Future Grace, p. 39)
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