For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God.
Ephesians 2:8
As I write this, Christmas is just over a month away.
And this year will mark the 43rd Christmas I’ve gotten to celebrate. I know there were some hard financial years for our family when I was little, but my parents always faithfully provided great memories each year.
And never once did they make me pay them back for any Christmas gift that they purchased for me.
You know why? Because gifts aren’t paid back.
The very definition of a gift includes not requiring payment.
Gratitude Expressed By Obedience
At the church I pastor, we’re currently walking through a short sermon series on thankfulness. We’ve talked about Who ultimately we’re thankful to and why. We talked about how we can be thankful to God for who He is, what He’s done, and even what He will still do for us. And we talked about how the Bible directs us to express our gratitude to God. We talked about expressing our gratitude directly to God in prayer, singing our gratitude to God, and also how our gratitude can be expressed through our obedience.
But keep in mind that gratitude to God that leads to obedience to God is not about paying God back for what He’s done for us.
That’s the idea of a “debtor’s ethic.” That’s where you go out to lunch with someone and they pay for your lunch. So now that means you think you have to pay for their lunch next time to pay them back. You think you owe them something because they did something for you.
That’s fine to do between people, but that’s absolutely not what we’re doing when we obey God out of gratitude. That’s not it at all.
Gratitude doesn’t move us to obey so that we can pay God back through our obedience.
A Gift, Not A Loan
We have to understand that God’s grace to us is a gift. It’s not a loan. If you take out a loan for a car, you have to make a payment every month until the full amount of that loan is paid back. And that car isn’t fully yours until the loan is paid off.
But God’s grace isn’t a loan that we pay back through our good deeds until the full amount of our sin debt has been paid back to God and then we can know God’s grace is fully ours. We would never be able to pay that kind of debt off because our sin is far too great.
Many people wrongly think that God’s grace to them is something they earn by doing good deeds. They have this logic that they can only go to heaven if they do more good things than bad things. Like they have to earn their place with God.
Well, some people can think of gratitude in that same way. When you think of gratitude as paying God back for what He’s done for you, that’s still wrongly thinking that you need to earn God’s grace through your good deeds. And that’s absolutely not the case. That’s not what the Bible teaches us.
God’s grace isn’t a loan that you keep paying back and it’s not fully yours until it’s all paid back.
God’s grace is a gift.
A wonderful, undeserved, inexpressible gift. Ephesians 2:8, “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God.” God’s grace is a gift to you. God extending mercy and forgiveness to you because of what Jesus did for you on the cross, even though you are entirely undeserving of it, that’s a gift of grace.
And here’s the beautiful thing … gifts aren’t paid back.
We don’t make our kids pay us back for their Christmas presents. And neither do we pay back God for His gift of grace.
When you get a gift, you take it and receive it joyfully. You enjoy it. The way we enjoy the gift of God’s grace and the way we thank Him for it, is through our obedience.
Obedience isn’t the currency we use to pay God for His grace. Obedience is a way we thank God in worship for the gift of His grace.
We can simply show our gratitude to God for His gift of grace by enjoying that gift through our obedience to Him.
So go and enjoy!
Photo by Kira auf der Heide on Unsplash
A Thrill of Hope 