A Reason To Live Thankful
Picture this—you have just been summoned to greatest recognition and reward ceremony of your life to stand before Jesus Christ so as to be recognized and rewarded for all of your service and obedience to Him since the day you became a Christian. As you stand before Him and He reviews your life with you and your memory is refreshed so that you are able to recall with vivid clarity all the sacrifices you made for Him, all the money you gave for His cause, all the people you shared Christ with, all the hours you spent on church building projects, all the time invested in ministry to others, and all the battles you fought for Him………and as you are reliving all these moments…..and beginning to contemplate the rewards Christ will bestow upon you….and the crowns you will throw at His feet……you are brought back to the present by words you never in all your life expected to hear…….
“Oh my dear child--You wasted it all….oh you were so busy…..so very busy…..but you wasted it all…because in all that you did for me—you did not live as a thankful person and thus nothing that you did for me was done as an act of worship and thus you have wasted your life.”
Man-oh-man, can you imagine standing before Christ at the Bema Seat Judgment and having Him say to you—that you wasted your life as a Christian because you did not worship Him because you lived as an unthankful person?
I read a sentence the other day that really engaged and captivated my thoughts this week. I don’t know who said it or wrote it—all I know is that it greatly convicted me and I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if it may also have that same effect upon some of you as well.
“An ungrateful person will acknowledge God but won’t worship Him.”
Wow—that is a powerfully convicting and penetrating statement. And the problem with it is that it is true. You cannot worship God and be unthankful at the same time. Now—whereas, I think the sentence stands just fine without correction—I think you can fine tune it to say:
“An ungrateful person can acknowledge God but can’t worship Him.”
You see whereas, we can acknowledge God without being grateful thankful people—we cannot worship Him without being grateful and thankful.
If we are not thankful in any given situation, especially seemingly bad ones—it is because we are not recognizing God’s worth. We are either diminishing His sovereignty saying that He was not able to keep something bad from happening or we diminish His goodness by saying He had the power to prevent such and such but didn’t—thus He is not good. Either way, whenever a Christian is not thankful, he in effect is diminishing something about God’s character and thus is not recognizing God’s worth and worthiness and thus is not worshipping God.
Furthermore, since 1 Thessalonians 5:18 commands us to give thanks in everything because this is God’s will for us who are in Christ Jesus—to not give thanks in everything would be sin and you cannot sin and worship God at the same time.
And if we are not worshipping God—we are wasting our lives!
Now most of us as believers have fallen prey to what John Piper calls the “debtor’s ethic” in which we feel that all of our service to and for the Lord flows out of our gratitude to Him for saving us. In other words, our gratitude is our primary motivation for service and obedience. However, the Bible seems to indicate that our gratitude has much more to do with being a primary motivator for worship from which all our service and obedience should flow. So this whole issue of whether we are thankful people is a very important one as there can be no true worship without it and therefore, there can be no true Christianity without it.
I have found that Christians who are genuinely grateful to God for His wonderful gift of salvation are people who typically don’t waste their lives complaining about their troubles, grumbling about their circumstances, criticizing others, regretting what could have been, and generally bemoaning the sorry condition of life around them. Rather, I have observed that Christians who are genuinely undone by the fact that God has forgiven them, justified them, saved them and given them new life in Christ give themselves to worshipping Christ in every aspect of their lives by living thankfully. I think this is why we are commanded in Scripture to be thankful in all things—God doesn’t want us to waste our lives!
Now how does all this talk about being thankful have to do with Romans 3? We have been in Romans 3:9-18 for a few weeks now and I doubt any of us have any illusions about being good people who were worthy of God’s notice and mercy before He saved us. And right now, I want to apply these things we have learned about ourselves by focusing our attention on the appropriate response to seeing who we really were and what we were like in God’s eyes and the fact that He loved us and saved us anyway. I mean—God certainly had no illusions about the kind of people we were and may I say—are right now—and yet He Who knew us best loved us the most and sent His Son to die for us so as to redeem us from our sins. So—what kind of response does that invoke in us? I don’t know about you but it makes me very thankful and my guess is it does the same for you. And so one of the reasons we look back at who we were when God saved us is because it makes us thankful people.
What I want us all to see this morning as we work through this passage is that:
“In spite of the fact that none of us were righteous in our conduct, conversations, connections, conceit, and thus were all under the power of sin as well as the condemnation of the Law—God placed us under grace and declared us righteous so as to save us from the penalty our sins deserved—And for this we should be thankful—regardless of what else is going on or not going on in our lives.”
In other words—if you are struggling with being a grateful and thankful Christian perhaps it is because you have forgotten who you were and what you were before God so mercifully saved you. And to help us remember—let’s give our attention to what we were like before we were saved.
Now, we are not going to spend a great deal of time today in developing these points because my purpose today is to simply remind us of how God saw us before we were saved. And I think this will help us to see that we of all people should not only be thankful but live thankfully as thankful people all the time. We will come back later and develop these points further but for now let’s just survey them.
1. We were desperately wicked and reprehensible in our conduct. (12)
Because of our depravity inherited from Adam we too have turned away from God in sinful rebellion and have become “useless”. This word actually and probably best means “corrupt” as in spoiled, worthless, rotten, and without value. The word was often used of milk or food in a market that had spoiled and thus was no longer of any value or worth. And since this corruption occurred in our very heart of hearts—everything we did was corrupt and without value as far as God was concerned.
You see, a person’s actions as an unbeliever, everyone of them without exception, are polluted at their very source—because the heart of the unsaved man is totally and radically corrupt. Therefore, whereas the unbeliever can do things which are good things as far as we can see and experience—he cannot do them for the right reason or with the right motivation and thus, he really is not doing a good thing in God’s sight—Who sees beyond what we can ever possibly see.
Listen—if at the source of a spring there lies a dead rabbit in the water—then all the water flowing from that spring has been ruined regardless of how cold and refreshing it may appear and taste.
2. We were desperately wicked and reprehensible in our conversations. (13-14)
Note that Paul makes the point in verse 13 that the source of the sounds of our speech, the throat or the voice box, as unbelievers was like “an open grave”. Thus again, the idea that if the source of our speech is corrupt and foul and disgustingly dirty then so will be our actual words and conversations.
3. We were desperately wicked and reprehensible in connections with others. (15-17)
Then in verses 15-17, Paul raises the corruption experienced in our relationships which resulted as a natural by-product of our corrupt deeds and words, which naturally flowed from a corrupt and unbelieving godless heart.
4. We were desperately wicked and reprehensible in our conceitedness. (18)
Then in verse 18, Paul turns to our conceitedness and pride, which is always gauged best by whether or not we have a healthy respect for and fear of God. As unbelievers, we did not fear God. And because we had no fear for God—we paid no regard to God and lived our lives any way we saw fit—independent and apart from God.
5. We were desperately lost and without hope in our condemnation. (19-20)
And as a result of having a polluted heart that was not righteous—our conduct, our conversation, and our relationships with other people and with God Himself were corrupted so that essentially everything about us as human beings was desperately wicked, lost, worthless, and without hope in God’s eyes. As God saw us, not only were we under the power and corruption of sin—we were also under the condemnation of His own righteous Law. And to make matters worse, there was nothing we could do about it.
Our condition was hopeless as there was simply nothing we could do to make things right with God—no even keeping His Law—as if that were even a possibility. There was simply no hope for us unless God Himself would reach down to us who could not and would not reach up to Him and somehow do something that could and would reverse the corruption of our sinful hearts and pay for all the evil we had done and give us a new heart that instead of being polluted at its very source was as righteous as God’s Himself.
6. We who were desperately wicked, reprehensible, and condemned because of our unrighteousness were declared righteous through the redemptive sacrificial work of Christ on our behalf so as to be freely declared righteous as a gift of His grace. (21-24)
Apart from the Law—God revealed His righteousness, which according to verse 22 was for “all those who believe”. And so in spite of the fact as verse 23 puts it that all of us were utterly sinful, had, and continue (present tense) to fall short of the glory of God, which is like saying we all had fallen and continue to fall far short of God’s perfect standard of righteousness and all that is glorious—God still reached down and took care of our need and met us in our need and gave us the gift of His righteousness so as to declare us who were anything but righteous—the very righteousness of God Himself—so that He could save us and make us His own dear children.
That is what Paul means in verse 24. We who were deplorably and detestably unrighteous and without value to God were declared righteous by God on the basis of Christ’s sacrificial death on the cross in our place as our substitute when He redeemed us from the just penalty for our sins. And whereas, we will spend much more time on this later—let it suffice us to say that in using the phrase: the redemption that is in Christ Jesus”, Paul is making the point that in order for salvation to be free for us—God paid the price for it by crushing and killing His own Son as He hung on the cross in our place as our substitute bearing our sin and shame.
And to whom did God pay the price of His own Son’s death on the cross so as to save us—to none other than Himself and His own perfect holiness and righteousness that demanded our sin—every ugly and horrid bit of it be paid for if we were ever to be able to enjoy Him and His love and His smile for all of eternity.
Oh—how much we who know Christ have to be thankful for—especially when our salvation is seen in light of our sin and when who are now in Christ is seen in contrast to who we were and what we were like without Christ.
CONCLUSION
So—with all this in mind—what keeps any of us from living our lives thankfully and graciously?
You know, a great many of us waste precious moments of our life complaining, criticizing, grumbling, feeling sorry for ourselves, and just plain being negative and downright mean. And I have wondered in my own heart of hearts just how many of those wasted precious moments it takes before you’ve gone from wasting a moment to wasting a life.
The remedy for wasting our lives by being chronic complainers and critics of others is to take a good hard look at the cross and what it took for God to save us. When we do that and see all that He has done for us—is there really any reason for us not to live as thankful people—being a blessing rather than always asking for one.
When I say we have every reason to live thankful what I mean is that instead of demanding our rights—we can and should relinquish them. Instead of criticizing another—we compliment them. Instead of complaining when cut off in traffic, stuck in line, or taken advantage of—we pray for the one who has offended us. Instead of grumbling about how bad life is—we thank God for how good it is and how much we can still enjoy it being the wicked sinners we are. Instead of holding a grudge against someone—extend forgiveness. Instead of bemoaning the fact that we are in a church in the middle of a building program and our time, energy, resources, and efforts are necessary to its success—we thank God for the opportunity to be used by Him to build a church facility for His glory and our family’s benefit. And instead of worrying and stressing about all of our problems so as to give the impression that we do not have a Heavenly Father Who loves us and cares for our every need—we give thanks for even our problems knowing that the problem is the provision of God’s grace to you that moment.
Wow—what a challenge for all of us. And we must take up the challenge because the alternative is to live unthankfully and ungratefully and thus waste our lives as Christians who while acknowledging God cannot worship Him.
And that would be a wasted life indeed!
No comments:
Post a Comment