Faith in Future Grace

I stumbled across this book, 'Future Grace' by John Piper when I had been doing a devotion series about the powerful promises of God; I found the content of the devotions to be very interesting and new to me, and realised that it was based on this book 'Future Grace'. And so the next time I went to Koorong, I decided to get my hands on a copy. Unlike a fair few of other Christian books that I have read, the first chapter was already rich with gems of very eye-opening knowledge from Piper and it definitely changed my thinking on several things.

I think we would all agree that Jesus coming down and dying for us (which he didn't have to but did because he loves us so much) is the greatest gift mankind has ever received in history. And like any gift we receive, we feel gratitude towards the person for giving us a gift and therefore feel like we are in debt and have the inclination to offer back something good to the person who gave us the gift. And so, as a Christian, my impression was that I needed to pay God back with my life out of gratitude for his gift of grace in dying for me. 

However, Piper disagrees with this thinking and he called it the 'debtor's ethic'. As Piper explains: "The debtor's ethic says, "because you have done something good for me, I feel indebted to do something good for you". This impulse is not what gratitude was designed to produce. God meant gratitude to be a spontaenous expression of pleasure in the gift and the good will of another. He did not mean it to be an impulse to return favours." Following this debtor's ethic totally depletes the purpose of the gift; the gift is no longer a gift but is a business transaction. 

However, this is not to say that gratitude is not good. We should definitely still be grateful for all the things that God has done for us. It just shouldn't be the driving force for good and moral behaviour and obedience to God as an effort to pay him back. The Bible never says that we should obey Christ out of gratitude (but out of faith). 

'So should you pay God back? And if so, how do you do it?' Piper conveniently answered these questions in the next sections of the chapter just as they were running through my head. The answer is: yes, we should "pay" back God, but definitely not as according to the debtor's ethic. Our "paying" back to God is another act of receiving. Piper explains through Psalm 116: 12-14 "How can I repay the Lord for all the good He has done for me? I will take the cup of salvation, and call on the name of Yahweh. I will fulfill my vows to the Lord." Taking the cup of salvation means to take his salvation, 'drink' it and expect more. This is what it meant when saying it is not ordinary payment; it is another act of receiving. And what else can we give back to God for graciously listening to and answering our calls? By calling again (which is what it means to call on the name of Yahweh). 

Basically in other words, we "pay" God back by continuing to receive his gifts so that his inexhaustible goodness will be magnified, and by having faith that he will continue to shower us with his grace in the future. Piper sums it up perfectly: "true gratitude does not give rise to the debtor's ethic because it gives rise to faith in future grace. With true gratitude there is such a delight in the God's past grace, that we are driven on to experience more and more of grace in the future. But this is not done by "payments" of a debt in an ordinary sense. Rather, it happens when gratitude for past grace quickens and energises faith in future grace." 

Having read all that quickly made realise that I had been living with the mindset of the debtor's ethic. I am guilty of asking "God has done so much for me, what can I do for him?" which leads me to follow him out of gratitude of all the thing he has done for me. And then there is this: God's grace is meant to be free so it shouldn't even be viewed as something to be repaid. Even if I had a gift to give to God, God wouldn't need it anyway. I need God, it doesn't work the other way round. God doesn't need me. What gifts I can offer him is fickle and weak, and cannot even equate to the things that he can give to me. What I can offer, however, is my continuing faith and trust in his future grace...and then receiving it all with open arms. 

And then doing it all over again knowing that his goodness is never-ending.