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Gratitude and Joy
The Twin Children of Grace
I heard about a small rural Baptist Church years ago where the members became overcome by excitement at a revival meeting. One man stood and declared, “I’ve been smoking three packages of cigarettes a day, and I’m going to quit.” Folks in the congregation said, “Amen.”
Then another stood up. “I’ve been drinking a six-pack of beer a day,” he said, “and I‘m going to quit!”
“Amen, amen!” the congregation replied.
I’ve been swearing and cursing an awful lot, and “I’m going to quit,” confessed another parishioner. The “amens” came from all over the room.
Caught up in the excitement of the moment, a matriarch of the congregation stood up and said, “I haven’t been doing anything. . . and I’m going to quit that, too.”
It’s nice to get excited in church from time to time. It doesn’t happen often enough in some traditions, like our own. One thing we should get excited about is the blessings we have received from God. “Do not be anxious about anything “wrote St. Paul, “but in every situation, by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be known to God.”
That says to me that gratitude ought to be the dominant theme of our lives. Not just in November as we prepare to celebrate Thanksgiving Day, but our whole year should be marked by an attitude of gratitude. That is the secret to living a grace-filled and joy-filled life.
For C. S. Lewis gratitude was the essential difference between heaven and hell. Lewis believed “that the doors of hell are locked on the inside.” In other words God isn’t the one trying to keep fallen people out of heaven, rather it is the other way around. Heaven is the house of gratitude where every repentant sinner is welcome, Lewis declared, but “we must picture hell as a state where everyone is perpetually concerned about his own dignity and advancement, where everyone has a grievance, and where everyone lives the deadly serious passions of envy, self-importance and resentment.”
Lewis dramatized this in his novel The Great Divorce. In this story a tour bus arrives in hell to take the poor creatures who live there for a day’s holiday in heaven. If they like, they may stay at the end of the day. As it turns out, few jump at the opportunity. One woman comes off the bus complaining about the rigors of the trip, complaining about her friend; she gets together with other visitors from hell and they have a complaining party and then later she complains about them; she complains about the doctor who cared for her in her final illness; she complains about the pastor of her church; she complains about the caregivers of her former nursing home; she complains and complains and complains some more!
The narrator turns to his heavenly tour guide and says: “I am troubled because the unhappy creature doesn’t seem to be the sort of soul that ought to be in danger of damnation. She isn’t wicked: she’s only a silly garrulous old woman who has got into a habit of grumbling.”
The problem is obvious. This woman enjoys complaining more than she is capable of enjoying the sheer joy of heaven. In heaven she would have nothing to complain about and thus be bereft of her central preoccupation in life. She defines herself by what she finds wrong in the world and complains about it. She deserves better, she’s quite sure of it.
All the souls of the damned feel they deserves better, as a matter of fact they feel entitled to something better. To put it bluntly—Hell is the Kingdom of Entitlement. “I only want my rights, “says one, of the visitors to heaven, “I’m not asking for anyone’s bleeding charity.”
“Then do, At once!” his guide says, “Ask for Bleeding Charity. Everything is here for the asking and nothing can be bought.”
In heaven no one gets what he or she deserves, no one gets what he/she is entitled to. What heaven has to give is Joy, God’s greatest gift. Joy comes as a gift of grace to those who can receive with hearts of gratitude.
In his book He Has Made Me Glad, Ben Patterson shares these wise words on the inter- relatedness of grace, joy, & gratitude: “Gratitude and joy are the twin children of grace, organically joined both theologically and spiritually. In Greek they are even related linguistically: the words for grace, gratitude and joy all have the same root, char, a noun that refers to health and well-being. ‘Grace’ is charis, ‘gratitude’ is eucharistia, and ‘joy’ is chara.”
“What is merely a linguistic relationship in Greek is a burning reality in the kingdom of God. Grace is God’s mercy, his unmerited favor. It is what Frederick Buechner calls the ‘crucial eccentricity’ of the Christian faith, the unique and wonderfully odd thing God does to forgive sinners: he doesn’t give them the bad things they deserve but the incredibly good things they don’t deserve. The great gospel mystery is not that bad things sometimes happen to good people, but that such a good thing has happened to bad people. The guilty and broken have discovered that ‘while we were still sinners, Christ died for us’ (Romans 5:8). What else can we be but grateful?” The only proper response to the grace that God has shown as Christ Jesus is unending gratitude and eternal joy.
A man who didn’t particularly like grocery shopping drew the short straw one evening and headed to the local supermarket with the weeks grocery list. Shoving his cart down the grocery aisle he was astonished as he ran into a couple of people who were enjoying grocery shopping. It was a mother and her young son, and they had learned how to make a game out of grocery shopping. She would read him the first item on her list—paper towels, aluminum foil, whatever—he would hear what she said, and race around the store until he found what he needed, and then he would bring the trophy back to her shopping cart, place it in the cart, she would applaud him for what he had done, give him another item, and off he would go. They were laughing and having a great time acting out this ritual and it caught the man’s attention.
You know how it is when you meet somebody going down a grocery store aisle—you’re going to meet them several times before you finish your shopping. It was about the third aisle over when it dawned on the man that the little boy was a child with a mental disability. It was just at that moment that the mother caught the man staring at the two of them.
“I was just admiring your relationship with your son,” he said.
“Yes”, she responded, “he is a gift from God.”
As Ben Patterson concludes in the quote I shared earlier: “Grace and gratitude belong together like heaven and earth. Grace evokes gratitude like the voice of an echo. Gratitude follows grace like thunder follows lightening. And as gratitude follows grace, so joy follows gratitude, for joy is what we feel when we’re hugely grateful. The pattern runs throughout scripture: God does something wonderful and the people praise him joyfully. What else could they do - praise him somberly? Genuine gratitude must necessarily be joyful. The greater the grace, the greater the gratitude; the greater the gratitude, the greater the joy.”
May you know God’s grace & gratitude and joy each and every day of your life as you seek to serve God in all that you do.
Greatful and Joyful for all that God has done,
Pastor Greg Kintzi
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