Future Grace

I was struck by a passage Pastor Huffman read today at church from a book by John Piper called Future Grace. I think I might pick up the book and read it...John Piper's website gives the first 3 chapters. What I am posting are just excerpts that particularly struck me. Pastor Huffman used the book to talk about behaviors in giving (especially monetarily) but this concept, I think, touches on all our behaviors as a Christian because it addresses the foundation of our actions. While our motivations will never be 100% pure, we should never have the wrong concepts in our mind. Anything that helps me to broaden my understanding of how this salvation thing works and how to respond to it, I gladly welcome. There are so many subtle things that the world has distorted in my mind that I have yet to discover all of them...and I don't know if I ever will but when one of them is exposed, it is only because His light has so graciously revealed it to me. I think, from what little I've heard and read, what Piper mentions in this book falls into that category. Plus, because of my Chinese culture, gratitude and indebtedness are closely intertwined. So this is a concept that could be helpful for Asians in general to ponder...

WHAT IS GRATITUDE?

Like most precious things, gratitude is vulnerable. We easily forget that gratitude exists because sometimes things come to us “gratis”—without price or payment. When that happens, we should feel a pleasant sense of the worth of what we’ve received and the goodwill behind it. This pleasant sense is what we call gratitude. Then, spontaneously rising from this pleasant sense, come expressions of delight. We feel constrained with joy to acknowledge the gift and the goodwill behind it, and to express how good we feel about the gift and the heart of the giver. Gratitude corresponds to grace (“gratis”)...

THE BIRTHPLACE OF THE DEBTOR’S ETHIC

But right at this point there lurks a danger. There is an impulse in the fallen human heart—all our hearts—to forget that gratitude is a spontaneous response of joy to receiving something over and above what we paid for. When we forget this, what happens is that gratitude starts to be misused and distorted as an impulse to pay for the very thing that came to us “gratis.” This terrible moment is the birthplace of the “debtor’s ethic.” 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 spontaneous expression of pleasure in the gift and the good will of another. He did not mean it to be an impulse to return favors. If gratitude is twisted into a sense of debt, it gives birth to the debtor’s ethic—and the effect is to nullify grace...

Today, “What is the biblical motive for Christian obedience?” great numbers would say, “Gratitude to God.” And yet this way of thinking seems almost totally lacking in the Bible. The Bible rarely, if ever, explicitly makes gratitude the impulse of moral behavior, or ingratitude the explanation of immorality...

...What is future grace? It is all that God promises to be for us from this second on. Saving faith means being confident and satisfied in this ever-arriving future grace. This is why saving faith is also sanctifying faith. The power of sin's promise is broken by the power of a superior satisfaction; namely, faith in future grace. Gratitude for past grace was never meant to empower future obedience. Tomorrow's crisis demands tomorrow's grace. And faith that future grace will be there is the victory that overcomes the world.