I would like to share with you a submission to the Dear Amy advice column which was printed in the Detroit Free Press on July 24, 2023.
Dear Amy: I have three children, ages 38, 41, and 52.
The two youngest have children under the age of 10.
Every year I give the children thousands of dollars. I give my oldest three times as much because she has been ill for several years, even though she refuses to see a traditional doctor.
None of my children acknowledge my gifts. The middle child will thank me if I ask if the money has shown up in the children’s accounts.
This is complicated by a car accident when my eldest, while she was high on drugs, killed a woman and her baby.
She went to jail for four years. I visited her on weekends, taking away time from the other two. We had to move to another city to avoid death threats to our family, mostly to the children.
The youngest two still don’t speak to her.
Now my oldest isn’t speaking to me because I “favor her siblings.”
I don’t expect gratitude, but an acknowledgment would be nice.
I have had years of therapy, but my children refuse to get any.
Do I have any options, aside from stopping all my giving?
Worn Out Mother[i]
Gratitude is Necessary for Happiness
It is easy for us to recognize ingratitude and be offended by it in others. It is much harder for us to see it in ourselves and recognize the impact our thanklessness has on others. But it is imperative that we do the hard work of rooting out thanklessness from our hearts for two reasons: First, a thankless heart harms those around them because they take and rarely give. Second, a thankless heart can never be happy because gratitude is necessary for happiness. How do we grow in having a grateful heart? That’s what we are thinking about in this post, and to help us as we do that we are going to be looking at Psalm 103. If you have a Bible or a Bible app, I invite you to turn there now. And what we will find as we turn there is that cultivating a generous heart requires us to recognize the greatness of the gift, the generosity of the giver, and the depth of our need.
The Greatness of the Gift
First, the greatness of the gift. Notice that the writer of this Psalm, who, as was the case last week when we looked at Psalm 23, is David, starts off by speaking to his innermost being:
Praise the Lord, my soul;
all my inmost being, praise his holy name.
Praise the Lord, my soul,
and forget not all his benefits—(Psalm 103:1-2)
The words that we say to ourselves shape who we are and what we do in life. David is telling us that the first steps toward having a grateful heart involve making praise toward God part of our ongoing inner conversation. This isn’t something that we do to impress others. No one knows what thoughts run through our mind but us and God. So filling our inner discourse with praise for God means that a profound shift has happened. Someone has replaced our original self-centered soundtrack with a God-centered hallelujah of thankfulness. How does that happen? By focusing on the greatness of God’s gifts.
The praise from David’s soul is rooted in remembering that it was the Lord who:
who forgives all your sins
and heals all your diseases,
who redeems your life from the pit
and crowns you with love and compassion,
who satisfies your desires with good things
so that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s. (Psalm 103:3-5)
Please notice a couple of things about what David is saying here. First, he is using the continuous present tense. He doesn’t say to his soul, the Lord has forgiven, or the Lord will forgive you. He says, “The Lord forgives you.” It has this sense that the Lord forgives you now and he is always forgiving you.
Second, David uses the continuous present tense for things haven’t completely happened yet. We don’t know when David wrote this Psalm. Some commentators suggest that David wrote this Psalm near the end of his life when David had a greater appreciation for God’s graciousness and a greater awareness of his own sin. If that is the case, then David is writing when all his disease are not yet healed and his youth is not yet renewed. Why is he writing as if the forgiving, healing, redeeming, crowning, satisfying and renewing gifts of God are already happening? Because they are.
As someone saved by grace through faith in the God who saves, David is living in two realms at the same time. His outer being is alive before the world, and has been ever since his birth. And the Holy Spirit has brought his inner being to life before God. David’s inner being lives in the realm of God, and it is his inner being that is continuously being forgiven, healed, redeemed, crowned, satisfied and renewed by the Lord. And because we live life from the inside out, that means that all of David is continuously being forgiven, healed, redeemed, crowned, satisfied and renewed by the Lord. That does not change when circumstances go awry or when disease or death tries to steal our life away. That cannot happen because our life is based on the Lord.
The Generosity of the Giver
David’s attention then turns from the greatness of the gifts to the generosity of the Giver. In some of the most beautiful words in the Bible, David shows us how God’s generosity is rooted in his character. Let’s read these words together.
The Lord is compassionate and gracious,
slow to anger, abounding in love.
He will not always accuse,
nor will he harbor his anger forever;
he does not treat us as our sins deserve
or repay us according to our iniquities.
For as high as the heavens are above the earth,
so great is his love for those who fear him;
as far as the east is from the west,
so far has he removed our transgressions from us.
As a father has compassion on his children,
so the Lord has compassion on those who fear him;
for he knows how we are formed,
he remembers that we are dust. (Psalm 103:8-14)
Notice that David describes the Lord in relational terms: He is compassionate and gracious toward us, he is abounding in love toward us, he does not treat us as our sins deserve, he does not repay us according to our iniquities, he removes our transgressions from us, and he knows how we are formed, and he remembers that we are dust. Our God is a relational God. He was the One who formed the first human from the dust of the ground and breathed life into his soul, not because he needed someone to love him but because he wanted to love others. He knew when the first humans he created chose to go their own way and all of creation fell into corruption as a result. But his love for them did not diminish in any way. Now there were more ways for God to love humanity, and love them he did. He promised a Messiah who would come and undo all the damage that sin had done. He chose for himself one people to be his representatives in the world, not because they were the best, or the biggest, or the most powerful. Quite the opposite. They were often the underdogs in any battle they faced, but this only showed that the power that was protecting, preserving, and providing for them was not human, but divine. God’s people were at their best when admitted their weakness and fully relied on God. And they were at their worst when they turned away from God and did whatever they thought was right in their own eyes. But their unfaithfulness did not diminish God’s faithfulness.
God kept his promise and God the Son became fully human to be the Messiah that would save God’s people from their sins. This God-human Jesus stood in our place and lived a perfect human life that counts as righteousness for all us broken sinners. Then he took our place on a cross and suffered the punishment that we deserve for all our sins. And when the full cost of our forgiveness was more than paid for in full, Jesus gave up his life and died. But on the third day that followed, Jesus rose from the dead, proving that his victory for us over death was complete.
Notice that Jesus didn’t say, “My goodness is yours if you complete these three steps.” Or “My forgiveness is yours when you do A, B and C.” Jesus didn’t say, “You will live with me in heaven when you finally become a good person.” No, Jesus did not say any of those things. That might be something we hear humans say, but that is not what Jesus says to us. Jesus knows exactly who we are, he knows how deeply sin has affected our inner being, he knows how we keep trying as hard as we can at certain things, but again and again we fail. He knows the dark thoughts we know we shouldn’t think, the harsh things we know we shouldn’t say, and the awful things we do and later regret. Jesus knows all these things, and he still loves us infinitely and accepts us unconditionally anyway.
The Depth of Our Need
It is because of the strength of Jesus’ love that we free to go to that place where we would otherwise never go and freely admit the depth of our need, a depth of which David was very aware. Let’s read together verses 15 to 17:
The life of mortals is like grass,
they flourish like a flower of the field;
the wind blows over it and it is gone,
and its place remembers it no more.
But from everlasting to everlasting
the Lord’s love is with those who fear him,
and his righteousness with their children’s children— (Psalm 103:15-17)
Confronting your own mortality can be harsh if this life is all that you have to cling to. But it can be freeing to give up on our life in this world, a life that we cannot keep, and turn our heart and affections toward receiving the gift of a new life from God that we cannot lose. This is what Jesus meant when he said, “For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it.” (Matthew 16:25) Only by admitting our great need for salvation will we see the greatness of the gift of salvation and the generosity of the Giver who offers it to us for free.
Underestimating the Love of the Father
In Jesus’ story of the Two Lost Sons, the younger son took his share of his father’s estate and left for a far-off land where he spent all he had on wild living. Eventually, he was destitute and had to work as a hired hand taking care of pigs. He was so hungry that he wanted to eat the pig’s food, but no one would give him anything. It was then that he came to his senses and realized that life as a hired hand with his father was better than life on his own without his father.
The younger son headed back home, practicing his apology along the way. When he got within sight of his home, there was his father running to meet him. The younger son started his confession, but before he could even finish, the father welcomed back, not as a hired hand, but as a son. What better picture could there be of God’s graciousness than the one that Jesus has painted for us. The younger son underestimated the greatness of his father’s love. I think that we underestimate the greatness of our heavenly Father’s love too, at least I know that I do. Through this story, Jesus is encouraging us not to do that.
So the challenge I wish to leave with you today is this: Freely admit that you are a deeply broken sinner, and live your life based on the grace and love of Jesus. And you will find that thankfulness and praise for God will be the natural result. Amen.
[i] Amy Dickinson, “This lack of gratitude has a disturbing past,” Detroit Free Press (Internet; available at: https://www.freep.com/story/life/advice/2023/07/24/this-lack-of-gratitude-has-a-disturbing-past/70434071007/; accessed May 31, 2024).
(This message was shared at Walnut Grove Lutheran Church in Langley BC on June 2, 2024. For more info about WGLC, please go to wglc.org.)
Farewell to Shadowlands 