06.07. Brothers, Beware of the Debtor’s Ethic
Every good deed we do in dependence on God does just the opposite of paying Him back; it puts us ever deeper in debt to His grace. And that is exactly where God wants us to be through all eternity.
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Good deeds do not pay back grace; they borrow more grace.
7 Brothers, Beware of the Debtor’s Ethic
Why Christians do what they do is just as important as what they do. Bad motives ruin good acts. “If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing” (1 Corinthians 13:3). At the last judgment the Lord “will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness and will disclose the purposes of the heart” (1 Corinthians 4:5).
Therefore, we must not be content that our people are doing good things. We must labor to see that they do good things from God-exalting motives—lest they find in the end that their sacrifices were for nothing. The debtor’s ethic has a deadly appeal to immature Christians. It comes packaged as a gratitude ethic and says things like: “God has done so much for you; now what will you do for Him?” “He gave you His life; now how much will you give to Him?” The Christian life is pictured as an effort to pay back the debt we owe to God. The admission is made that we will never fully pay it off, but the debtor’s ethic demands that we work at it. Good deeds and religious acts are the installment payments we make on the unending debt we owe God. Have you ever tried to find a biblical text where gratitude or thankfulness is the explicit motive for obedience to God? Stories like the sinful woman (in Luke 7:36-50) and the unforgiving servant (in Matthew 18:23-35) come to mind,1 but neither speaks explicitly of grati-tude as a motive.
Why is this explicit motive for obedience—which in contem-porary Christianity is probably the most commonly used motive for obedience to God—(almost?) totally lacking in the Bible? Could it be that a gratitude ethic so easily slips over into a debtor’s ethic that God chose to protect His people from this deadly motivation by not including gratitude as an explicit motive for obedience?
Instead He lures us into obedience with irresistibly desirable promises of enablement (Jeremiah 31:33; Ezekiel 36:27; Matthew 19:26; Romans 6:14; 1 Corinthians 1:8-9; Galatians 5:22; Php 2:13; Php 4:13; 1 Thessalonians 3:12; Hebrews 13:21) and divine reward (Luke 9:24; Luke 10:28; Luke 12:33; Luke 16:9; Luke 16:25; Luke 10:35-36; Hebrews 11:24-26; Hebrews 12:2; Hebrews 13:5-6).2
God takes pains to motivate us by reminding us that He is now and always will be working for those who follow Him in the obedi-ence of faith. He never stops and waits for us to work for Him “out of gratitude.” He guards us from the mind-set of a debtor by remind-ing us that all our Christian labor for Him is a gift from Him (Romans 11:35-36; Romans 15:18) and therefore cannot be conceived as payment of a debt. In fact the astonishing thing is that every good deed we do in dependence on Him to “pay Him back” does just the opposite; it puts us ever deeper in debt to His grace. “I labored even more than all of them, yet not I, but the grace of God with me” (1 Corinthians 15:10 nasb). Let us teach people that is exactly where God wants us to be through all eternity, going ever deeper in debt to grace. Should we then stop preaching gratitude as a motivation? I leave that for you to answer. But if we go on urging people to obey “out of gratitude,” we should at least show them the lurking dangers and describe how gratitude can motivate obedience without succumbing to a debtor’s mentality.
Ponder with me the meaning of gratitude and how it might work to motivate in a good way, not like a debtor’s ethic.
First we need a definition. Suppose I wake up to the sound of a robber trying to break into my house. When I turn on the light, he flees. As I get dressed, I smell smoke. A fire had just started in the basement where my sons sleep. I quickly put it out. The thief had awakened me and, unbeknownst to him, saved my sons. But I do not feel grateful to him. I feel grateful to God. Why? Because the thief had no good intentions toward me, but God did. We do not respond with gratitude to a person who does us a favor unintentionally. Or suppose I am visiting some Christian friends in a remote jun-gle village and fall deathly sick. One of the villagers perceives a need for penicillin and sets out on foot to get it from a doctor ten miles away. On his way back he is bitten by a deadly snake but manages to make it to the village before he dies. In his pocket is found the bottle of penicillin—broken by his last fall. He gave his life for me, but I did not get the benefit he died to bring. Do I feel thankful? Yes! Because gratitude is not merely a response to a benefit received; it is a response to someone’s goodwill toward us. This is confirmed by another experience. Suppose you give some-one a gift at a party and he opens it and loves it. He fondles it and shows it off and speaks of it the whole evening but never once does he even look at you or speak to you, the giver. He is totally enthralled with the gift. What do we say of such a person? We say he is an ingrate. Why? Because his emotion of joy over the gift has no refer-ence to the goodwill of the giver. So I arrive at this definition of gratitude. Gratitude is a species of joy which arises in your heart in response to the goodwill of someone who does or tries to do you a favor. The reason this spontaneous response of a heart has a good potential to produce other acts of obedience is that it is a species of joy. Whenever we experience joy, it is because our hearts have esteemed something we regard as valuable. The cause of joy is always a perceived value. The greater the value to us, the greater our joy in receiving it. But not only that. All joy is gregarious. It has in it a demonstrative impulse. It likes to gather others around and savor the value together. Is it not a psychological impossibility to feel intense delight in some-thing good yet feel no impulse to demonstrate to others the value which caused that delight? In his Reflections on the Psalms, C. S. Lewis put it like this:
Just as men spontaneously praise whatever they value, so they spontaneously urge us to join them in praising it: “Isn’t she lovely? Wasn’t it glorious? Don’t you think that magnifi-cent?” It isn’t out of compliment that lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they are; the delight is incomplete until it is expressed.
It is frustrating to have discovered a new author and not be able to tell anyone how good he is; to come suddenly, at the turn of the road, upon some mountain valley of unex-pected grandeur and then to have to keep silent because the people you are with care for it no more than for a tin can in the ditch.3 So the secret of how gratitude motivates obedience is in the nature of joy. All joy has in it an impulse to demonstrate the beauty and value of its object. So the question becomes: How should (indeed, how must) our joy in the value of God’s gift of Jesus Christ demonstrate itself? Answer: In a way that honors the nature and aim of God’s goodwill and does not contradict it. (You should not try to show your gratitude to someone who just paid your way through an alcohol treatment center by throwing him a beer party. That would contradict the aim of his goodwill.) The nature of God’s goodwill in giving His Son was that it was unconditional and undeserved—a gift of free grace. The aim of that act was to unleash a power of forgiveness and renewal that would transform people into reflectors of God’s glory. So the way our gratitude to God for His goodwill must express itself is by saying and doing what honors its nature as free and its aim as God’s glory. This immediately excludes the debtor’s ethic. Any attempt to express a gratitude by paying God back would contradict the nature of His gift as free and gracious. Any attempt to turn from being a ben-eficiary of God in order to become God’s benefactors would remove the stumbling block of the cross where my debt was so fully paid that I am forever humbled to the status of a receiver, not a giver. “Whoever serves is to do so as one who is serving by the strength which God supplies” (1 Peter 4:11 nasb).
Instead, the way our joy expresses the value of free grace is by admitting we don’t deserve it, and by banking our hope on it and doing everything we do as a recipient of more and more grace. “God is able to make all grace abound to you, [so that] . . . you may have an abundance for every good deed” (2 Corinthians 9:8 nasb). Good deeds do not pay back grace; they borrow more grace.
Gratitude will always degenerate into the debtor’s ethic if it only looks back on past grace and not forward as well to future grace. We honor the nature and aim of God’s goodwill by trusting Him to work for us from now on, which means that gratitude functions well as a motive only as it gives rise to faith. Gratitude says to faith, “Keep trusting your Father for more grace; I know He will supply. I have experienced it, and it was sweet.” Gratitude does help motivate the radical obedience of love, but it does so indirectly through the service of faith in future grace.
Perhaps this is why the central ethical affirmation of the New Testament is that “faith works through love” (Galatians 5:6), not “gratitude works through love.” Not that this would be untrue, but that it is fraught with legalistic dangers. So Paul would have us beware of the debtor’s ethic and lead our people into the life-changing power of ever-dependent joy.4
Notes
1.Another possible exception is Hebrews 12:28-29, “Since we receive a kingdom which cannot be shaken, let us show gratitude, by which we may offer to God an acceptable service with reverence and awe; for our God is a consum-ing fire.” But the phrase “show gratitude” is a questionable translation. The KJV has, “Wherefore we receiving a kingdom which cannot be moved, let us have grace whereby we may serve God.” Even if the KJV is wrong, I take the func-tion of gratitude to be that it empowers service by feeding faith in future grace. I say this because Hebrews, more than any other book in the New Testament, is explicitly insistent that obedience comes “by faith” (Hebrews 11:1-40).
2.See chapter 7, “Brothers, Consider Christian Hedonism.”
3.C. S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1958), 93–95.
4.A full treatment of what I call “living by faith in future grace” and which is the opposite of the debtor’s ethic is found in John Piper, The Purifying Power of Living by Faith in Future Grace (Sisters, OR: Multnomah Publishers, 1995).