Awakening Gratitude: Recognizing the Magnitude of Our Debt

Let me tell you about a problem I had with debt.

“A certain moneylender had two debtors. One owed five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. When they could not pay, he cancelled the debt of both. Now which of them will love him more?” Simon answered, “The one, I suppose, for whom he cancelled the larger debt.” And he said to him, “You have judged rightly” (Luke 7 V41-43).

Growing up in a Christian home, I attended church and believed what was taught in Sunday school—that I was a sinner, that Jesus came to save me, and that Jesus died on the cross in my place.

I remember one particular meeting where people who had been associated with the Yakuza (a Japanese organised crime syndicate) were sharing stories about how they met Jesus and came to faith. As a ten-year-old, I was scared of the way these people looked with tattoos all over their bodies. Yet, at the same time, as I listened to the cruel things they had done, I was in awe of how God saves cruel people.

This prompted me to reflect on what it meant for these individuals to be forgiven, and how their cancelled debt must have had a huge impact on them. By contrast, a young girl like me, born to ordinary law-abiding parents, was unlikely to do such cruel things. I naively concluded that because my crimes were not as huge, my debt was not so great.

My early years in a Christian home included various mistakes, and each mistake gradually confirmed my need for a Saviour. Eventually, I received Jesus as my Lord and Saviour and was baptised. The problem was, deep down I continued to minimize my sin by comparing my minor failures with the larger failures I saw in others.

It was never my intention to act like a Pharisee during those early years. I never set out to be someone who thanked God for not being like ‘those’ people over there. Yet looking back, I realise I rarely felt like the tax collector either—who beat his breast and asked God to be merciful towards a sinner like himself (Luke 18 V9-14)

During a recent small group meeting, we were asked, 'How does knowing Jesus went to the cross to prevent you from experiencing God’s wrath, encourage you in the present?’ Each of us, including myself, was temporarily silenced. We realised how easily we forget how deserving we are of God's wrath.

It is easy to bypass being heartbroken over the seriousness of our sinfulness.

It is easy to depersonalise the reason why Jesus bore God’s wrath on our behalf.

There are other truths which are more comfortable to contemplate—such as being loved and cherished, being fearfully and wonderfully made (Psalms 139 V14), and being image bearers and children of the Most High.

But these truths need to be held in tension with other truths. We are also debtors. Sinners who resort to minimising, excusing, and even forgetting our own sinfulness (Matthew 18 V25-27).

Maybe, like me, you try to cancel your own debt by working hard to achieve good deeds? Maybe, to avoid the tension, you blame your sinful behaviour on the actions of others. Or maybe you blame your stressful circumstances and insist you would behave better if life was better?

As long as we fail to grasp the scale of our debt, and the impossibility of ever paying it back, we will remain ungrateful towards Jesus’ accomplishments on the cross. We will occasionally be in awe of God’s ability to forgive others (who we perceive to be far worse than ourselves), whilst rarely tasting the true extent of God’s grace towards ourselves.

In his book, Deeper, Dane Ortlund offers a response which he refers to as ‘the great prerequisite’ (a pattern of healthy self-despair):

‘If you feel stuck, defeated by old sin patterns, leverage that despair into the healthy sense of self-futility that is the door through which you must pass if you are to get real spiritual traction. Let your emptiness humble you. Let it take you down. Not to stay there, wallowing, but to shed the facile optimism that we so naturally believe of ourselves... we cannot circumvent this stage. It is the great prerequisite to everything else.’

The more we realise how holy God is, the more we become aware of the seriousness of our own sins. This realisation awakens our gratitude for the mercy of God and empowers us to love Him more! This has nothing to do with dwelling in a ‘pit of despair’. Ortlund refers to it as somewhere we go to, but not somewhere we remain.

‘The Bible teaches, rather, that each experience of despair is to melt us afresh into deeper fellowship with Jesus. Like jumping on a trampoline, we are to go down into freshly felt emptiness but then let that spring us high into fresh heights with Jesus. The Bible calls this two-step movement repentance and faith.’

It is this two-step movement which helps awaken our gratitude for the mercy of God. It is this two-step movement which moves us forward and increases our delight in Him.

“Now which of them will love him more?” Simon answered, “The one, I suppose, for whom he cancelled the larger debt.” Jesus said to him, “You have judged rightly.” (Luke 7 V43)