My mom always made me write thank you notes when I was a kid for special gifts people gave me. To be quite honest, I loved receiving gifts from people but hated writing thank you notes. I mean, I still wrote them—I didn’t really have a choice. But I would procrastinate. When I finally got around to doing them, I just wanted to get them done as quickly as possible.
Eventually, once I started giving gifts, I realized how important it is to express thanks to people who give me a gift. I can’t say I’ve entirely outgrown my ingratitude though. It’s still much more exciting to me to receive a gift than to write a thank you note. That’s actually pretty pathetic in light of how much I enjoy writing :/
I’ve been blessed with some lush gifts at different times in my life. When I graduated high school my grandparents gave me money to buy a car. I bought a 1966 light blue Corvair Convertible. Not the most practical or safe car, but lots of fun. When I finally graduated college, my parents bought me a Honda CR-V, which was very practical and very safe, but still fun. Now that I think of it, I’ve been given a lot of cars. My father-in-law—Papa Jack—gave us his Honda prelude and a friend from NYC gave us a Ford Escort. And a sweet older couple gave me a 1972 De Tomaso Pantera, to sell, to help fund my struggling church plant during the recession.
Indescribable Gift
These wonderful gifts, however, are as nothing compared to the supreme gift of salvation through Christ.
For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. — John 3:16-17
In our pursuit of God, it’s important to remind ourselves frequently of the gift we have been given and the great price Jesus paid to purchase the gift for us. These essential truths will do more to motivate us to seek and serve God than anything else. As someone once said, “Preach the Gospel to yourself daily.” Why? Because it deepens gratitude. It motivates us to love God.
This idea is so simple that we often overlook it. In our pursuit of God we come up against our laziness and apathy. We come to the limits of our discipline. We want to be more devoted but don’t know how to get more motivated. Listen to what I’m saying today. Spend your best energies remembering what Christ has done for you. Rehearse the Gospel over and over to yourself, and watch what it does. There is a profound motivating energy that takes hold of the heart.
The Gospel
Now, I don’t mean that we should just shoot up a prayer of thanks daily for the gift of salvation. I’m talking about meditating on the Gospel. In other words, thinking deeply on what Christ has done,
The Gospel means “good news.” The Gospel is the essential message of the Bible. That we have all sinned and are guilty before God. No one is exempt from this. In fact, we are all separated from God, and are so flawed by sin, that we have the sentence of death upon us. We are without God and without hope. We are dead in sin. We are at enmity with the Creator, not consciously, but by nature. We are lost. Part of the reason we don’t appreciate the Gift of God is that we don’t take time to consider what we would be apart from Christ.
We all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. — Ephesians 2:3
If we read the Bible, we frequently come across verses like this. But do we understand the implications of this? That apart from Christ coming into the world to die—we would be destined for eternal separation from God! We would be doomed for destruction.
The Lamb Slain
The Lord knew that Adam and Eve would sin, and He knew that all of humankind would inherit sin. None of this took God by surprise. Before He even created the earth, He knew that all humans would be tainted by sin and would need a Savior. God knew that the only sufficient Savior would be the Son of God. Revelation 8 tells us that Christ was the lamb slain before the foundation of the world. Think about that!
The cost to purchase our salvation would be the perfect life of Christ sacrificed on a cross. Christ stood in our place. He took the punishment we deserved. He took our sin and shame upon Himself and absorbed it so we could be free. It’s been called “The Great Exchange.” We give God our sin, our brokenness, our guilt, our shame and God gives us a new life. We hold up an empty cup and God pours upon us the abundance of joy. We give God our sinful record and He gives us a clean slate. It is the single most ridiculous scandalous thing in the universe. Though we are sinners deserving judgment, in Christ we are lavished with the riches of His loving kindness for eternity! Though we were rebels at enmity with the Lord—now we are the friends of God! We are children adopted into His family.
But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ-by grace you have been saved—and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, — Ephesians 2:4-8
Meditating deeply
There’s so much more I could say about this but what I want to press upon you today is the importance of meditating deeply on the gift of salvation we’ve been given in Christ. God did not just forgive us of our sins and invite us to heaven. That would be a violation of His justice. Justice needed to be satisfied. Our sins couldn’t be brushed under the rug. They needed to be paid for. We have peace with God because Jesus Christ, God the Son, gave Himself up for us by dying on a cross. He submitted Himself to the brutality of flogging and the shame of public crucifixion. And, in some mysterious way, the sins of the world were placed on Him.
But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned-every one-to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all. — Isaiah 53:5-6
Meditate on these things. Don’t ever get tired of the simple Gospel. We never graduate from the Gospel and move on to deeper things. The Gospel is the deepest thing. To know the Gospel is to know God’s heart. So preach the Gospel to yourselves daily.
Ruined
Something almost magical happens when we think daily about what Christ has done for us. It breaks us. It sinks in that we were headed toward hell but Christ gave His life to purchase our way to heaven. It knocks us on the head at times realizing just how selfish we were, and yet, we’ve been crowned with loving kindness. It floors us that we get to know and enjoy God forever. It has a way of increasing our appetite for God and our desire to please Him.
Ah! I’m struggling to say this in a stronger way. Meditating on the Gospel doesn’t just give you a little turbo boost in your walk with God. It does much more. It works into us gratitude that cannot be contained. It makes us despise the thought of mediocrity. Any thought of living a life of halfhearted devotion to Christ is obliterated. We look for new ways to honor Him. We aren’t content anymore with doing the minimum—we are consumed with doing the utmost we can do for the One who is worthy of it all. We are ruined for normal living.
I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. — Romans 12:1
Brothers and sisters, hear what I’m saying. If you want to have a heart filled with passion for Christ, then go to the “Gospel well” and drink deeply. You’ll never find the passion just by pushing yourself or being hard on yourself. You won’t find it by trying harder to be passionate. Passion is birthed out of a deep understanding of what God has done for us. So make that your daily food. You’ll find that you not only won’t dread writing a thank you note to God, but—you’ll want to fill the earth with thank you notes to Him! More than that, you’ll want your whole life to be a thank you note to this One who gave Himself for you.