Thursday, November 27, 2014

Grace and Gratitude

Ann Voskamp writes:
This world doesn’t have anything that can burn down the faith of a heart on fire for God.

What if we celebrated Thanksgiving the most because it’s the least commercialized?

What if the grace of God was only rightly answered by the gratitude of men?

Ann quotes these words from Karl Barth:
“Grace and gratitude belong together like heaven and earth.

Grace evokes gratitude like the voice an echo.

Gratitude follows grace as thunder follows lightning.”

Ann and her husband the Farmer, lived through a drought on their farm in Canada this summer. They worried that they might lose the entire corn harvest. The Farmer said to Ann when she asked about that possibility:
“When you know your Father’s loving — what can you fear losing?”

As they harvested the corn this fall, Ann remembered that summer night when they prayed for rain and later that evening the sky darkened and the family danced for joy as the hoped-for rain stormed away. Ann said to the Farmer:
“The storm gave us this yield. The storm was grace.” There’s no harvest without a storm.

Gratitude follows grace — as thunder follows lightening. And the storm is grace because whatever drives us into God, is a grace from God.
More from Barth:
[O]nly gratitude can correspond to grace, and this correspondence cannot fail.

Its failure, ingratitude, is sin, transgression.

Radically and basically all sin is simply ingratitude–man’s refusal of the one but necessary thing which is proper to and is required of him… And there’s sky and food and family and this country and a God in heaven and a love we don’t deserve and there’s grace that comes as storms and the only answer to God’s unending grace — is man’s unending gratitude. When you live in a covenant of grace, you can’t help but live out a covenant of gratitude.

And the Farmer leans into me and whispers it Thank you, Lord —

and I murmur it too.

The way Grace and Gratitude echo to each other through everything….
Read more here.=

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