“...All for which it is Our Duty to Thank and Praise, Serve and Obey Him”
Luke 17:11-19
11/27/08
In Luther’s Small Catechism, under his
discussion of the Apostles’ Creed, Luther lists a number of
gifts, benefits, and blessings that God daily and richly provides for
us all out of His fatherly divine goodness and mercy, apart from any
merit or worthiness in us. Among these gifts are our very lives,
our bodies and souls, our eyes, ears, and all our members, our reason
and all our senses, all of which He still preserves. He also
graciously provides us with things like clothing, shoes, food and
drink, house and home, spouse and children, land, animals, and all our
goods. Luther’s list of the blessings of God is by no means
exhaustive; we could add things to it like our jobs, our money, our
friends, our health, our cars, and our toys, all of which we have as
gifts from our merciful heavenly Father. Luther adds that not
only does God provide us with all that we need to support our bodies
and lives, but also that He defends us against all danger and guards
and protects us from all evil. And yes, this even when bad things
happen to us, since He works all things together for the good of those
who love Him and are called according to His purpose.
What’s more, through His crucifixion and resurrection from the
dead Jesus has delivered us from the greatest evil of all - the second
death, the lake of fire. Now the first death, the little death of
our bodies, can no longer harm us; the grave will not hold us.
Because Jesus was raised from the dead, we who have been baptized and
believe in Him will also participate in His resurrection, being raised
from the dead ourselves on the Last Day, when we will enter into glory
and live and reign with our Lord in the new heavens and the new earth
forever.
In the meantime we live under the mercy of our
heavenly Father as he daily and richly not only provides us with our
physical necessities in this life, but also our spiritual necessities
through His Word and His Sacraments. Through these means He
cleanses and heals us of the leprosy of sin. Just as Jesus spoke
His word and healed these 10 men of their physical leprosy, so with the
word about His suffering, death, and resurrection proclaimed to us He
forgives our sins, grants us eternal life, and promises us the perfect
healing of all bodily ailments at the resurrection of our bodies when
He returns for us. God’s greatest gift to us is His Son,
Jesus Christ, our Lord - true God, begotten of the Father from
eternity, and also true man, born of the Virgin Mary. With His
holy, precious blood and His innocent suffering and death He redeemed
us lost and condemned persons, purchased and won us from all sins, from
death, and from the power of the devil, that we might be His own, live
under Him in His kingdom, and serve Him in everlasting righteousness,
innocence, and blessedness. The delivery of our Savior to us
comes by way of the Holy Spirit, whose work it is not only to bring us
to faith in Jesus, but also to preserve us in that faith until the
end. Luther describes the Holy Spirit’s work by saying that
He calls us by the Gospel, enlightens us with His gifts, sanctifies and
keeps us in the true faith, just as He calls, gathers, enlightens and
sanctifies the whole Christian Church on earth, and keeps it with Jesus
Christ in the one true faith. To do this the Holy Spirit works in
and through the Christian Church where the Word, Baptism, and the
Lord’s Supper are going on. Through these means the Spirit
daily and richly forgives sins to us and all believers and will at the
Last Day raise up us and all the dead and give to us and all believers
in Christ eternal life.
Thus, in his discussion of the Apostles’ Creed
Luther summarizes for us all the gifts, blessings, and benefits which
God gives to us out of His fatherly divine goodness and mercy towards
us. Were we to try to list all the gifts that God gives us,
we’d be here way past dinner time (and our turkeys would be
burnt). But on this day of Thanksgiving we are given to pause for
an hour to consider once again the kindness and goodness of the triune
God and what it cost Him to grant us these gifts, so that we
don’t take them for granted and just go on our merry way,
forgetting to give Him thanks. For as Luther says, given all of
the gifts and blessings we have received from the hand of our Maker,
Redeemer, and Sanctifier, it is our DUTY to thank and praise, serve and
obey Him.
“Duty” is a law word. It’s a
“must do” word. It’s what you say to someone,
either when they refuse to do what they’re supposed to do or when
they don’t know what they’re supposed to do. If
you’ve had the privilege of raising children, you know that
it’s one of your duties to teach your children that they have the
duty of saying “thank you” to those who give them
gifts. This would not have to be done, were it not for sin.
Because of sin, we are thankless beings by nature, receiving gifts with
about as much thanks as a cow can give. And so we have to be
taught to give thanks.
But the ideal way is not to have to be told to give
thanks at all. God would rather not have to tell us that it is
our duty to give Him thanks and praise, or to serve and obey Him.
That command should be reserved for those who refuse to acknowledge and
confess that they are nothing but given to by God, nothing but on the
receiving end of His gifts. The thanks and praise, service and
obedience that God wants is that which flows from the shear joy of
being on the end of the Lord’s gracious giving, and not as a
result of being told what one ought to do. Instead of having to
command us what to do in order to try to extort the thanks and praise,
service and obedience that He wants from us, the Lord would rather we
be motivated by the gifts He’s given us. The more we
meditate on those gifts and consider who is giving them to us, the more
this will inspire us to give Him our thanks and praise, service and
obedience.
But that was the problem with nine out of the ten
lepers who were cured by Jesus in today’s Gospel account.
They didn’t take note of what the Lord had done for them.
They no doubt saw that their leprosy was suddenly gone, but they
didn’t come to the same conclusion as the Samaritan man did,
which was that it was Jesus who had healed them. Perhaps they saw
it as a coincidence. Perhaps they thought that they were entitled
to such a healing or that Jesus owed it to them. But the
Samaritan man, when he saw that he had been healed, turned back,
glorifying God with a loud voice, and he fell on his face at
Jesus’ feet, giving Him thanks. This one recognized that
his healing was a gift to him from Jesus. Even more than that, he
realized that in order for Jesus to have been able to do such a thing,
He must have been God, because only God could miraculously cure
leprosy. Out of his joy for the gift that Jesus had given him and
his recognition that Jesus was God in the flesh, he then returned to
give the Lord thanks and praise. In like manner, we too ought to
recognize that all our gifts, especially the gift of salvation, flow to
us from our merciful heavenly Father through His Son, Jesus Christ, as
He delivers them to us by way of the Holy Spirit. And even though
medications and doctors are used today, we still recognize that these,
too, are gifts from God and masks behind which He is at work treating
and healing our ailments.
So the Samaritan man here teaches us, who often take
our gifts for granted, to consider once again the great mercy that God
has had upon us for Christ’s sake, and to remember that for all
that God has done for us and all the blessings He’s given us it
is our duty to thank and praise, serve and obey Him. All four of
these verbs are ways in which we may express our thanks to God.
Thanking and praising is done with the lips. We all know what it
is to thank someone. It usually begins with words like
“Thank you!” Thanking someone for a gift is a way of
acknowledging that what you have you received freely. To thank
God for His gifts is to acknowledge that He is the giver of those
gifts, and that He gives them to you out of His love for you, not
because He owes them to you. To praise Him for His gifts is to
speak of those gifts. When a child goes out and tells all his
friends what nice parents he has to have given him such wonderful
presents for Christmas, he’s praising his parents. The
Psalms are full of expressions of praise as David and others recount
what the Lord has done for them. We praise God not only when we
tell others what He’s done for us, but also when we tell Him what
He’s done for us. This is what we do here in the divine
service. As we receive the gifts He gives us, we give Him thanks
for those gifts in our singing, confession, and prayer. Praise is
a means by which we make confession before God and the world that we
are nothing but given to by the Lord.
Then there’s service and obedience.
These, also, are ways in which we can express our thanks to God, but
instead of giving Him thanks with our lips, here we are giving Him
thanks with our lives. The Apostle Paul writes, “I urge you
therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a
living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable
service.” This reasonable service will be the service you
perform for your neighbor in your various vocations. God
doesn’t need your service; He doesn’t need you to provide
Him with anything. Instead, you serve God as you serve your
neighbor. Jesus even says that the good works that you do for His
brothers, that is, the members of His body, your fellow believers, you
do for Him. To live in service to others, loving and forgiving
them as God loves and forgives you in Christ, is a way in which you can
show your thanks to God for all that He’s done for you.
Finally, there’s obedience. One way in
which a child can show his or her parents how thankful he or she is
towards them is by doing what they say. If a mother tells her
daughter to do the dishes, she does them with a cheerful heart, without
complaining, and without having to be forced or told twice. This
obedience doesn’t make the daughter a child of her parents; in
other words, she’s not doing her work in order to be loved and
accepted into the family. She’s already one of the family
by her birth into it. She obeys her parents because she is their
child. Similarly with Christians, we aren’t trying to
become God’s children by our obedience to His ten
commandments. We’ve been born into His family by way of our
Baptism into Christ. It would actually be an insult to Christ, if
we tried to earn our way into heaven by our obedience rather than
through faith in Him alone. However, now that we who have been
born of water and the Spirit are God’s children, we show Him our
thanks by being obedient children, following His commandments with a
cheerful heart, not because we’re afraid of punishment or because
we hope to be rewarded, but because He is our loving heavenly Father,
who has delivered us from sin, death, and the devil, as well as the
wrath that He will pour out on the unbelieving, unthankful, and
disobedient in the end.
Given all the gifts that the Lord has poured out
upon us, every day should be a day of thanksgiving. God has not
only given us our lives, but sustains them daily. He has not only
created us, but redeemed us with the blood of His Son. And now by
way of the work of His Spirit through His Word and Sacraments He daily
delivers the forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation that Jesus won
for us through His life, death, and resurrection. For all this it
is our duty to thank and praise, serve and obey Him. Let us not
be obstinate children who have to be told to give thanks, but let us
again take into account all that God has done for us, meditating on all
His gifts which He has freely given us, and we will gladly glorify Him,
as the healed Samaritan did, fall on our faces at His feet and give Him
thanks. Amen.