One of the areas where a lack of understanding of our depravity, prior to regeneration, affects us is that we can have a lack of gratitude for the Gospel. The person who is forgiven the most is the person with the most gratitude.
Let’s suppose there is a beggar on the street, whose “turn of luck” has been primarily bad. He is reduced to groveling in the streets for bread. A wealthy millionaire comes upon him and decides to give him a new life. He takes him under his wing and radically alters his life in ways that he could have never imagined on the streets.
The change is authentic. The man has gone from worst to first. The gap between where he was and where he now finds himself is as far as the human mind can stretch in its thinking. This is an analogy of the functional reality of the Gospel for any person who has ever been regenerated.
However, the temptation for the 5-year old girl, who is now 35-years old, is that she cannot fully grasp who she really was before Christ regenerated her. (This is also part of the damaging teaching of legalism. Legalism compares people to people, where it ought not to, and doles out a grade based on the grader’s lists of righteousness or unrighteousness.) Prior to salvation this little girl was no different in her standing before God than Hitler or, in our analogy, the beggar in the street. Her sin list may not have been as long, but her condition was identical.
When she comes to terms with this truth in a functional way, she, like the “darker” sinners, will lift her hands in the air to express her thankfulness and her primary speech patterns will be that of gratitude. She, like Paul, will have juxtaposed the compatible truths: I was the worst sinner ever, but God showed mercy. (1 Tim. 1:15-16)
A practical manifestation of a person who understands this truth is a heart of gratitude. “Thank you” is a common response from someone who understands the Gospel because gratitude is what springs from their Gospel-centered heart.
It should be a normal response for anyone to be thankful when he thinks about where he was before Christ came to him, regardless of his age or the amount of sinning he had committed at that time.
Application Ideas:
- Ask a very good friend how they generally perceive you: joy-filled or lack of joy.
- Ask a very good friend how they generally perceive your primary expressions: gratitude or cynicism or something else.
Other Articles in This Series
- Problem: Big Sinners vs. Little Sinners – 1.0
- Churches with Big Sinners & Little Sinners – 2.0
- Adult Sinners with Big Problems – 3.0
- Acknowledged Sinners with Inexpressible Gratitude – 4.0
- Big Sinners, Little Sinners & the Worst Sinners – 5.0
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