Please take your Bible this morning and join me in Luke chapter 17. Luke chapter 17 is where our text will be this morning. A few weeks ago, we began a short series on gratitude, thankfulness in the Christian life. And the reason why we are giving special attention to this is several fold. One is that the Bible talks a lot about gratitude. The Bible speaks a lot about thanksgiving, that the life of the Christian is to be marked by gratitude. And if that is to be the way the Christian life ought to be, we ought to know more about the passages that talk about it. We're obviously not exhausting them, but we are talking about several of them. And to remember where we have been and kind of follow the sequence here. And to be honest with you, perfectly honest with you, There's part of me that's been making it up every week, knowing where we're going. Trying not to make this series too long, because I could spend a long time in it. And yet, trying to hit on a couple of key things. And we began our series by talking about, from 1 Thessalonians chapter 5, that gratitude is God's will for believers. Paul says there, to rejoice always, pray without ceasing, and give thanks in all circumstances, for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. That because we are in Christ Jesus, God's will for His people is that they be thankful people. And then last week we moved on and we talked about the direction of our gratitude. Whom are we to be thankful to? And it is obvious, it is the Lord. And we spent time in Psalm 103 where David rehearses and calls his own soul into action to bless the Lord. Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless His holy name. Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all His benefits. heals your diseases, who redeems your life from iniquity, who forgives all your trespasses, your sins. He does all those things, and then David rehearses those benefits by giving a specific example, and he uses Moses in the Old Testament, and he talks about the fact that God revealed Himself to Moses, and we considered Exodus 33 and 34, where Moses asked the Lord to see His glory, And the Lord passed before him and he declared those attributes to him. And part of those attributes include what David includes in Psalm 103, verse 11, that as far as the east is from the west, so far as he removed our transgressions from us. And toward the end of that sermon, in order not to make it too long, we were kind of rushing along and I didn't get to hit on that. So here I am doing it now. that God has removed our sins from us. Because of Christ's finished work on the cross, God sent His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shouldn't perish but have eternal life. This is a wonderful benefit. But it's more than just eternal life. But it's actually that He removes our sin debt. For the wages of sin is death, That's what we deserve for our sin, right? But the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. The wage that we deserve is death, but God reversed that. He took on our sin, and we took on His righteousness. The great reversal, the great exchange that took place at Calvary. And this gives us every reason to praise God. Our gratitude is to be focused on the Lord. But where, from where does gratitude come from? How do we become thankful people? Like, how does that happen for us? Okay, it's God's will. Yes, it's to be focused on the Lord, but from where does it come? This morning, we're here in the Gospel of Luke, chapter 17, and we want to consider the source of our gratitude. And so with that in mind, let's, before we dive in the text, let's ask the Lord for his help one more time. and we'll come to the text together. Father in heaven, thank you for your word. Thank you for the truth that we see here, and we ask that you would teach us more of yourself, more of what you have done to make us not merely thankful people, but to make us redeemed, forgiven people. And in turn, that we might be thankful. We ask for your help now as we look at your word. In Jesus' name, amen. As we look at the text together, the reason we did not read the text at the beginning is that I want to read through it and let the tension of the text build. There's a lot of tension in the text, and we're going to stop a lot as we read through the text, okay? We're going to stop a lot. And we're going to look at the geographical and physical markers that help emphasize and highlight Luke's point. So you're going to need your Bible open. I hope you have it. Have your Bible open, looking at the words on the page, and if you miss the markers that Luke includes, you're not going to feel the tension, and you're probably going to miss the point. So Luke 17, pay close attention as we work through the text. Look at verse 11 with me now. It says there, Luke writes, on the way to Jerusalem, stop. Why is that a significant marker in Luke's Gospel? What does that tell us about the story that's going on? Why is Jesus going to Jerusalem? Well, He's going to die. He is going to Jerusalem to die, and Luke refers to that point several times in his Gospel. And Luke is not giving us this marker as if it's ticks on a map as we're looking at Google Maps and where we're going that will just satisfy our geographical curiosity. How many of you like maps, by the way? Anybody like that? I love maps. I love road trips in part because I just like looking at the maps and how the roads all go together and all that. And some of you, a map wouldn't help you to save your life. Some of you really hate that. And so if you're a landmark person instead of a direction person or a street name person, when they close that gas station and they bring it to the ground, you have no idea where to turn. So, learn the math, it's really important. Anyway, that's not helpful to you, I guess. Gospel of Luke. Luke is helping us to understand what Jesus is doing. Essentially, in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus is traveling in circles. He's not going directly to Jerusalem. His point is not geographic then. But here, he's communicating something about what Jesus is coming to do. I'd write down these references for your consideration. Luke chapter 9, verse 51. It begins the section, if we're looking at the context, and context is King. Luke 9 51 begins the section of Luke's gospel that we're in, and in that section we read in that verse that Jesus did what? He set his face toward Jerusalem. It's not that he just like looked in the direction, but he set his purpose, his mission has now become to go to Jerusalem. Here's another one. Luke 13 verse 22 says that Jesus was moving toward Jerusalem. Luke chapter 17, verse 11, our text, he's on his way to Jerusalem, and there's a lot more in the Gospel of Luke as well. The point seems to be that if you're going to read the Gospel of Luke correctly, you in essence need to read it backwards. You need to start with the conclusion that he's going to Jerusalem, and everything else in the Gospel of Luke works its way up to that point. So when you're reading the Gospel of Luke, it is flavored by this need, by this purpose that Jesus has to go to Jerusalem to die. So verse 1, verse 11, on the way to Jerusalem, he was passing along through or between Samaria and Galilee. Why is that significant? Well, it's significant because when we consider the kind of relationship that Jews had with Samaritans, what kind of relationship was that? It's one of conflict and tension, wasn't it? They don't get along. If you back up 800 years to 722 BC, we talked about this in John chapter 4, so I'm just calling your mind to that. That when that happened, the Assyrians carried away the people of the Northern Kingdom. carried them away, and they brought back in a whole bunch of other kinds of peoples. And so what happened is then you have this weird mixing of all kinds of people, not weird in a bad way, but it's not just one ethnic group anymore, it's a mixture of them. And so Jews obviously are not looking favorably at Gentiles, they looked at them as half-breeds. Not very nice, but it's how they viewed them. And not just mixed physically, but they're mixed spiritually. There is this syncretistic religion that's going on where the Samaritans, the people that live there, don't just embrace some of what the Jews do. They only actually believe the Torah, the first five books. They only embrace parts of them. And there are many other differences they don't agree with the Jews about, even where to worship. Remember, where do the Jews worship in the Old Testament? Where do the Jews worship? Jerusalem, right? That's their primary place of worship, according to John 4. According to John 4, where do the Samaritans worship? Anybody remember? Mount Gerizim, right? And so they have a different place of worship, they have a different understanding of the law, many different other characteristics. So because of that, there's this huge animosity between the two groups of people. So Jesus is coming down between these regions of Galilee and Samaria, passing along between. Verse 12, and has he entered a village? Pause. And has he entered a village? When you read your Bible, you need to ask important questions of the text. What might the question be here? Which village? Where was this village located? Was this a typical Jewish village? Was this a Samaritan village? It doesn't say. Tension's building. Keep reading. It says that he was met by ten lepers who stood at a distance. Why would lepers stand at a distance? Well, because they're considered unclean. They're not part of the group. And so even if you're traveling down the road and you're a leper, you have to announce to everybody your physical condition. So you're walking down the road, and in case there happens to be somebody who's not unclean, you have to shout out, unclean, unclean. You have to announce to everyone your physical condition and you have to stay at a distance. In fact, there were all kinds of little leper colonies that would have been outside cities for these people to go to. They'd be isolated away from the rest of the society around them. They live in isolation and they live together with their infection. What is leprosy? Well, consider that it's a horrific condition. Without the neural sensation of pain, your body begins to suffer the ravages of cuts and burns, infections. And in Jesus' day, people who were leprous were considered dead people, the walking dead, the original walking dead. You were dead to society. And because of its ability to infect others, you could no longer be with your family or anyone else you knew beforehand. But in that day, there's now a cure for leprosy, but in that day, leprosy was not only viewed as a physical disease, but it was viewed as a spiritual defilement. So the shame, think about that, it's not just that I have this skin condition that's really, really bad and hurts a lot, but it's actually that I'm considered as some kind of spiritual outcast. So the guilt that they are living under as they live away from everyone they've known and loved or who loved them. And so they're cut off, they're hopeless. Keep all of that in mind as you read the rest of the text. Verse 13, these 10 lepers going at a distance, verse 13, and lifted up their voices saying, Jesus, Master, have mercy on us. So they must have known something about Jesus for them to call out and declare him as master, as someone who could have mercy on them in some kind of physical and tangible way. Perhaps some of them had seen them before, and maybe they're telling the others, hey, do you see that guy? I think that's Jesus. Jesus. Oh, the guy who can heal. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that guy. The guy who can heal people. So you can hear the conversations that are going on, perhaps, and so they cry out, they lift up their voice, Jesus, Master, have mercy on us. This is a cry of desperation. You know the expression, desperate times call for desperate measures. And you know you're desperate when you're raiding your kid's Halloween candy because you're out of chocolate. You know you're desperate when you get to the second page of a Google search because you can't find what you're looking for. You know you're desperate when you've searched all the YouTube videos you can find to fix something on your car and there's nothing that's helpful at all. You're just desperate. This is a different kind of desperate. This is a desperation for the for Jesus to be kind to express mercy So what does Jesus do verse 14? When he saw them stop again When he saw them So they're crying out. They're calling Jesus is seeing He's seeing that's not insignificant But we ought to remember that Jesus sees us. That He knows us. And so when you cry out to Jesus with a desperate cry, Jesus sees. Jesus knows. He knows us deeper than we know ourselves. He sees what you're going through. He sees the trial you're enduring. He sees the difficulty that's making you anxious. And so when Paul says in Philippians 4, do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God, he's not saying that just flippantly. But there's no need to be anxious because if you remember what Jesus says, you know, if He will take care of the birds, if He will take care of nature in that way, how much more will your Heavenly Father take care of you? Jesus sees them. He knows what's going on. And the text says in verse 14 that when he saw them, he said to them, go and show yourselves to the priests. Why would Jesus say that? Well, what was he wanting to give to them? When he says, show yourself to the priests, he's not saying, go show yourself to the priests, you nasty people. Why would you go show yourself to the priests? Because you weren't even allowed inside the city, not to mention the religious quarters. Well, the priests, in essence, were the health inspectors. They were the ones who would declare someone as clean. Ceremonially, physically clean. And Jesus is effectively saying, I've shown mercy on you. You said, Jesus, Master, have mercy on me. Here's me having mercy on you. Go show yourself to the priests. I love the expression at the end of verse 14. And as they went, they were cleansed. You ever been at a place where you're reading something in the scripture, and it doesn't seem to be happening? The promise that God has made doesn't seem to actually be working out for you, and so you kind of fold your arms and you say, God, where are you? I thought you promised this. What's happening? Maybe you feel that. Maybe you woke up this morning, and the first thing you said to yourself is, I don't want to go to church this morning. And it's not because I'm tired. Maybe that's part of it. I just feel so spiritually dry, spiritually empty. I feel discouraged. What does the Holy Spirit say to someone like that? Well, through the Word, we know that the Holy Spirit says, you need to be around God's people. You need to soak in my Word, because your feelings change rapidly. But my Word stays the same. Right? Isaiah 40 verse 8. The grass withers, the flower falls, but the word of our God stands forever. Just the same as Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever. He is the same. He changes not. Are you struggling to forgive someone and you're feeling so much anger? And the Lord says you must forgive him. You say, I can't forgive him. But God says, trust me, come to me, and he makes you free. You see, God is doing this amazing work in the life of these ten lepers. Because God does miracles like that. He does wonderful miracles, the greatest of which is saving your hellbound, deathbound soul. Verses 15 and 16. Then one of them, that's striking, then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, remember, as they went on their way, they were cleansed, they were healed, then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice. And he fell on his face at Jesus' feet, giving him thanks. Now he was a Samaritan. Whoa! There it is! This is no monotone reading of the story. This is a Samaritan who has turned back. If you don't underline anything else in this passage, this would be the thing to underline. He was a Samaritan. That's the punchline for this whole thing. Who's Luke primarily writing to? Jews. If you're a Jew who's reading what Luke has written, you're not expecting the Samaritan to be the one to turn back. You're expecting some religious, well-known Jew to turn back, to be the hero of the story. That's not the case here. The Samaritan seems to be, at least from the human, flawed perspective, the hero. So a Jew who's reading this would be crossing their arms saying, what a dumb story this is. They haven't gotten the point. Verses 17 and 18. We'll come back more to that in a moment. Verses 17 and 18. Then Jesus answered, were not ten cleansed? Where are the nine? Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner? There's three questions here. They're all rhetorical. Were not ten cleansed? Did Jesus forget how many were there? Certainly not. Where are the nine? Once come back, where are the nine? It's obvious. They're gone. They've gone to go show themselves to the priest. But here is this one who's now here returning. Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner? A foreigner is important here. Again, I draw a little arrow to the Samaritan in the previous verse. The foreigner, the Samaritan, the one who was the outcast of the outcasts. He's the one who's returned to give praise to God. So three rhetorical questions, verse 19. And he said to him, rise and go your way, your faith has made you well. Your faith. has made you well. Well, that's the story. So what can we learn from this account? And this is where we'll spend the bulk of our time. What can we learn from this text? First thing we'll learn from the text. One is that gratitude is rare. Gratitude is rare. Look again at verse 15. than one of them. One of the ten. There's your statistics. Ten percent. I don't think the statistics in our day have changed that much about who's thankful and who's not. I think in our culture it's still uncool to be someone full of thankfulness. Someone who has gratitude. I read a story this week about a girl who was moving to Seattle as a teenager, 15, 16 years old. And she was looking to make friends, and so she's moving to a new school and having a difficult time finding friends. And eventually she found that there was a lot of disgruntled and unhappy people who complained about everything with the school, the teachers, the subjects, the lunch, everything. And she found that she actually found friends when she started to complain along with the bulk of the people there. that she actually found girls who were willing to be her friend because she was willing to complain and find all kinds of things wrong with everything. If you're thankful in our culture, in a sense, it's still that you're kind of weird. You're certainly not a cool one. The sad part is that gratitude is rare. True, heartfelt, deep gratitude is rare. Ingratitude is quite common. And it's not just true of teenagers, that's true of congregants, you, that's true of pastors. I can be an extremely ungrateful person. I can complain quite a lot. It doesn't take much. Why? Well, because my flesh is sinful. Because my flesh is contrary to what I know God wants for me. God wants me to be a thankful person. Someone who, 1 Thessalonians 5, 18, gives thanks to God in all circumstances. But often I shun God's will. I throw it to the side because I'd rather complain about the situation. You ever met a person who just loves to complain about a problem, but when a solution is offered, they don't like it because they would rather complain than find the solution? You've never met anybody like that. I haven't either, so. Of course we have. Because complaining is the way of the world. And I've shared this many times, I think a couple of times at least with you, in other contexts too, is that when I was working at McDonald's after I graduated from college, Everybody was like this grumbling complaining hard to deal with and if you weren't like that you just you kind of almost had a hard time fitting in with the group and it was just so common for the complaints about everything no matter what it was to complain and there was one worker there who claimed to be a Christian and They were a bit different. They weren't saying. Thank you all the time or something, but there was just something different about them They just didn't complain And it was such an encouragement to me while I was there that they were not like that. They were different. They were in this other category. Gratitude is quite rare. Second takeaway from the text is that gratefulness becomes obvious. Gratitude becomes obvious. Look at what he does, the man who'd been healed. Not only does one of them, when healed, turn back, verse 15, but look at it. He says in verse 15, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice. and he fell on his face at Jesus' feet, giving him thanks. He prays God with a loud voice. He has no concern for what others may think of him. The phrase loud voice is where eventually we get our word megaphone. It's obvious that this guy is excited about what God has done in his life so that he screams out, praise the Lord. Here's the thing. Even non-Christians understand that when you are really grateful, you've just got to get it out. If you're actually so thankful for something, you can't help but talk about it. You just feel like you're going to burst unless you get it out. And so you express your gratitude to other people, to God, for whatever it is. You express your gratitude no matter the circumstance. You have to get it out. There's an article that was written by... I don't have it on the screen, so you have to listen, and I'll do my best to read slowly. An article written by a secular psychologist called, The Narcissistic Pathology of Everyday Life in Secular Psychoanalysis. Long titles. These are non-Christians who are saying this about gratitude. Listen. Gratitude seems to us to be an integral expression of our dependency on one another. So they're not Christians, they're not going to acknowledge our dependency upon God as Christians, but they say that gratitude seems to us to be an integral expression of our dependency on one another. So on our dependency on one another. To thank someone acknowledges our need to have been helped. or enriched in the first place. Although those of us with predominantly narcissistic, my parentheses, or you could say selfish, close parentheses, concerns may go through the motions of thinking, we frequently resist expressing wholehearted appreciation because that would acknowledge a previous insufficiency of some sort, an insult to the grandiose self." End quote. You see what they're saying there? Even as an unbeliever, they are saying that gratitude acknowledges that we're dependent on one another. We don't have everything in ourselves, and we as believers are saying, absolutely! We are acknowledging that even if we pull all of our resources together as human beings, we're still insufficient. And that is what is so hopeless about atheism or any other kind of relationship without God, because essentially you have no one to thank. And this man in our text knew that when you experience a sufficiency that is not of yourself, you can't help but express gratitude. We don't mind saying thank you under our breath, don't we? Or appreciate you, appreciate it. But true gratefulness is something very different. And that's why if you're unfamiliar with the church or you're unfamiliar with Christianity and you hear people singing praise to God with such exuberance, why is this? What are they doing? It is because we're acknowledging our utter dependency upon God for what He has done. This brings us to number three. Gratitude reveals our worship. This is probably the main point, if you will. Gratitude reveals our worship. So, we're getting to the real heart of the passage. In verse 16, he fell on his face at Jesus' feet. He fell on his face at Jesus' feet. You can follow someone's gratitude to the object of their worship. There's three observations, three sub-points about gratitude revealing our worship that I want you to see about this man's worship that are just so genuine. First of all, letter A, real worship is through Jesus. True, real worship is through Jesus alone. Here's the question for you. Where was this ex-leper who came back to Jesus, where was that leper supposed to go? Talk to me. To the priests. So, to the priests. That's where the other ones went. But they were cleansed on their way. So it wasn't like they had to go to the priests to get cleansed. They were cleansed and they went to the priests to declare them clean. But where's this guy? He's at Jesus' feet. And Jesus doesn't rebuke him for it. And remember the fact that if Jesus says, go to the priest, where would the priest be? Well, the priest would be at the temple. Well, for the Samaritan, where's he supposed to go? Is he supposed to go to Jerusalem with the other guys? Does he head all the way back down to Gerizim? Or maybe he's closer because we don't know where this village is? We cannot be sure of that. But here he is at Jesus' feet. And that's the point. Because Jesus is the focal point of any true worship. Remember John chapter 4 with the Samaritan woman. Chapter 4 verse 21. Jesus said to the woman who was at the well. The Samaritan woman at the well. Woman, believe me. The hour is coming and is now here when true worshipers will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. They'll worship the Father in spirit and in truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship Him. Jesus is saying that the focal point of all worship is here, with me. And you, foreigner, you've got that. This is a beautiful picture of the gospel. We'll see more of that in time. Letter B, true worship does not depend on status. True worship does not depend on status. Jesus receives worship, again, from a quote-unquote filthy foreigner. And I say that because that's exactly how the Jews then, the lepers even, and how any Jewish reader reading Luke's Gospel would have viewed him. Filthy foreigner. You see once again that Jesus is highlighting this great exchange in the gospel. This grand reversal that if you exalt yourself, you will be humbled, and if you humble yourself, you will be what? Exalted. You just picture the religious elite standing there, cross arms or with a board in their hands, taking notes saying, oh, violation. Oh, violation. looking down in their pride at this one. The fact is that the cross wipes out all status. The unlikely ones end up at the feet of Jesus. Do you see a connection to the entitlement mentality that is so commonplace in our culture? If you feel entitled and Jesus does something for you, you're gonna go, well, duh! Clearly he's gonna do something for me. That's just what God does. But if you're not entitled, but rather shocked at God's grace and you realize that you do not deserve any of his grace and every expression of his mercy and kindness invokes a wholehearted worship and expression of praise and gratitude. If you're someone who is truly born again, this is your heart. The truth is that we are all unlikely ones. Whether or not we want to admit it, we all are filthy foreigners who are not only estranged from God physically, but are enemies of God spiritually. And he has made enemies his friend by dying in their place. And this ought to lead to gratitude for all of us, in every situation of our lives, in every day of our lives. Because we are undeserving people of a good, good God. Letter C, I want you to see that true worship is God-centered, not gift-centered. True worship is God-centered, not gift-centered. Look at the difference between the gift-centered gratitude of the nine lepers and the God-centered gratitude of the one leper. The gift-centered gratitude of the nine. They received the benefit. And as they went on their way, they were cleansed. They received the benefit. They were healed. But when the one returns, Jesus says, rhetorically, we're not ten cleansed. So they did the ritual, we can assume they went to the temple, to the priest, and were declared cleansed, physically cleaned, because Jesus used his word to cleanse them. That's a big difference with the God-centered gratitude of the one. He received the benefit as well, but when he was cleansed, he turns back to the one who's the true fulfillment of the ritual. Don't be satisfied with the ritual alone. He turns back because Jesus is the fulfillment of the cleansing. And in doing that, Jesus has declared this one not only physically clean, but spiritually clean. Look at verse 19 again. And he said to him, rise and go your way. Your faith has made you well. whole. Any of you with a translation that says saved? That's the Greek word. Saved, there. And translating it as well or whole is fine, there's nothing wrong with that. But saved, the reason I like saved here, I think it's just a better translation because it differentiates between the earlier cleansing and this one. In other words, Jesus is saying something more than just they've been cleansed. So they were cleansed previously, getting clean skin, but what is Jesus saying to this man? Not only do you have clean skin, but now you have a clean heart. This man received more than just the initial benefit. Rather than just pursuing the gratitude of that benefit, he had his heart now turned to Christ. This is a Christ-centered gratitude. He apparently saw what the other nine did not see. This is huge. The fact is that we can daily experience all kinds of blessings for God. He daily loads us with benefits. David says, forget not all his benefits. What are the benefits that you and I receive from God? If we were to list them, what he provides for us, He cares for us. He takes care of our needs. He helps us in difficulty. He gives us food to eat, house to live in. We say at the end of that, I mean, hasn't God been good to us? Right? At Thanksgiving, when we go around the table, and I've made light of it before, but if you start thinking about all the blessings God has given you in the year, If we make it smaller, in the last week, in the last 24, 48 hours, think about the blessings that God has given to you. We could spend so much time counting them. But yet we can be so caught up with all of the blessings that God gives that we never see through the blessings to the blesser. Ephesians 1 verse 3, bless, he says, bless the Lord who has blessed us with all spiritual blessings in the heavenly places in Christ. God is a good blesser. The nine lepers that go to the priest, they're going to get sick again. Maybe not with leprosy, but they're going to get sick again and they're going to die. And here they're dead. They're going to die. This one Samaritan is going to die. So the cleansing that this one receives that the other nine apparently do not is much deeper and much richer. We need to see it from that perspective this morning. If you're just looking for some immediate blessing from God, financial, physical, experiential, emotional, whatever. We might experience some degree of gratitude, but if we never see through that to the ultimate healing and salvation and transformation of Jesus, then we've missed it entirely. So here's the question. Hope you wrestle with this. How do you know if you're a gift-centered, if your gratitude is gift-centered or God-centered? How do you know if your gratitude is gift-centered or God-centered? How would you know? Let me give you a couple questions to ask yourself. One, do you thank God for difficulty? Do you thank God for difficulty? Because if I can't thank God when times are hard, then how do I know that my gratitude is legitimate? If I'm only thankful to God when things are going great, how do I know it's legitimate? How do I know that I'm actually thankful to God? It's conditional then. But true, wholehearted gratitude is irrespective of circumstance. It is not dependent upon feeling. It is not dependent upon situation. It is all the time. Because God's will for His people is that they be thankful all the time. That's God's will for you in Christ Jesus. A second question to ask yourself then, is, do I see evidences of God's grace in the people around me? Do I see evidences of God's grace in the people around me, and do I give thanks to God for them? Do I see evidences of God's grace in the people around me, and do I thank God for them? How often in our prayers are we thanking God for other people? We pray for them, we pray for what they need and all of that, but how often are we actually praying for individuals and people? Situations. Thanking God for them. Let me give you an example of that. We could show a lot of examples, and Paul especially, who uses the word thank more than anybody else in the New Testament. I want you to go to Philippians chapter 1. This is by far my favorite Pauline epistle, maybe it's yours too. The Philippians chapter 1, I want you to see this example, just a lone example here, this one, of Paul's gratitude that he expressed for other people. Philippians chapter 1, Paul and Timothy, servants of Christ Jesus to all the saints in Christ Jesus who are in Philippi with the overseers and deacons. Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ." This is opening greeting, but then he gets right to the business. And these are normal parts of Paul's letters, but they're not just the normal pattern as if that's all that they are, but he is thankful to God for these believers. Paul says, I thank my God in all my remembrance of you. Always in every prayer of mine for you all, making my prayer with joy because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now. And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ. It is right for me to feel this way about you all because I hold you in my heart, for you are all partakers with me of grace, both in my imprisonment and in the defense and confirmation of the gospel. For God is my witness, how I yearn, how I yearn for you with all the affection of Christ Jesus. And it is my prayer that your love may abound yet more and more with all knowledge and discernment so that you may approve excellent things and so be pure and blameless to the day of Christ being filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes by Jesus Christ to the glory and praise of God. Stop there. This prayer begins with Paul's overflowing thankfulness for these believers. Well, they were on the whole a pretty good church. Paul probably had an easy time thanking God for them. He loved them. He had this confident assurance of God's work in them. What about some more difficult people? Well, let's go to 1 Corinthians chapter 1. 1 Corinthians chapter 1. Let's go to verse 4. He opens the letter by saying who he is and all of that. Actually, verse 3, Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Verse 4, I give thanks to my God always for you because of the grace of God that was given you in Christ Jesus, that in every way you were enriched in Him, and all speech and all knowledge, even as the testimony about Christ was confirmed among you. so that you are not lacking in any gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ who will sustain you to the end. Guiltless in the day of the Lord Jesus Christ, God is faithful by whom you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord." He is so thankful to God for these believers. Why is that significant? Well, because in verse 10 he gets right to the problems that are happening in the church. But he doesn't stop He does stop, rather, to give thanks to God. He says in verse 10, I appeal to you, brothers, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree that there be no divisions among you and that you be united in the same mind and the same judgment. Corinth had so many issues. Issues of division and sexual immorality and selfishness, division, all of this. And yet, for difficult people, Paul was still thankful to God for them. What about you with the difficult people in your life? Are you thankful to God for them? That's really hard to do. I'm preaching to myself here. Because I'm not naturally thankful for people who drive me nuts. And that is why the Holy Spirit must do work in my own heart, and He must do work in your heart to make us the kind of thankful people we ought to be. May God do that work in our hearts. God wants to root our gratitude in the gospel, even as Paul is praying and thanking God for these different believers. I mean, you can't get around that. He is rooting his gratitude for them in who Jesus is. Not in the circumstances, not in the situation, but in the gospel. If I might reference Philippians chapter 4 again, he says, I entreat, chapter 4 verse 2, I entreat Diodia and I entreat Syntyche to agree in the Lord. The conflict that those two women were having in Philippi was great. It was causing all kinds of issues in Philippi. And yet Paul doesn't say that you might agree about whatever it was that they were disagreeing about, so much as that they would agree in the Lord, that their unity in the Lord would be the thing that anchors them. So our gratitude must be rooted deeply in the gospel, because it's God's will for us. And it brings us to the fourth and final point this morning, and that is that gratitude is the result of God's gracious salvation. Why is it that that one leper turns back? Is it because he thought he was better than the other nine? I don't think so. Is it because he received a greater benefit initially than the others? No. He turns back. And he turns back because the Lord has changed his heart. Verse 19, Go, your faith has made you saved. It's made you well, it's made you whole. Born again people are thankful people because God has transformed their heart and God is transforming their hearts. We are sanctified positionally. And we are being sanctified, made like Christ, progressively, in time. And so our gratitude continues to grow as we grow in the Lord. You want to test your spiritual maturity? One of those tests would be considering your heart and how grateful or ungrateful you tend to be. And how, by the Spirit's help, you're seeking to walk closer with Him to make you a more grateful person. A person who explodes with praise even as this man who could not hold back his cry. So the question is, have you repented and believed the gospel this morning? Have you repented of your sins and put your faith and trust in Jesus Christ alone? Not merely to make you a thankful person and do good on the outside. to actually change your heart so that it's your heart that has been made new and your heart explodes with praise to God. May God help us to be thankful people because of the Gospel. What is the Gospel? The Gospel is the good news that Jesus came, that He lived a perfect life, that He died on the cross as our substitute and a sacrifice for sin, and that three days later He rose again from the dead. By me calling you to believe the Gospel and calling you to believe that truth and that Christ's work is sufficient to save your soul and make you new. Let's pray. Our gracious God in heaven, we thank you for your mercy to sinners just like us. We thank you that though we are undeserving, broken, wicked, sinful people, you have redeemed a people for your own possession. You have made sinners Your own by taking their place. In our place, condemned, You stood so that we would not face the wrath of God that is rightly deserved. Lord, we ask that You would help us to turn around and give praise to You. Help our hearts to be overflowing with thankfulness to You. Because not only is it your will, but you've actually done all the work to make it possible for us to be made new and to be thankful. Thank you for your word and we ask that you would plant it deep within our hearts and shape us and fashion us in your likeness. For your own glory and own namesake and also for our joy. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.