Gisle on Thankfulness

“The Believer’s Childlike Obedience to God,” Lectures on Christian Ethics

As gratitude to the God of grace, this love is also necessarily a heartfelt desire to please Him in everything. This speaks, of course, about someone's desire to attain to God's good pleasure. Precisely, it is the essential presupposition of the believer’s love for God. It solely concerns the grateful heart's desire to thank Him, He to whom one thus has to thank for everything one is and everything one has. This desire to thank God thus becomes in reality the willingness of the grateful heart to thank God for His grace in deed, to respond, to reciprocate the love with which He first loved the sinner, and to return to Him who repays everything that one whom His grace has adopted.

The act of sacrifice is the only form in which the one Sacrifice can even find any place within the believer's relationship to his God. After the Sacrifice, which was necessary for the reconciliation of the fallen race with the holy God, has been brought once and for all with eternal validity by Christ, the one Mediator between God and men, from the side of humanity thus reconciled to God alone there can be talk of a thanksgiving, in which the grateful recognition of the accepted grace finds its expression. According to the Holy Scriptures, the believer, as a child of God, is also a priest, a member of a holy priesthood, whose work it is to “offer spiritual sacrifices” (1 Pt. 2:5). The believer's current life of the will thus takes on the character of a priestly act of sacrifice. What he now has to produce for God as a thank-offering for His grace, then cannot be anything other than what he has accepted from God, i.e. his own existence in its full extent, himself with all that he is and has by nature as well as spiritual gifts from God. When Scripture mentions the believer's "body" as a sacrifice pleasing to God (Rom. 12:1-2), the meaning is by no means confined to the inner, spiritual side of the believer's existence. The outward, visible sacrificial life is required precisely as a testimony that the heart already stands in such a priestly, self-sacrificing relationship with God. The external sacrifice is in and of itself meaningless, without any value in God's eyes; what makes it a real, God-pleasing sacrifice can only be that the sacrifice in the bottom of his heart stands in the normal relationship with God, that the true, normal, original relationship between God's will and man's will is restored in him.

Therefore, the believer's gratitude to God is also in reality his heartfelt desire and heartfelt willingness to do His will, to keep His commandments, to serve Him in childlike obedience. This is precisely why, according to the testimony of Scripture, "Obedience is better than sacrifice” (1 Sam. 15:22), because obedience itself is the right sacrifice.