The Attitude of Gratitude

Introduction

Well, good morning, everyone. Open your Bible to Luke 17. And let’s see if we can find the text of Scripture this morning in Luke 17. I’m going to begin reading in verse 11 in just a moment, please. As you’re turning to Luke 17, I might say a word or two of introduction. I am Mark Roberts, and I preach for the West Side Church of Christ in Irving. And if you’ve not heard of Irving, you should know that Dallas is a suburb of Irving. And there’s a wonderful church there. And we, Dean and I and our family, we’ve been there 15 years now. It’s a great church. Just love being there. If you’re ever in the Dallas Fort Worth area, please come and worship with us. It’s a wonderful family of Christians.

And I’m just really pleased to have a little bit of my family here. Normally when I’m in meetings like this, it’s just me, but my wife Dina is here with me today, and I appreciate that very much. We did leave at home our two daughters. I have two teenage daughters, it’s Rebecca and Sarah. Rebecca is on the right, she’s 18. And in kind of an unusual thing, Rebecca’s actually been here. It’s very unusual for my kids to have been someplace that I have not. But the band came to see the mouse, to the house of the mouse. And uh kind sister here came and picked her up from the hotel and brought her to services. So Becca knew where I was going. And she’s 18. She’ll be in uh Tampa, Florida College in the fall.

She’s a senior this year. And then that’s Sarah on the left-hand side. Sarah’s 16. She’s just turned old enough to drive. And I have found that uh that is an occasion to really help your prayer life. It’s a wonderful thing, isn’t it? So I wish that they could be here as well, but uh maybe in a daring kind of thing. We left them at home with my mother. My mother, the woman who could not say yes when I was a child, can now not say no to my children. It’s a remarkable sort of thing. Let’s be in the text this morning. Let’s read in Luke 17, please. I’m gonna begin reading, as I said, in verse number 11. On the way to Jerusalem, Luke 17 and 11, on the way to Jerusalem, he was passing along between Samaria and Galilee, and as he entered a village, he was met by ten lepers who stood at a distance and lifted up their voices, saying, Jesus, Master, have mercy on us.

And when he saw them, he said to them, Go and show yourselves to the priests. And as they went, they were cleansed. 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. 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? And he said to him, Rise and go your way. Your faith has made you well. I’m fairly confident this morning that if I went back to one of these classes and got little first graders out of their class, and I marched them down here and I set them on the front row, and then I reached in my pocket and I started giving them.

I said, Hold out your hand, and I started giving them pieces of gravel that I had picked up out of the parking lot. The kids would be looking at it in their hand with a puzzled expression, and a mom in the back would yell, What do you say, Johnny? And then Johnny would say in appropriately robotic, automatic voice, thank you very much. And that’s how we do with kids. We try to encourage our kids to be grateful. We try to encourage them to have thanksgiving and to say, we hope someday, without us having to prompt them, that gratitude kind of thing. And that’s certainly important. We want to teach kids the attitude of gratitude. And of course, in that regard, this story plays directly into that sort of thing.

We don’t want our kids to be like the nine who were ungrateful. We want them to be like the one who returned to say thanks. We want them to show gratitude. And all that’s fine and good. I’m not saying anything against that. I want parents to teach that sort of attitude. But I want you to look carefully in your Bible at Luke 17. Was there anything there that said, this is a children’s story? Did Jesus stop and say, I’m going to say something that’s just going to be for kids? This will be parents and grandparents. You’ll use this for your children. This has no application or relevance to adults. Jesus didn’t say that at all. What happens here in Luke 17 is not a children’s story.

1. Am I Part of the Nine?

What you and I need to be asking ourselves this morning is, is it possible that I in fact am part of the nine? Am I part of those that are not grateful? And as I’m talking about that this morning, I want to hone the application of this very, very sharp. I don’t want this morning to encourage you to be more grateful for your job, or more grateful for the material blessings you have in your life, or more grateful for your health, although all of those things are very, very important. I want to talk about being grateful for the blessing of salvation, being grateful for redemption in Jesus Christ. That’s exactly what I’m looking for this morning and entirely what I’m going to focus on. Because whatever you want to say about leprosy, whatever horrors there are that are associated with being a leper, the deprivations of that kind of living and the horror of dying in that kind of way.

Let’s be candid. You and I have been healed of something far, far worse. We were sinners. We were lost. We were destined to spend eternity without God in eternal torment. You and I have been to the great physician, and our souls have been healed of something far more serious than any earthly disease, any leprosy or AIDS or cancer, anything like that, we have been healed of sin. We have been forgiven. And we sing about that. I was lost, and Jesus found me. Or we sing about redeemed, how I love to proclaim it. And we do offer prayer about that. Lord, we thank thee for thy son, through whom we might have a hope of eternal life in the hereafter. But what I’m looking for this morning, and what I would have pressed you very hard about this morning is how often are we consciously aware of the wonderful blessing of God’s mercy, God’s grace expressed to us in redemption, expressed to us in forgiveness.

How often does that thought flood our soul and cause us to sing out to God with thanksgiving in our heart? Lord, I am redeemed. I’m so thankful for that. When is the last time? Outside of an assembly, when you were thankful to God, not for material blessings, but for every spiritual blessing found in Christ Jesus. So I’m asking you, if we’re going to condemn the nine who were slow to show gratitude for physical healing, how much more you and I would stand condemned if we have failed to be grateful for an eternal healing, the work of Jesus Christ forgiving our sins. And as I look at this story in Luke 17, it seems to me that it’s very easy to see about three things there that reveal what gets in the way of gratitude, what causes us to miss out as you look and watch what happened here.

2. Doing What Everybody Else Is Doing

You can just see the very things that cause you and I sometimes to fail. To be what we ought to be in regard to thanking the Lord for saving our souls. The more I contemplate that, the more I confess that too much of the time I am standing with the nine. I’m not showing the attitude of gratitude for being forgiven of sin. I want to show you three reasons why that happens in our lives. It seems to me the first thing that you have to notice as you’re looking at the text here is that lots of times we’re just doing exactly what everybody else is doing. Isn’t that about how things work? In fact, in this particular text, I think the reason why most of those men didn’t turn back is because most of the men didn’t turn back.

We are social creatures. We are highly social creatures, and what that means is we conform to other people’s expectations of us. We do what everybody else is doing all around us. Used to coach little kids soccer when I had little kids. I’m not sure exactly where those two big girls came from. Remember when Sarah was in the third grade and she was playing soccer and we had our first practice, and of course, we needed to do the very most important thing that you have to do when you have a new soccer team. The kids were just sure that what we need to do first was get a name for the team. And so we spent a considerable amount of time discussing that. And there was a little boy who was sure that the team needed to be named the Wolverines.

And I mean, he couldn’t hold still about a half a second before you’d say, Wolverines, we ought to be the Wolverines. Since I’m an Ohio State Buckeye fan, I thought that was the worst name possible. I would rather we had been the Satan worshipers, but he kept pushing Wolverines, Wolverines. Well, we finally got it settled down to three choices, and we’re gonna vote. So the first choice was the Twisters. Who’s for the Twisters? And all the kids. They looked around. Nobody raised their hand, and nobody voted for the Twisters. So then we’re going to vote for the Wolverines. And here’s a little Wolverine bouncing up and down. Who wants us to be the Wolverines? And he looked around. He didn’t vote for the Wolverines. Then he nominated that.

Then I said, How about the Cougars? And everybody, yeah, we all voted for the Cougars. We’re the Cougars. Okay. Well, that’s not just third graders, is it? That works in the lives of adults as well. We conform to what people around us are doing. We are affected by what happens to others because we all know their safety in numbers as long as we don’t break ranks. We do what everybody else is doing. And in our world today, our society just is not very thankful. That is remarkable to me. There’s no society on this earth that’s ever been as prosperous, known the levels of health care, the levels of individual freedom, the levels of personal luxury that our society knows. And yet, honestly, most Americans are not happy.

They are not thankful for the material blessings that they have showered upon them in an unprecedented way. Americans are not thankful people. By and large, we are a society of whiners who are constantly complaining about what we still lack, what we do not have. You ask people what they want. They can provide a laundry list for you in a heartbeat. You ask people what they’re thankful for, you will be met with a blank stare. And sometimes, as a result of that, we act just like the people around us. Look over in Romans 1, please, in Romans the first chapter. You will find in my preaching that I’m just pretty near insistent that you turn your Bible and just trot along over there with me. You’ll get used to that as we go along.

I’m so insistent, I’m going to give you the passage a couple of times. Sometimes that’s because I’m still saying the books of the Bible in my head, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, where’s Romans? And I’m trying to get over there. But I want you to have enough time to open your