Our Motive for Obeying God Shouldn’t Be Gratitude

What Is Gratitude? Like most precious things, gratitude is vulnerable. We easily forget that gratitude exists because sometimes things come to us gratis—without price or payment. When that happens, we should feel a pleasant sense of the worth of what we’ve received and the goodwill behind it. This pleasant sense is what we call gratitude. Then, spontaneously rising from this pleasant sense, come expressions of delight. We feel constrained with joy to acknowledge the gift and the goodwill behind it, and to express how good we feel about the gift and the heart of the giver. Gratitude corresponds to grace (gratis). This is true even when we feel thankful for something we paid for. We sense that what we bought might have been disappointing in spite of our having enough money to buy it. It might not have been in such good condition; or it might not have been the exact one we wanted; or someone might have bought it before we could; or the transaction might have been harsh; or the timing might have been wrong for our intended use; or the price might have gone down just after we bought it. In other words, gratitude is not the feeling that we have been shrewd in how we get things. It is the...