Grace, Gratitude, and Generosity

1 Peter 1:13-25                                   Matthew 5:21-30

Grace, Gratitude, and Generosity

Have you ever failed in your life? I don’t mean small failures like failing at an exam or failing a driver’s test or failing to be on time for an important event. Nor do I mean a big failures like physically murdering someone or physically committing adultery or physically stealing from someone. 

Of course, these failures are serious and ought to be dealt with if they have occurred, but the kind of failures I have in mind are the more common everyday failures that are more likely to have occurred at some time in your life. Perhaps the failure to be kind to someone who desperately needed to be encouraged. Or the failure to love someone who desperately needed to be assured that they are worth something to someone. Or the failure to listen to those who just needed to be heard. Or the failure to speak up for someone who needed to be defended before your mutual peers or your mutual superiors. Or the failure to give to someone who was in need. Or the failure to forgive someone despite having been forgiven yourself. Or the failure to live out your Christian witness in a hostile environment. 

Have you ever failed in your life? 

Peter knew what it meant to fail. Before Jesus was arrested, Peter was absolutely certain of himself. "Even if everyone else falls away,” he claimed defiantly, “I never will.” He believed his courage would be enough, that his loyalty would be enough, that his resolve would be enough, and that his love for Jesus would be enough.

But we all know what happened, don’t we? Within a few hours he had denied even knowing the Lord he loved.

Now, Peter’s failure raises an uncomfortable question. What causes believers – especially strong, mature believers – to fail? Is it fear? Is it pressure? Is it a lack of commitment? Or is it perhaps an overconfident self-reliance?

You will recall that Jesus had warned Peter long before the soldiers arrived. "Watch and pray, that you may not enter into temptation." Why did Peter not take heed of Jesus warnings? Well, fundamentally, I think, it was because Peter trusted Peter. He believed that the strength of his own commitment and his own dogged determination could and would sustain him.

This type of self-deception has never disappeared. I think we often assume that our Christian behaviour depends chiefly upon the strength of our own tenacity. If I try hard enough, then I will not fail to live out my Christian witness. But, I think, Peter would tell us otherwise.

As you know, after the resurrection, Jesus met Peter on a Galilean beach…not with confrontational condemnation, but with a gentle presence wrapped in a friendly and safe setting, because the object of this meeting was not rebuke, reproach, or rejection, but rather restoration. And in this atmosphere of love and grace, Peter’s denials were undone by three invitations to once more confess his love and devotion to Jesus, combined with a repeated commission based on trust: "Feed my sheep."

It was at that breakfast on the beach that Peter discovered that his future rests not upon the power of his own personal resolve to love Jesus and to follow him, but rather upon the power of Jesus' grace and love keeping him and working in him.

Years later, as a maturing believer writing to new isolated and fearful baby believers scattered throughout the northern provinces of Asia Minor, Peter does not simply tell them to behave better, to try harder, or to buck up and to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. 

No, he tells them to remember better…because it is possible that the reason believers fail is because they have forgotten what grace really means. It is possible that a deficiency in understanding the God of grace, the nature of grace, and the cost of grace leads to a presumption that is precariously based on self-assurance. 

As we have seen, Peter’s life testifies to a progressive experience of grace that reaches a crisis point after the greatest failure of his life – not only the denial of a friend he swore to protect, but a denial of a friend who exemplifies and embodies grace – one who is the God of grace incarnate. But the Lord’s gracious initiative in his restoration catapulted Peter into a life wholly set apart for the Gospel of grace. 

Clear thinking about the God of grace and his acts of grace leads to a changed life. Peter’s experience of mercy, love, and forgiveness nurtured a transformed mind that resulted in transformed behaviour. 

So, in the opening twelve verses of this letter, Peter celebrates the astonishing grace of God. The Father's electing love, the new birth into a living hope, the inheritance that can never perish, and the salvation secured for them in Jesus Christ. 

And only after having spelled out the greatness of the grace his readers have received, he exhorts and encourages them to prepare their minds for acts that will reveal the certain grace that is theirs in Jesus. Only after he has heaped blessing upon blessing in an explosion of praise does he write, "Therefore...” And everything that follows grows out of the grace he has just described.

I think this shows us that Peter has learned the lesson that his younger self had not yet understood…that right living does not begin with self-determination. It begins with remembering grace.

And I think this is the main reason why believers fail. We fail not simply because temptation is strong and we are weak, but we fail because we tend to lose sight of the grace that is the bedrock of what we believe.

So, through our text for today, I want us to see how Peter now teaches the lessons he learned on his own journey…his own journey from grace, to gratitude, to generosity.

He begins this next section by telling the readers of his letter to remember their spiritual beginning…to remember where their own journey had started.  His emphasis in verses 13–17 is not primarily on a resolve to live better lives, as much as it is about a response to the Father's gracious initiative that enables us to live better lives.

As we have already seen, Peter spent twelve verses describing what the Father has done, and only now comes the "therefore." In other words, what comes after the therefore is dependent upon what came before it. Every command in 1 Peter rests on a clearly stated fact. In this case, the fact that God always acts before we act. Grace always precedes obedience.

In other words, because God has acted on our behalf, we now ought to prepare or to change our minds or to think differently so that we might live out an appropriate response to his gracious acts. You see, when grace is remembered, the way we think changes, and when our way of thinking changes, our behaviour changes. 

Remembering grace leads to gracious and grace-filled living…it leads to a life shaped and ordered by gratitude. And when gratitude is the dominant force directing our behaviour, then a generosity of spirit…a capacity for unconditional kindness, empathy, and grace…an attitude of giving people the benefit of the doubt, celebrating the achievements of others without jealousy or resentment, and offering support without expecting anything in return…when gratitude is the dominant force directing our behaviour, then a generosity of spirit begins to flourish. And when this generosity of spirit flourishes, the holy living God commands becomes the beautiful evidence of the grace he has already given.

You see, a correct understanding of God’s grace will infiltrate, influence, and define the kind of people we are as citizens of heaven living in a hostile world where we are exiles… a correct understanding of God’s grace will cause us to respond appropriately so that we might be holy as the God we follow is holy.

Peter also tells us that we need to remember that this grace was not cheap. We were ransomed…our penalty for sin was paid for in full…but the cost was the life of God’s incarnated Son. The innocent died in the place of the guilty…the pure for the impure…the holy for the unholy…the sinless for the sinful. “For you know,” Peter says, “that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your ancestors, but with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect.” 

As such, grace and gratitude and a generous spirit have been the foundation of Christian commitment and transformation throughout history. Lives have been irrevocably changed because followers of this God of grace have responded in gratitude to the call to live generously like he lived and to love generously like he loves. 

This attitude of gratitude – this positive appreciation of who God is and what he has done, is doing, and will do for us, releases an understanding and an experience of the breadth and length and height and depth of God’s immeasurable grace, mercy, compassion, forgiveness, and love, all of which are indispensable marks of the life of those who follow him. The church ought to be filled with people who display their grateful hearts through their demeanour and their conduct. 

Gratefulness to God for his grace and mercy is a powerful motivation for consistent sacrificial service. 

Paul tells us that it was the love of Jesus that compelled him to continue in his ministry despite the many hardships that he suffered. He could never forget the love that met his murderous heart on that road to Damascus. 

Nor could Peter ever forget the love that met his indecisive heart on that beach in Galilee. Both Paul and Peter lived with hearts full of living hope because of past grace, present grace, and future grace. 

Dearest beloved brethren, what have you forgotten that you should never have forgotten? Have you forgotten God’s grace toward you when you were lost? When you were in need of forgiveness? When you had failed? 

Have you forgotten that moment when the unconditional love of a holy God broke through the barriers around your hardened heart? Have you lost your grateful heart? Have the trials of life choked out the gratitude that you once had when you first were confronted with such an immeasurable and incredible love? 

Is it perhaps time to go back to the basics to learn once again the greatness of the grace that is ours in Jesus?

We need to remember God’s grace if we are to recapture the gratitude that ought to be characteristic of the lives of those who have been saved through the sacrificial love of Jesus. This gratitude for grace received will be manifested in a generosity of spirit. As Peter says, “now that you have responded appropriately to the grace of God…now that you have purified yourselves by obeying the truth so that you have sincere love for each other, (now) love one another deeply, from the heart because you are new creations…you are a renewed people…you have been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable, through the living and enduring word of God.”

You see, once we truly understand the meaning of grace and begin to live out a grace-filled life that is dominated and defined by a gratitude for a grace that saved even me, then we will be able to truly love one another like God loves us…then we will be able to love one another earnestly from a heart that is pure. 

Once we realise that all flesh is like grass…that we are all finite and feeble and frail and fallible…that our own glory fades and falls and fails…and that it is only the gracious word of the Lord that stands forever…once we understand our own desperate need of grace from a holy God…then we will be less inclined to behave in graceless or loveless ways towards others. 

Have you failed in your life? Have you failed to love as God loves? Have you failed to live a pure life? Have you felt that your life has dried up and withered and faded and fallen? Have you tried so hard to change something harmful or sinful in your life, but failed?

Peter would say, welcome to the field…we are all grass that withers and fades and falls. 

But the remedy for our failures is not a firmer resolve. Your relationship with Jesus didn’t start that way, did it? So why do you think that you need to continue that relationship doing what you know you weren’t able to do before he saved you from the futile ways of human solutions to life? 

No. The remedy to our failures, is to remember the fullness of his grace…his past grace, his present grace, and his future grace…and to live in the light of that grace in gratitude and a generosity of spirit. This, dearest beloved brethren, is the essence of the Gospel we claim to have received. 

Shall we pray?

© Johannes W H van der Bijl 2026