Today, I’d like to tackle the idea of “gratitude;” or consequently, the idea of how ungratefulness impedes our gratitude. The rationale behind this is twofold: first, to understand how ungratefulness seeps into our hearts and secondly, to keep it from choking the gratitude out of our lives.

Everyone would agree that ungratefulness is the opposite of gratitude, and it is so easily recognizable when we’re on the receiving end of ungratefulness, but so difficult to see when we’re the ones being ungrateful. And the reason it is so hard to see, is because there are different shades of ungratefulness. I’m going to share my top three.

First, there’s the outright ungrateful. You spend hours in a hot kitchen over a hot stove to prepare the most incredible Thanksgiving meal. And after the meal, you get, “honey, the turkey was too bland.” Ungratefulness!

Then there’s the more casual form of ungratefulness: it’s when you get somebody a gift, like a classy sweater, and then they say something to the effect of “Oh, so, thank you for the sweater, I really appreciate it, but I’m more of a hoodie guy.”

And then, there is the subtle ungratefulness. You’re running late to a meeting at work because you’re on the 696. I haven’t been on it, but I’ve heard stories. And everybody on the highway is slowing down because people love to rubberneck. Then it’s your turn, and you mumble to yourself, “I can’t believe I’m late to work because that guy’s car broke down, how inconsiderate of him during rush hour?!”

I know I don’t always see my ungratefulness, and I’m sure you’ve had moments this past week where you were ungrateful too. It is the ungrateful moments like these that kill the momentum of giving thanks in all circumstances (1 Thessalonians 5:18). Can we read from God’s word?

¹ “For the kingdom of heaven is like a master of a house who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard. ² After agreeing with the laborers for a denarius a day, he sent them into his vineyard.³ And going out about the third hour he saw others standing idle in the marketplace, ⁴ and to them he said, ‘You go into the vineyard too, and whatever is right I will give you.’ ⁵ So they went. Going out again about the sixth hour and the ninth hour, he did the same. ⁶ And about the eleventh hour he went out and found others standing. And he said to them, ‘Why do you stand here idle all day?’ ⁷ They said to him, ‘Because no one has hired us.’ He said to them, ‘You go into the vineyard too.’ ⁸ And when evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his foreman, ‘Call the laborers and pay them their wages, beginning with the last, up to the first.’ ⁹ And when those hired about the eleventh hour came, each of them received a denarius. ¹⁰ Now when those hired first came, they thought they would receive more, but each of them also received a denarius. ¹¹ And on receiving it they grumbled at the master of the house, ¹² saying, ‘These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.’ ¹³ But he replied to one of them, ‘Friend, I am doing you no wrong. Did you not agree with me for a denarius? ¹⁴ Take what belongs to you and go. I choose to give to this last worker as I give to you. ¹⁵ Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or do you begrudge my generosity?’ ¹⁶ So the last will be first, and the first last.” (Matthew 20:1-16 ESV)

Upon reading this parable, you may immediately cry injustice! That’s unfair! However, here’s some context to understand why Jesus told this parable in the first place.

This parable comes on the heels of a head-scratching dialogue that a rich young man had with Jesus. He asks, “Hey Jesus, what good deed must I do to have eternal life?” Jesus tells him to follow the ten commandments and by doing so, to love his neighbors. The rich man says, “I already do all that.”

Then Jesus told the rich young man to be more radical—sell everything, give it to the poor, and then to follow Him. The Bible says the rich man went home that day very dejected because he had so much, and couldn’t fathom the life Jesus prescribed.

When the disciples heard this, they were just as dejected. Although they’d left everything to follow Jesus and were excited at the prospect of what they’d earned for themselves in Heaven, this parable threw a wrench into their expectations.

This parable illustrates the economics of God’s kingdom for us. The economics of God’s kingdom are not like the economics of this world. It’s an economics of grace. In a grace-based economy, nobody has earned the right to anything. It was all freely given by God. As a result we should recognize God’s grace and be filled with gratitude.

Gratitude is recognizing God’s blessings and responding with praise.

Here’s the beautiful thing —even though we behave so ungratefully, Jesus loves us anyway. And His mind-boggling love is meant to overflow in us and prompt an uncontrollable praise.

However, recognizing God’s blessings and responding with praise is not easy, is it? Especially with what is going on in our lives and our world these days. So, today, I want to share three ways we can position ourselves to recognize God’s blessing and respond with praise.

Stop Comparing Ourselves to Others

Imagine this scenario: you are a day laborer, waiting patiently outside Home Depot or Lowes, for a job opportunity for today. Some days, it’s a bust: nobody needs help. Others, you are contracted to help someone do rough work on their home. You negotiate a fair, living wage for your services and begin working at 6AM. As you’re faithfully working, more workers are brought on to help throughout the day: at 9AM, noon, 3PM, and even at 5PM. At the end of the day, let’s say 6PM, the workers are lined up and all are paid the same wages.

Think about that. You were hired at 6AM and worked until 6PM. Some of the guys were hired at 6PM, and worked until 6PM. Whether you worked an hour or 12, all received the same pay. Does this mean the homeowner you worked for, is very generous or very unreasonable? This is exactly the situation explored in the parable. Let’s pick this up at verse 8.

⁸And when evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his foreman, ‘Call the laborers and pay them their wages, beginning with the last, up to the first.’ ⁹ And when those hired about the eleventh hour came, each of them received a denarius. ¹⁰ Now when those hired first came, they thought they would receive more, but each of them also received a denarius. (Matthew 20:8-10)

One source of ungratefulness in our hearts comes when we start comparing ourselves with others around us.

Before coming to Woodside, I spent 15 years in bi-vocational ministry. What that means is that I had my regular Monday through Friday day job and then I worked my pastor job Saturday and Sunday. Around 7 years into my career, I started seminary fulltime on top of my day job and my church job. I know what these 6AM day laborers were feeling. I would get ready at 5AM so I could be at seminary by 6:30 or 7AM, and there I’d read and do assignments, then sit through my classes. At noon, I’d leave seminary so I could get to my day job by 2PM, work there until 10PM, and then come home to start it all over again the next day. And I remember thinking: How unfair is this?! My work colleagues get to go home at 5pm. My classmates are done with their by day by noon. I’m sitting on a delayed commuter train in the dead of night because of unscheduled track work. But I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for those long days and insane hours. What a blessing from God.

Maybe, you’re single and you’re looking around church this morning and you see the hundreds of babies, young children, and teenagers, roaming our halls and you see their proud parents. Don’t compare yourselves with them. You’re blessed with singleness. How? The apostle Paul said he wished everyone were single like him. Maybe he meant that he could eat whatever he wanted, go wherever he wanted, watch whatever Roman games he wanted, and sleep an entire night rather than be woken up three or five times by a baby! More importantly, he said the single person is concerned about how to please the Lord, not their spouse.

Maybe, you’re a parent, and you’re looking at your single friends or your empty nesting friends and their clean, non-food stained outfits on Instagram. You’re blessed, you have kids that need you and whom you can raise in God’s love.

Maybe, you’re stacking yourself up against other people’s accomplishments, your siblings, friends, neighbors, and co-workers. Don’t do it—You’re unique, your story is unique, nobody else has that.

I grew up in New York City. And in the Big Apple, there is a certain societal pressure to achieve more, and go further. For example, the public high school system allows you to apply to a school you may not be zoned to. I applied to the Ivy League feeder schools that were expected of me. Everyone I knew got accepted: my classmates, my church friends, everyone. Except me. I was unhappy, bitter, and ungrateful when I only was accepted to my zoned high school because I compared myself to everyone else. I refused to see the blessings God was bestowing on my life.

Here’s the funny thing, when we have a comparison mindset, we also tend to develop an attitude of entitlement. If we really want to recognize God’s blessings and respond to Him in praise, then each of us need to:

Recognize My Own Entitlement Mindset

In Jesus’ parable, these workers who were hired first were waiting to get paid and they started comparing the wages of the people hired later than them and their pay. That made them think they would get more because they worked more. Look at verse 11 and 12

¹¹ And on receiving it the grumbled at the master of the house, ¹² saying, ‘These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.’ (Matthew 20:11-12).

At first glance, these guys who worked the long and grueling twelve hour shift, well they may have reason to complain—it’s kind of unfair that they are paid the same as the guys who only worked an hour. But when we look at the story again, verse 3 says the master of the house and the laborers agreed to the wage before work was begun. As such, the guys working the twelve hour shift were paid exactly as promised. What were they grumbling and complaining about? Do we share their entitlement mindset?

There is a new person at work who is making what you’re making but doing half the work with half the experience. He or she is not as efficient as you are. The person can’t write as many lines of code as you per hour or design the variety of widgets needed to fit the unnamed protype car as quickly as you. In fact, he or she isn’t even sacrificing time with family, friends, and Fortnite like you. So every time you walk into the office, your entitlement mindset kicks in and you grumble and complain.

I failed to recognize Jesus’ love for me when I got rejected from all those high schools I felt entitled to. I recognized Jesus as the greatest blessing in my life, and as my Lord and Savior, while a student at this school.  The best part of this story is that a friend who didn’t even appear to be a good Christ follower, convinced me to ditch class one day. And since I already felt the school was beneath me, I was entitled to a day off. So, well, I cut school. Once we committed our truancy, though, this rebel friend brought me to a Christian club meeting where I recognized my entitlement mindset blinded me from seeing God’s work in my life. I understood then that God didn’t need to, but He chose, to save me at my worst. Because He loves me more than words could express.

We were entitled to death before Jesus paid the price for us. The day laborers standing outside waiting for a job, they were not entitled to anything until the owner of the vineyard came by.

Those of us who are followers of Jesus know that we were never entitled to new life in Christ. We’ve all fallen so short of the glory of God, and that never stopped Him from loving us to death. Romans 3:23 says…for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus (Romans 3:23-24 ESV)

Doesn’t being a follower of Jesus mean that we’ve already received far more than we ever deserved? Of course it does. We did nothing that warranted salvation. God did not compare our works,  our personalities, or our looks. He took what we were entitled to: death, and paid the price through the blood of Jesus Christ on the cross. That’s the good news. We need to remember that when we start feeling like we’re entitled to something. A third way we can recognize God’s blessings and respond with praise is to:

Celebrate God’s Blessings – to myself and others

Let’s look at these last few verses in this passage.

¹³ But he replied to one of them, ‘Friend, I am doing you no wrong. Did you not agree with me for a denarius? ¹⁴ Take what belongs to you and go. I choose to give to this last worker as I give to you. ¹⁵ Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or do you begrudge my generosity? ¹⁶ So the last will be first, and the first last.” (Matthew 20:13-16 ESV)

Remember the context of this parable. It is right after the exchange Jesus had with the rich young man about how he can earn eternal life. The young rich man had earned wealth, and kept the ten commandments, and he believed he would be entitled to God’s kingdom.

Nobody has rightfully earned salvation. None of us deserved it. God gave his one and only son, and through Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, we are blessed with more than we deserve.

Do we begrudge Jesus’ generosity? He is the master in this story. He gives us salvation that cannot be taken away or measured by any means of work. He gives up his life for ours when we were at our worst and least deserved it. We were the last, and we were made children of God when we had no claim.

We are saved when we believe in the name of Jesus and nothing can stop that, nothing can take that away, it doesn’t matter whether we were the 8AM person or the 5PM person. Neither person deserves salvation, but we have it through Jesus.

Jesus, who, though was in the form of God, did not count equality with God, but emptied himself, being born in the likeness of men.  Jesus did this so that he could die on the cross on our behalf.

Jesus could have compared himself to the people he was saving, but He didn’t. He could have said, these people are not entitled to salvation. Yet he gave himself up so God could make us His heirs.

That’s the reason we come to church on Sundays—to celebrate God’s blessings and to praise Him. That’s the reason we meet in small groups across our neighborhoods; have our sisterhood meetings, moms meetings, men’s meetings, huddles, Bible studies, grief share, triple L meetings, Oasis and Wake meetings. We do these things to celebrate God’s blessings on ourselves and others.

Because whether we come together in a big room like this or in somebody’s living room, there is opportunity to get out of our entitlement mindsets, our comparison traps and actually celebrate God’s love for us, His blessings in our lives. And when we do this, an attitude of gratitude radically takes root.

We have a wonderful savior who chose to give his life in exchange for ours. To bless us as children of God so we can see lives changed, neighborhoods altered, and a broken society look more like the Kingdom of God than we ever imagined possible in our lifetimes.

If you are ungrateful with comparisons and entitlement, you need to celebrate. Recognize God’s blessings and respond in praise. Don’t walk out after we pray, stick around. Grab a pastor, greeter, staff person, or hit our connect table in the lobby. We want to celebrate God’s blessings with you.

Our worship team will be leading us in singing “In Christ Alone.” Let’s recognize how we received salvation, God’s ultimate blessing through Christ and respond loudly with praise.

Let’s pray.

Lord, it is so easy to be ungrateful and have a perspective filled with nasty comparison and entitlement. We ask that we can recognize your great blessing, Jesus, our Savior, and we can be refreshed and renewed through Him. Fill us with your Spirit so gratitude can resound in our lives. We thank you. In Christ name we pray. Amen.