Chrisitians bent on maturity should work hard at gratitude. Thankfulness to friends, parents, senior believers who have helped us on our way, and abpve all to God himself, is not only common courtesy, it is something more, much more: it is simultaneously a powerful antidote to bitterness and malice, and potent acknowledgement that we stand by grace. What else could ever displace gratitude as the appropriate response to grace, whether the special grace that brings us salvation or the grace mediated through fellow believers, friends and events? Grace gives; what more can we do than give thanks? What response to grace could be more vile than ingratitude?
D.A.Carson, From Triumphalism to Maturity, 160.
In Anticipation 