Latter-day Grace, part 1: You are enough (and other things we don't believe)

As Latter-day Saints, our relationship with grace tends to be tenuous, when it exists at all.

This is the first in a three-part series.

I was called into a bishopric at a tough time for my family. I worked in a demanding job that never seemed to turn off, and my wife and I were about to have our fourth child. Friends assured us that we would be blessed for the time I’d spend away from my family to serve other ward members.

I poured myself into the calling, but as one year dragged into the next, I wondered what those blessings were supposed to be. I didn’t expect miracles, but I was stuck wondering if God noticed the effort and sacrifices I was putting in. I was desperate to measure up to the calling I’d received. It seemed like there must be more I needed to do.

One weeknight, instead of being at home to put my boys to bed, I attended a meeting with the stake presidency and the other bishoprics in the stake. Our stake president stood up and started the meeting with words that resonated profoundly with me. I don’t remember anything else from that meeting, years later, but I remember this clearly. He said:

“Brethren, your offering is acceptable to the Lord.”

I almost gasped audibly. It was a weight immediately lifted. There was no way he could have known what I was thinking, or how badly I needed to hear that message. I’d never heard anybody say anything like that. We’ve been trained, as Latter-day Saints, that nothing is ever enough. There’s always more scripture study, ministering, and service to do. There’s always more calling magnifying, sabbath keeping, and temple attending to do. It’s never enough.

But for one brief moment, it was enough.

Our affinity for a meritocratic gospel

We love to teach a meritocratic gospel. We love to teach that if you score enough good works points, à la The Good Place, you’ll make it to the Celestial Kingdom. But we like even more to talk about how committing certain sins makes it so you won’t make it in¹. We end up with a lot of reasons for why people (other than ourselves) won’t be lined up to enter the highest degree of glory.

The meritocratic ideas aren’t without scriptural basis. There are plenty of prophets and scripture authors throughout history that have painted the picture of a judgment day where our good works are weighed against our bad works, and if the ledger comes up negative, then we are cast into an eternal hell. Consider these verses, that say almost exactly that:

Wherefore, if ye have sought to do wickedly in the days of your probation, then ye are found unclean before the judgment-seat of God; and no unclean thing can dwell with God; wherefore, ye must be cast off forever. (1 Ne 10:21)

For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ; that every one may receive the things done in his body, according to that he hath done, whether it be good or bad. (2 Corinthians 5:10)

These cherry-picked verses are our bread and butter in describing this meritocratic, works-based gospel. But I’m increasingly convinced that we’re not telling the whole story. I feel like there is a major piece missing, and here’s why:

The idea of a meritocratic gospel is not "good news."

The idea that you get what you earn is what’s stressing so many of us out, and causing feelings of inadequacy in women and men throughout the Church. This version of the gospel requires no savior, it only requires endless hustle. And at the end of the day, none of us will ever perfect ourselves; meaning our effort will always be a disappointment, no matter how hard we try.

This does not sound like a plan that would come from loving Heavenly Parents. In what scenario do They not want all of us to return to Their presence? If They loved us completely as parents, would They put together an arrangement where They send us away and only get a fraction of us back? This does not sound like the plan of a loving God, who wants us to call Them Father and Mother.

The good news of a gospel of grace

Jesus taught that He gives "not as the world giveth," but what we so often believe is that salvation and divine love come exactly the same way the world gives—that is, in direct proportion to our performance. The top salespeople get paid the most, the best football teams win the championship, and the person who spells the most words correctly takes home the spelling bee trophy. But our Heavenly Parents appear to have little interest in rankings, stats, or individual performance.

Instead, our Heavenly Parents love us for who we are. We have intrinsic value as Their children. This love that They have for us, that comes without strings attached, is grace. Grace is given to all of us, undeserved and unearned. Grace is the good news.

As Rob Bell puts it:

The good news that Jesus announces is an announcement of who you already are. You are a son, you are a daughter of the Divine. It is not about how to get somewhere, but it is a revelation of who you already are and what you already possess.

One writer, the apostle Paul in the New Testament, has this great line, “Now let us live up to what we’ve already attained.” He essentially is saying, you live in grace, so now just order your life around that which you already are, and you already possess.

We easily forget this word of grace. We start keeping points, we beat ourselves up, we struggle to forgive ourselves.

Is that you? Do you keep points, beat yourself up, and struggle to forgive yourself? It’s me, too. And just like when that stake president assured me that my contribution—however small it may have been—was already acceptable to God, these assurances make the massive weight on my back start to give a little bit. This is the idea that gets me up out of my seat, again from Rob Bell:

Grace is the announcement that you already possess that which you've been striving for.

This is life-changing stuff. This is something I needed to hear, and that I think a lot of folks in the Church need to hear. God already loves you. You’re already there.

We tend to think of grace as something that will come later. We know we can’t actually save ourselves, as much as we act like we can, and that grace plays a role in our salvation. But we often don’t think about what it means for us now. Grace is what makes us redeemed and whole in this life, as Nadia Bolz-Weber² says:

“God's grace is not defined as God being forgiving to us even though we sin. Grace is when God is a source of wholeness, which makes up for my failings. My failings hurt me and others and even the planet, and God's grace to me is that my brokenness is not the final word ... it's that God makes beautiful things out of even my own sh*t. Grace isn't about God creating humans and flawed beings and then acting all hurt when we inevitably fail and then stepping in like the hero to grant us grace—like saying, "Oh, it's OK, I'll be the good guy and forgive you." It's God saying, "I love the world too much to let your sin define you and be the final word. I am a God who makes all things new.”

But, meritocracy is familiar and comforting

The topic of grace is uncomfortable to some in the Church, at least at first. We’ve been raised on a steady stream of “faith without works is dead” and “after all we can do” to the extent that grace feels like something that other Christians believe, not us. Starting to understand grace, for me, requires some backtracking on principles I thought I understood before. I’m not used to feeling like I’m enough, just the way I am. It doesn’t come naturally to me.

The idea of a meritocracy, on the other hand, is familiar and can be comforting. We understand how to follow a checklist of commandments. We can answer confidently, in a temple recommend interview, when asked if we follow the Word of Wisdom or pay our tithing, because those have clear boundaries. We understand salvation and exaltation when they are in our control, because it aligns with performance and incentives that we see in mortality. We know how to do that, and we can control it, as Samuel Alonzo Dodge says:

Meritocracy, in its own odd way, offers fleeting comfort through the idea that we can control our fate merely through grit and hard work, independent of others or circumstance. But such control is an illusion.

It’s not just that grace is a new concept or that it’s unfamiliar, it can be an actual affront to us when we’ve spent all our lives in the hustle trying to earn our way to heaven. For some of us, the self-flagellation when we make a mistake has become something we take pride in. We subconsciously believe that beating ourselves up is a requisite part of repentance, or necessary suffering for sin, and use it as a way to demonstrate just how righteous we are. Richard Rohr acknowledges how grace can create a discontinuity in our belief system:

God’s freely given grace is a humiliation to the ego because free gifts say nothing about being strong, superior, or moral. Thus only the soul can understand grace, never the mind or the ego. The ego does not know how to receive things freely or without logic. It likes to be worthy and needs to understand in order to accept things as true. The ego prefers a worldview of scarcity or quid pro quo, where only the clever can win.

The concept that “the last shall be first, and the first shall be last,” even 2,000 years after Christ taught it, still grates on us. It violates our basic sensibilities of fairness. As Nadia Bolz-Weber puts it³:

This is exactly, when it comes down to it, why most people do not believe in grace. It is ******* offensive.

But sometimes, just sometimes, it’s also the message we need to hear right now. It’s the much-needed countermeasure to the works-based, meritocratic gospel we’ve been taught most of our lives. Grace is a glimpse of real belonging.

Yea, my soul delighteth in his grace

There are questions that need to be answered, when we talk about grace. The natural question to ask, once we understand that God loves us no matter what, is: Why try? Does it even matter what I do? The other question that we, as Latter-day Saints, immediately ask is, doesn’t grace save us after all we can do? These are topics I'll address another day, in upcoming posts.

But for now, it is enough to be like Jacob, in the Book of Mormon, and let our souls find delight in God’s grace. I haven’t totally figured out how to do that. I know it’s there. And delighting in His grace will help me extend that same grace to myself, and to others. I can stop the comparisons. In the words of Cynthia Winward, one of my favorite #gracepeddlers:

When we finally buy into grace, it is liberating. We realize God isn't keeping score. In fact, Jesus came to crush the scoreboard.

It’s liberating. It’s also hard, and both can be true. Leaving behind the hustle and trusting in grace is a process. Living by love, instead of by checklists, is a higher law. It will require everything we have, but the reward is greater. Grace allows us to take His yoke and His burden, which are light, instead of trying to bear it all ourselves. To conclude with the words of Paul Washer⁴:

You ask me “What’s the the greatest act of faith?” To me is to look in the mirror of God’s word, and see all my faults, all my sin, all my shortcomings and to believe that God loves me exactly as he says he does.

1. Inevitably, those disqualifying sins happen to be ones that the person talking doesn’t see themselves committing.

2. Bolz-Weber, Nadia, “Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint,” (Jericho Books, 2013).

3. Bolz-Weber, “Pastrix.”

4. This quote is repeatedly attributed to Paul Washer, but I can’t track down the original source.