Latter-day Grace, part 3: Why try?

If we're saved by grace, does that mean we can just take it easy? Well, I'm not sure I'd call it "easy."

See part 1 and part 2 of this series on grace.

When being introduced to grace as a Latter-day Saint, there’s a question that always comes up. I’ve asked it, for sure, and you’ve either asked it or you’re asking it right now. The question is this:

If grace saves us, then why do we need to do anything? Why try?

It’s the natural question to ask, when the rug of meritocracy is pulled out from under us. If we are doing the works because we believe they’ll save us, finding out that God loves us anyway seems to make the effort futile. But grace disconnects works from salvation. Grace means we aren’t saved by our merits, we’re saved by Christ’s.

There is plenty of scriptural support for this; both saying that our merits can’t save us, and that only Christ’s merits can:

“…no flesh that can dwell in the presence of God, save it be through the merits, and mercy, and grace of the Holy Messiah,” (2 Nephi 2:8)

For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast. (Ephesians 2:8-9)

For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God; Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus: (Romans 3:23-24)

And since man had fallen he could not merit anything of himself; but the sufferings and death of Christ atone for their sins, through faith and repentance, and so forth; (Alma 22:14)

So, if our works and merits can’t save us, then we must conclude that our works are unrelated to our salvation—and that can be jarring, when we’ve been taught all our lives that we are saved at least in part by our works. But despite the fact that we can’t merit anything relevant to our salvation, we still have commandments. We’re still asked to do things.

And that does lead back to the question: If we don’t need works to earn our way to the Celestial Kingdom, then what are they for?

While I generally find analogies to be a poor substitute for actual doctrine, in this case there is an analogy I found to be incredibly useful. It goes like this¹:

Christ’s arrangement with us is similar to a mom providing music lessons for her child. Mom pays the piano teacher. Because Mom pays the debt in full, she can turn to her child and ask for something. What is it? Practice! Does the child’s practice pay the piano teacher? No. Does the child’s practice repay Mom for paying the piano teacher? No. Practicing is how the child shows appreciation for Mom’s incredible gift. It is how he takes advantage of the amazing opportunity Mom is giving him to live his life at a higher level. Mom’s joy is found not in getting repaid but in seeing her gift used—seeing her child improve. And so she continues to call for practice, practice, practice.

If the child sees Mom’s requirement of practice as being too overbearing (“Gosh, Mom, why do I need to practice? None of the other kids have to practice! I’m just going to be a professional baseball player anyway!”), perhaps it is because he doesn’t yet see with mom’s eyes. He doesn’t see how much better his life could be if he would choose to live on a higher plane.

In the same way, because Jesus has paid justice, He can now turn to us and say, “Follow me” (Matthew 4:19), “Keep my commandments” (John 14:15). If we see His requirements as being way too much to ask (“Gosh! None of the other Christians have to pay tithing! None of the other Christians have to go on missions, serve in callings, and do temple work!”), maybe it is because we do not yet see through Christ’s eyes. We have not yet comprehended what He is trying to make of us.

Do you see how grace changes the whole equation? We think of the plan of salvation so often as transactional, and sequential: If I do the works, then I’ll be entitled to Celestial glory. Or if I am obedient, then I’ll qualify for God’s love. Or if I read my scriptures, do my ministering, invite my friends to church, go to the temple, do family history, and have Family Home Evening, only then will I deserve grace.

Instead, that grace we receive from Christ is what transforms us. It’s what makes us want to do all the things, and to obey the commandments.

This feels backwards from how we’re used to understanding it. I’ve been taught my whole life that you need to be righteous first, and then afterward you’ll be transformed. But that’s the different mindset that grace requires. The transformation actually comes first, and what we call “righteousness” is actually an output of that, not an input we put in.

Obedience to God’s commandments is key to our spiritual growth, and ultimately, our eternal progression—which likely continues well after this life is over, and into the eternities. But that’s a very different concept that a binary “saved-or-not-saved” judgment happening at the end of this life, based on how many works points we scored while we were alive. If the question is “why try?,” the answer is that there’s a longer-view reason. It’s our eternal growth.

But even in this life, if we allow ourselves to transformed by the grace of Jesus Christ, it will drive us to follow the commandments we’ve been given, and to serve others. But we’ll do those because we want to, not because we transactionally need to do something to receive a reward. This is a higher law. This is living Christ’s directive, “If ye love me, keep my commandments,” which is dramatically different from “keep my commandments so that you can get something in return.”

Susan Hinckley, on the At Last She Said It podcast, described it this way:

If our hearts have been transformed… then we will naturally abound in good works.

Doing good things in order to gain a reward is not transformation.

I feel like that is a central point that gets overlooked sometimes in our approaches and discussions at church. We talk about having changed hearts, but we want to go about it through our good works. And I believe that truly understanding and accepting God's love for us, and therefore everyone else, can transform us.

But I don't think we're going to get there through works.

And that’s hard.

The assumption is that if we’re saved by grace, that makes it “easier” for us because then we have a free pass, we don’t have to do anything.

But if acknowledging the role of grace in our salvation means leaving behind the checklists, it’s not easier. Grace does not ask us to do certain tasks in order to merit our salvation. It asks us to live that higher law, one focused on loving God and loving our neighbor. Understand the grace of God means having the same grace for others, and for ourselves. I can’t think of anything more difficult. It literally requires everything of us.

The great German Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer distinguishes between “cheap grace,” which is the get-out-of-jail-free kind, and what he calls “costly grace”:

Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life. It is costly because it condemns sin, and grace because it justifies the sinner. Above all, it is costly because it cost God the life of his Son: "ye were bought at a price," and what has cost God much cannot be cheap for us. Above all, it is grace because God did not reckon his Son too dear a price to pay for our life, but delivered him up for us. Costly grace is the Incarnation of God.”²

The good news buried in this costly grace is that we can get off the hamster wheel of always feeling like we’re not doing enough. It requires shaking off the mindset that salvation is binary, a yes or no depending on whether we’ve done enough. We instead replace it with the knowledge that we learn and gain experience through everything we do. Sometimes we’ll succeed in being obedient. Other times we’ll mess it up, and those times are arguably more important for our growth than the times we simply manage to obey. As Richard Rohr says, “We grow spiritually much more by doing it wrong than by doing it right.”³

Let’s go back to where we started, and finish the analogy:

“But… don’t you realize how hard it is to practice? I’m just not very good at the piano. I hit a lot of wrong notes. It takes me forever to get it right.” Now wait. Isn’t that all part of the learning process? When a young pianist hits a wrong note, we don’t say he is not worthy to keep practicing. We don’t expect him to be flawless. We just expect him to keep trying. Perfection may be his ultimate goal, but for now we can be content with progress in the right direction. Why is this perspective so easy to see in the context of learning piano but so hard to see in the context of learning heaven?

Too many are giving up on the Church because they are tired of constantly feeling like they are falling short. They have tried in the past, but they always feel like they are just not good enough. They don’t understand grace.

Understanding grace is tough when we’ve been taught to ignore it our entire lives. But grace is the greatest gift we’ve been given. Grace is the very essence of the plan of salvation. And most importantly, grace is for all of us. As Adam Miller put it, “We don’t have to work our way into grace; we have to stop working so hard to pretend we aren’t already in it.”⁴

Our merits won’t save us. But grace is knowing that there is someone whose merits can.

1. Your mileage may vary, when it comes to using piano lessons as an analogy. If piano lessons were a point of contention in your home, then maybe substitute in something else that works better for you. There are a variety of reasons why a parent might want a child to take piano lessons, and this analogy takes just one angle on that. No analogy is perfect, but some are helpful.

2. Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, “The Cost of Discipleship,” (Touchstone, 2012). Emphasis added for clarity.

3. Rohr, Richard, “Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life,” (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2011).

4. Miller, Adam, “Future Mormon: Essays in Mormon Theology,” (Sandy, Utah: Greg Kofford Books, 2016).