To paraphrase Winston Churchill, I do not have the time to make this a short post, so I will make this a long one. Since coming to Thailand I have seen a personally new angle on an old problem that has given me some understanding on an issue that leads to a lot of misery and suffering but that begins from a fairly simple religious worldview misunderstanding. For most of my life, as sad as it is to say, I have had to wrestle with the delicate relationship between grace and works. In seeing the way in which people in Thailand wrestle with merit, I have seen how this problem is far more widespread, and that our application of merit is often very heretical in our own lives, leading to much suffering and misery.

In Thailand, the religious practice of the majority of the country is Buddhism of a particularly debased kind. In garish idol-ridden temples believers vainly imagine that if they earn enough merit through donating enough money to some priest, or attending enough prayer services, or doing enough good deeds of some kind, they can outweigh a lifetime of sin and dissipation or balance out a particular sin that they have struggled against, so that they appear righteous. Even crime lords donate money religiously to their special temple, just like mafioso lords to their local Catholic church, so that they may earn some sort of righteousness to balance out a life of crime.

It is easy for those of us who believe in grace (as I do) to laugh at such legalism. Rightly we scoff at attempts to earn salvation, or buy it, as if our own good merit could count as anything but rubbish in the eyes of God. And yet all too often we too believe that we an earn the love of others, which is precisely the same sort of problem as earning salvation. After all, when we are focused on earning we are focused on our supposed worthiness. We tell ourselves–I deserve this relationship, this standard of living, or whatever else it is that we have been given as a gift from God.

Nothing we do can earn us the love of anyone else. Love cannot be merited. It must be a free gift. How much misery we would save ourselves if we understood this. No matter how attractive we are, no matter smart, no matter how nice, no matter how loving, we cannot earn the love of our beloved. They must choose freely to give their love to us, or not. If they choose to love us, or someone else, it is worthless to ask whether we (or someone else) deserves that love. Love isn’t about deserving, it’s about grace, and it is most often bestowed on the unworthy.

After all, all of us are unworthy of the love that God has for us. The foundation of the faith of a Christian is Jesus Christ, because He alone was sent to die to pay the penalty of death for our sins so that we can have a personal relationship with God, whose holiness and righteousness prevents him from being close to sinners. None of us deserve it, but God’s love (and the love of Christ for us) allowed that sacrifice to be given. That love was for the whole world, prisoners of sin, no matter how much the boasted of being “model prisoners” by being obedient to the law. We all got in that prison because we earned it. There is nothing that can get us out except for grace and mercy that we do not deserve and cannot earn.

As someone who has come from an extremely dysfunctional family, I have seen generation after generation of my family (and I must include myself in this number) struggle with love between and among generations. The difficulty is not merely in loving and being loved. After all, our great problem as human beings is not in being loved by others but in feeling loved, and that is an entirely different problem. As can be imagined, I have a personal story for this. In 2003 I walked for USC, despite being a few credits short of actually graduating. The trip to Southern California was too far for any of my family to make it except for my father, who flew from Western Pennsylvania. When we attended church together in my local congregation at the time, one of my friends commented to me rather abruptly (I thought) that my father must have loved me a great deal. I was rather taken aback by the comment.

It is an entirely different matter to be loved than to feel loved. It is very easy for some of us (myself included) to feel very deeply but not be suspected by others of being rather cold and emotionless when that is not the truth at all. I tend to express my feelings in an analytical manner, but my feelings are no less strong for that. To love or be loved requires the free grace and lovingkindness to be given. To feel loved requires that this sentiment be expressed in ways that are recognized as love by the recipient of the graciousness. This is a vastly more difficult problem.

After all, God loves us in ways that we do not understand, and the same is true for each other. Yesterday in my leadership class I talked about the example of Joseph. When Joseph was 17, God gave him dreams of leading his family, and having all of his brothers bow down to him, as well as his father and (step-)mother. These dreams were literally fulfilled. But at 17 Joseph was an arrogant young man, and before he was capable of being a godly leader he needed humbling, a lot of it. As it was, he had thirteen years of being a slave in Egypt and being a prisoner for a crime he uprightly refused to commit. Over and over again in Genesis it says, perhaps to make the point clear, that God was with Joseph in slavery and in the prison, and it was clear that God loved him. But did Joseph feel loved while he was in slavery and wrongfully in prison? Probably not.

The same is true for us. Do we feel loved when we are suffering trials that we know we don’t deserve? Generally not. Do we feel loved when we are getting punishment we ought to know that we deserve? Generally not. Do we feel loved in the concentration camp, in the abusive household, in the school full of mean girls and bullies? Generally not. We certainly are loved in those situations, but we can’t feel love the love very easily through the pain and suffering, at least until after we have gone through it and see the purpose and design for it, if we ever do. It is only then that we feel loved by anyone, regardless of what love others had for us in the meantime.

We have to understand that our subjective feeling is often far from the objective reality of the situation, though, and this is not always easy. When we view our subjective feelings as the arbiters of objective reality, there is no end of the errors that we can make. Generally, in such circumstances, we are far too harsh on others, and far too kind on ourselves. This sort of error makes our own perceptions a poor judge of reality, and requires that we always remain humble about our powers of insight and intuition, no matter how intelligent or wise we are.

The problem of grace and merit is especially problematic when our own perceptions get in the way. If we think, in any way, that we can earn salvation, then our natural tendency to believe that honoring the Sabbath or tithing faithfully or being loyal to our husband or wife trumps a particular sin we struggle with unsuccessfully will lead us to tilt the scales in our favor. No man is competent to serve as his own judge, and yet we regularly act as biased judges when issues of our own pride and dignity are at stake, neglecting the weightier matters of the law, or what may be proper rebukes, because we think another person to be unqualified to judge us while we consider ourselves qualified to judge them even as we refuse to due our due diligence in judging ourselves.

There are some people who pride themselves in obedience to the law and claim that the foundation of their faith is the ten commandments. For one, it is woefully misplaced faith to believe that we can be saved by the law, for anyone who reads Paul’s epistles (like Galatians, Ephesians, Colossians, or Romans) would be hard pressed to find that heretical doctrine of works anywhere except Paul’s legalistic enemies. This is not to go into the opposite and equally heretical ditch and claim that there is no need for works, but we must understand that love is a matter of grace, as is salvation. It cannot be earned.

It is especially galling when people claim that the ten commandments are their foundation when they have behaved flagrantly broken the ten commandments, the ones that say: do not steal, do not lie, and do not covet. That sort of arrogant and presumptuous hostility bothers me. We are all sinners. Whenever we condemn someone by the standard of the law, we condemn ourselves because we are violators of the same laws. Often, we ourselves are guilty of the precise sins that we accuse others. But too often we would rather present ourselves as if we were righteous instead of honestly confessing our struggles brother to brother in the reasonable hope that we receive from our genuinely Christian brethren encouragement and support, rather than people taking away points on our righteousness scorecards.

Nonetheless, there remains a place for works. Works are not the foundation of love or salvation, but are rather the glue that binds a relationship together. To have a working relationship with someone requires that certain obligations be met, and where one or both parties is unwilling or unable to meet those obligations, even when (or especially when) there is love (even mutual love) present, there may be no relationship possible because of the lack of fulfillment of obligations. The law is a set of obligations, telling us not to do things that destroy trust and relationships, and commanding us to do those things that build up trust and relationships.

These matters are often rather straightforward, far more than they may initially seem. If we know something bothers someone we care about, our love and respect for them should lead us not to engage in that behavior. If we continually and habitually engage in that behavior, they will judge us (probably correctly) as not respecting them enough. After all, there is precious little respect and trust in this world, in large part because there is so little love shown in this world. We cannot abuse and mistreat others and then tell them (and others) of our love. We cannot lie about others, steal from them, and maliciously attack them and then say that we are loving people, because our actions belie our claims. Our love is the gracious decision of our hearts, but it is shown through our actions, and ought to be obvious. The love of even someone reserved with their emotions ought to be possible to infer through actions when it is not said, and we ought to make it possible for our relationships to be built as easily as possible. There is too little grace shown in our actions; we can all stand to improve as far as that goes. The world does not deserve our grace, but no one ever does.