By Rev. Todd R. Lattig[i]
Read Romans 3:21–31
ALSO IN SCRIPTURE
“I do not treat the grace of God as meaningless. For if keeping the law could make us right with God, then there was no need for Christ to die. (Galatians 2:21 NLT)
That is part of what makes Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory so satisfying. Five children receive golden tickets and enter Wonka’s strange, wonderful world, and one by one, four of them fail. Augustus cannot control his appetite. Violet refuses to listen. Veruca demands whatever she wants. Mike ignores every warning because he is convinced he knows better.
And then there is Charlie. He is poor, humble, and devoted to his family. He makes mistakes, but when the final test comes, he returns what does not belong to him. He does the right thing when there appears to be nothing left to gain from doing it. Wonka rewards him because Charlie has proven himself worthy of the factory. It is a wonderful story, and it works because we believe Charlie deserves what he receives.
It is also not grace.
We understand Wonka’s system instinctively because most of us have spent our lives inside systems of deservingness. Work hard and you deserve success. Make good choices and you deserve good consequences. Contribute enough and you deserve assistance when you need it. Follow the rules and you deserve respect. Prove yourself useful and you deserve a place at the table. We call it meritocracy, and there is something appealing about it because actions, work, and responsibility really do matter.
The problem comes when achievement becomes a measurement of human worth. Then the person who succeeds must somehow be better than the person who struggles. Poverty becomes evidence of irresponsibility. Wealth becomes evidence of virtue. Productivity becomes worthiness and need becomes failure. We begin sorting people into those who have earned what they have and those who deserve whatever happens to them.
Society does this constantly.
But so does the church.
Churches measure things: attendance, giving, baptisms, professions of faith, new members, small groups, mission participation, worship growth. We collect statistics, study trends, and talk about vitality. Some of that is necessary. Numbers can tell us things we need to know. They can expose problems we might rather ignore and help us understand whether our ministries are actually reaching people.
But measurements can quietly become merit. A growing congregation becomes a successful congregation, while a declining congregation becomes a failing one. A pastor whose numbers increase appears effective, while one whose numbers decrease becomes suspect. Churches with resources look worthy of investment while struggling churches begin to look like liabilities. Statistics that were supposed to help us understand ministry can become a scoreboard determining whose ministry matters.
We are measuring worth.
Paul tears straight through that system. In Romans 3, he asks what room remains for boasting after the grace of God revealed in Jesus Christ. His answer is none. Righteousness is not the prize at the end of a spiritual competition. Nobody reaches God’s grace by outperforming everyone else. Nobody receives the kingdom because they survived the tour while Augustus fell into the chocolate river and Veruca went down the garbage chute. We receive grace because grace is gift.
Galatians makes the point even sharper. Paul insists that if we could make ourselves right with God through our ability to satisfy the system, then Christ died for nothing. Christians can proclaim salvation by grace while constructing communities organized around merit. We can preach that nobody earns God’s love and then spend the rest of the week deciding which people, pastors, congregations, and ministries have demonstrated enough value to deserve ours.
The cross will not let us do that comfortably. Christ crucified exposes what happens when human systems decide who matters, who succeeds, who fails, and whose life is expendable. Grace announces something those systems cannot tolerate:
Your worth was never theirs to calculate.
That does not mean faithfulness does not matter. It does not mean churches should ignore decline, leaders should avoid accountability, or Christians should stop asking whether our ministries bear fruit. It means fruit is not the same thing as worth. There are faithful churches with shrinking membership. There are flourishing ministries whose impact cannot be captured on a statistical report. There are people doing holy work that will never produce impressive numbers. And there are successful institutions whose statistics look wonderful while their witness looks nothing like Christ.
Charlie Bucket deserves the factory, and that is why Wonka gives it to him. But the kingdom of God is not a chocolate factory. There are no golden tickets and no scoreboard determining who has accumulated enough merit to belong. Grace does not gather the winners at the end of the tour and congratulate them for being better than everybody who disappeared along the way.
Grace gives us what none of us could ever claim to deserve.
Maybe the question is not whether we have done enough to deserve what God gives us, but what might happen if the church finally believed that nobody had to.
THOUGHT OF THE DAY
Grace stops being grace the moment we turn it into something anyone must deserve.PRAYER
God of grace, free us from the need to measure our worth against the success or failure of others. Teach us to recognize the difference between faithful accountability and systems that turn achievement into value. Strip away our boasting, widen our mercy, and shape us into people who receive your grace as gift and extend it just as freely. Amen.
[i] Devotion written by Rev. Todd R. Lattig with the assistance of ChatGPT (OpenAI).