“By Grace Alone”: Why Hustle Culture Can’t Save Your Soul
By Pastor Ben Workentine, Discipleship Pastor at St. Mark Ministries
Five hundred years ago, a German monk by the name of Martin Luther started asking some dangerous questions.
While his life would have repercussions around the world, he never set out to be a rebel. He had no dreams of beginning something new. He was just tired.
Tired of feeling guilty, tired of trying, tired of suffering, tired of punishing himself, hoping that God would one day smile at him. He was tired of an angry God who only seemed to get angrier the more he did.
See, Martin was asking hard questions. But at the bottom of all those questions was one simple question that he kept coming back to in all of his study, all of his meditation, all of his teaching, all of his preaching, everything: “What is it going to take to make God happy with me? What will it take for me to be worthy of his love?”
And then one day, it was like a light bulb flipped on for him. He began to write 95 bullet points – covering a lot of territory – but at the bottom of it all, one theme rang out: God’s love can’t be earned, not for all the work in the world.
He posted those 95 bullet points up on the community board and left them there, hoping that somebody would correct him, somebody would show him the error of his tired ways.
What actually happened starting on that late October day in 1517 was a reformation that swept through Europe and eventually left its fingerprints on the entire world. See, Martin had rediscovered something that is all too easily forgotten: Grace cannot be achieved. It can only be received.
Here we sit, 500 years later, asking a lot of the same questions. Oh, the specifics and the language might have changed. We’ll ask questions like, “What’s it going to take for me to earn my worth? What does it take for me to be safe? What does it take for me to be me?”
But if you want to distill all those questions and give them spiritual language because they are inherently spiritual questions, it might go something like this: “What does it take to save a soul?”
Let’s ask that question. Let’s wrestle with some of the most common answers provided and see if we end up in the same place Martin did or someplace different. Will we end up with “grace alone”?
Debunking the “Do the Work” Philosophy
What does it take to save a soul?
You might think it’s “do the work, hustle, get out there, earn your keep, achieve, just start.” It’s the entrepreneurial spirit! How many great companies today began in a basement or a garage or a coffee shop with someone who had a dream? And that company has now reached the pinnacle of its industry because someone was willing to put in the work to make that dream a reality? They hustled.
The story that “hustle” tells is one of self-reliance: “No one’s going to give you what you’re looking for; you can’t rely on anyone else. Your worth is yours to create, and your bank account is an easy metric of how much worth you actually created. Your productivity is your permission to exist.”
The problem is that people who have hustled the most – the people who have reached the highest highs – there’s no relief. Go ask somebody like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos how many hours a day they work. They’re not taking it easy. They’re still hustling.
If you’ve ever achieved some goal of yours and then gone back to work on Monday, you know the feeling. Because “do the work” is an insatiable appetite that will drive you to more, more, more. There’s always going to be something else to do.
See, if you try to answer the question, “How do you save a soul?” with “Do the work,” you’re going to run into problems. Because everyone who talks about “do the work” – all the podcasters, all the authors, all the self-made millionaires – their assumption is that “all you need is motivation.”
But Paul says it’s deeper than that. The author of the letter to the Ephesians recognizes that you need more than motivation. You need a fundamental change.
In Ephesians 2:4-10 (NIV), he calls us dead – which means that all your hustle, all your work, all your “get out there and make it happen,” it all starts from 6 feet underground.
Which means you don’t need motivation, you need resurrection.
Hustle can’t deliver on its promise because hustle depends on your production, and production inevitably fades with time.
Debunking the “Be a Good Person” Solution
So maybe hustle is not the answer at all. Maybe you take the pressure off yourself and put it on other people? Maybe you stop looking at yourself and start looking at others?
Maybe the answer to the question, “How do you save a soul?” isn’t in here; it’s out there. Instead of pursuing greatness, you pursue goodness?
It’s another possible answer to “How do you save a soul?” – “Do the work.”
You’ve seen the creed. Maybe you’ve even said or posted the creed: “Unlearn, decenter, get therapy, be an ally.”
I think we can make the case for this kind of work being born of compassion. It could be a blessing to make space for someone else to thrive, to step out of the limelight so that somebody else could step into it.
Maybe the problem is virtue gets just as twisted as hustle. See, hustle gets twisted into the lie that your worth is the same as your production. Virtue gets twisted into “your worth is how you love.”
And that too becomes an insatiable appetite, a bottomless pit, because there’s always something more to unlearn. There’s always another word to scrub out of your vocabulary. There’s always another apology to make. There’s always more, more, more.
It will always demand that you platform a new person, that you get out of the way a little bit farther. It’s always going to demand that you demonstrate even greater virtue. It’s never going to be enough. There’s never a finite amount. There’s never a completion. There are always demands.
No one has the power to validate another human being. As soon as you try to, you’ll find yourself pushing a rock uphill, a rock that will inevitably roll back down before you ever reach the summit.
Whether it’s doing the work to prove your worth through hustle or doing the work to prove your goodness by virtue, they come down to the same problem: You cannot stack habits or add hashtags enough to save a soul.
“By Grace Alone” is the Only Perfect Solution
To answer our question, you have to get deeper. You have to go all the way to the bottom of who we are, to the very core of our nature. That is where scripture – especially this section from Ephesians – hits the nail on the head.
Let’s read Ephesians 2:4-10 (NIV). Some of the words might be familiar. You may have even memorized them! But can I encourage you? Can I challenge you as I read them, as we read them together, to read them for the very first time, to see them with fresh eyes:
“But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions – it is by grace you have been saved. And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith – and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God – not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.
Paul starts this section with a showstopper; two simple words that change the vibe of the entire conversation. You can see everything else that everyone else is going to say, “Do this, try that, be there.” The Apostle Paul, by the Holy Spirit, puts up a giant stop sign right in front of each of our faces. He stops us in our tracks from going down the dead-end road of obedience, of productivity, of signaling virtue, and gives us a surprise: “But God.”
And if that doesn’t stop you in your tracks, I’m not sure what will. “But God.” Stop making this all about you. Stop putting yourself at the center of the whole conversation. Look instead to God. When you do, what will you see?
There are two characteristics of God that come out and are worth our time in this section.
God’s Great Love for You
The first characteristic is his great love for you.
What’s the anthem of toddlerhood? You think it’s “no,” but that’s number two. The favorite thing for a toddler to say is: “I do it myself.”
Whether it’s zipping up their jacket, pouring the milk in their cereal, tying their shoes, turning on their favorite show, getting ready for bed, climbing into bed, changing their diaper… “I do it myself.”
I had the same attitude toward God. “I’ll do it myself.” When my toddler says it, it drives me crazy. When I said it to God, it drove him to love me.
He loves you.
- Loved you when it was clear that you were never going to be the person you needed to be.
- Loved you when it was clear that it was impossible for you to save your own soul.
- Loved you when you were way more interested in hustling or signaling virtue than you ever were in being saved.
He loved you because he chose to. Not because of what you produced, not because of the goodness you demonstrated, but because God – in his infinite wisdom, the one who sits on the throne in heaven, the one who created the atoms and the black holes and everything in between, the one who created everything – chose in his wisdom to create you with value. He loves you.
God’s Great Mercy Toward You
The second attribute we see in these verses is that God is rich in mercy.
I hope that every time you hear the word “mercy” come through in a page of scripture, you have a picture in your head. Here’s what it looks like:
A criminal caught red-handed who’s been accused, found out, and now kneels with head bowed in front of an all-powerful king who has every right to pass any judgment he wants. The criminal has no hope of leniency, no leverage for a plea bargain. So he waits for the hammer to drop, for the punishment to be pronounced. As the king draws breath to speak it out, the crown prince steps in and says, “Wait, wait. Whatever you are going to do to him, do to me. I’ll take the punishment. Let him go free.”
Mercy is not getting what we deserve.
Our New Identity in Christ
These two attributes of God, his love and his mercy, give birth to something in us that we could have only ever hoped to dream of. They give birth to a brand new identity.
Ephesians 2:4-10 (NIV) puts it this way, a list of different phrases that all come out to the same place: He made us alive in Christ. He raises you up. He has seated you at the table with King Jesus himself.
See, the fundamental flaw in any prophet who speaks about “do the work” – whether it’s hustle or virtue or work righteousness or any other human-invented solution, any other human-invented answer to the problem of “how do you save your soul” – the fundamental flaw is that they give us way too much credit. They imagine us like cars that work pretty well, just need a tune-up.
But the truth is, we are not broken people who need to be fixed. We’re dead people who need to be raised to life.
The more you do the work, the more you realize that you’ll never make it happen, which is why God had to step in. Why God had to make you alive. Why God had to raise you from the dead. No one else was going to do it.
That’s grace.
God’s Grace Changes Everything!
This grace shapes everything we are, everything we do. That’s what this last verse, Ephesians 2:10 (NIV), is all about. It says we’re called the handiwork of God to “do the work prepared in advance for us.”
There’s stuff to do. We’re called to do something! We’re called to be something new in this world. Not in order to earn an identity that’s already been given. Not in order to find a purpose that’s already been granted, but because you are something new.
It changes everything.
Every thought, every decision, every action.
- Whether or not you decide to enroll in that class at NWTC
- Whether or not you decide to go out for lunch
- Whether or not you cook a homemade meal at dinner
- Whether or not you sign your kids up for winter sports
- Whether or not you decide to take that new job
- Whether or not you get the promotion
- Whether or not you start the business
- Whether or not you decide to sleep in on Saturday or get a ton of things done
- Whether or not you decide to go another round in Call of Duty
- Whether or not you decide to call her after she gave you her number
All of it, every part, is shaped by the new creation because you have been shaped by a God who has created something new in you.
It’s an old question: “How do you save a soul?”
There have been lots of answers given over the years, the centuries, the millennia, but they break down into two basic categories: Either you do the work or God does the work for you.
On one hand, it’ll never be enough. You’ll never be done. There will always be more demanded of you.
On the other, you’ll find the things you most craved from the beginning. Meaning, value, purpose. They’re all yours. The work has been done. Your soul is saved by grace alone!