“You deserve it!” A Soapbox
Few phrases in our culture make my skin crawl more quickly than this: You deserve it! Or, I deserve it! They raise the fierce, fanatically loyal, gun-toting, heavy-metal listening side of me so fast. They make me anything but gentle and quiet. The concept of deserving some sort of reward because we’ve done ordinary work is diabolical. It’s arrogant and entirely unchristian. It’s selfish and narcissistic.
We, humanity, deserve nothing.
We don’t deserve anything in life.
That concept should be our starting point, not ‘me, me, me, reward me, I labored.’
Women especially seem trapped by this idea. We run around saying, screaming, demanding what we think we deserve. But who set the ‘deserve’ standard? Who said ‘this is worthy’ and the rest of this isn’t? We use this catchphrase for such flippant things. “I bought a new pair of shoes because I deserve this.” Commercials tell us we deserve their product and services. And by what standard have you judged your level of hardship, difficulty, endurance, and value to justify a new pair of expensive shoes? Or me-time? Or a vacation? Or any sort of self-indulgence?
The “deserve” culture removes grace and mercy. It removes the idea of the undeserved rescue, the salvaged unsalvageable. It starts with us being worthy of lavishness and then pouts when we aren’t lavished. Who decides who deserves what? The deserve culture is arbitrary and destructive. We live in a culture that thinks it can make it without grace and mercy. That we, just by being born, deserve health, beauty, safety, wealth, and riches. And if we don’t have it, because we deserve it, we take it. We have made an arbitrary standard of worth and heart-murdered anyone who dares to suggest otherwise.
We do the same thing with the word ‘hero’. We’ve made it arbitrary. In 2020 people labeled themselves heroic as they went to their normal jobs. Aldi put signs out front, ‘Heroes work here’ as they wore their masks, stood six feet apart with Plexiglas between them and us. (Yes, so heroic.)
Soldiers don’t like to be called heroes. Any vet will tell you the heroes are the men and women who never made it home, not the ones who did. Now someone who works part-time in an air-conditioned grocery store in the USA is declaring themselves heroic for coming to work.
It’s revolting, egotistical, and demeaning.
When we start claiming we deserve things because of the struggles of ordinary life or that we’re heroic because we’re bagging groceries, we lose not only what is heroic but also what is good about bagging groceries.
This is starting at the end of Proverbs 31 and demanding praise without doing any of the intense work. When that praise is demanded and the demand is given into it robs us of the glory of the work. If we all get participation trophies then why excel? How do you learn what you’re actually good at if we all get praised no matter what we do?
If we’re a hero for bagging groceries then how can a shop boy be inspired to be actually heroic? He’s already declared he’s as heroic as a soldier who has sacrificed his life or is willing to, and he deserves to be acknowledged for that, so what’s going to inspire him? Who does he look up to?
We are surrounded and marinating in a culture with no understanding of the difference between ordinary and heroic, and so we destroy the value of both heroic and ordinary. We have no humility. We don’t believe in God, we don’t worship God. We believe, because evolution teaches it, that man is a collection of chemical impulses, and we worship ourselves. This is what happens in a humanistic culture. We stop worshiping God and we go all in on worshiping man.
Life takes on a rich sweetness when we come at it with humility. We don’t clamor to be noticed, appreciated, praised, and honored. We believers know we deserve death, abandonment, exposure, and derision. Not new shoes, a new outfit, a treat, or a spa day. When we see this, grace and mercy flood our lives in a torrent. Everything becomes all of grace and not of me. Plants and trees, our homes and families, our churches, the food on our table, spa days, new shoes, new outfits, treats, a glass of wine at the end of the day, vacation, all that we have and are we don’t deserve.
Now the shop boy can bag with a heart of thankfulness and receive praise and the soldier can heroically sacrifice. Humbly, not demanding, but receiving.
This humility that we so desperately need affects our views of race and the environment. Humility teaches us that we can’t save things. We can’t save the earth and to think we can is utter arrogance. Go live off the land for just a week and you will quickly…die. Nature doesn’t need us. Nature can do things just fine without us. Nature is a force we don’t understand and can’t control and we have the arrogance to think we can save it. Same thing with rampant racism. We have the gall to think we can save ourselves from sin in our hearts by forcing everyone into a box of specific behavior. We think we can atone for the sins of our country, culture, and heritage by erasing it. We think we can save someone else by just bowing to their arrogant demands as if either of us has the power to fix this situation. If we came at different cultures and races with humility, we could actually learn from our pasts and treat each other kindly because we wouldn’t be demanding what we think we deserve. We would see the good and the growth instead of insisting that the good and growth isn’t enough.
We look at this world and we demand what we deserve and we think we can and have to save it all because we have stopped believing in infinite goodness. God is good and God is infinite. It is pagans who think that the resources of this world can be lost because they don’t believe in an infinitely good God. It is the pagans who erase history and scream that you’re not paying enough attention to me and now it’s my time to demean you because you have demeaned me. That isn’t humility. Humility says yes, you demeaned me, but I don’t deserve anything more. Humility can forgive, show grace, reach out with a hand of mercy.
There is only one being who has walked this earth who is worthy and deserves everything. Only Christ. Only Christ was good, kind, gracious, humble, and true. Only Christ truly deserves praise. Only Christ is actually worthy of worship. When we realize that only He has ever been worthy, it puts us in our place. And then the real pain point comes: He never demanded. Not once did the only being who was worthy demand that homage. Throughout scripture, we humans fall all over ourselves before angels. They are always quick to correct that they aren’t worthy of worship. Christ came humbly, as a man, setting aside the worship that he is worthy of. He came, he lived in poverty, he had few friends, and then he willingly submitted to a death he did not deserve for our sake. Look at our Christ. He never said, “I deserve this.” He did the opposite. He took on what he didn’t deserve, with all humility, and all trust in his Father’s infinite goodness.
Homemakers, we need to make sure we don’t buy into this culture. We don’t deserve anything. We shouldn’t say this to one another and we shouldn’t say it to ourselves. If we go at our work with an understanding that we aren’t worthy of praise, then our husband’s praise will be sweet. This isn’t being a doormat for abuse. This isn’t not telling our husbands when we’re discouraged because we feel taken for granted. This is understanding every moment of every day that all that we are and all that we have is undeserved.
This will impact our attitudes. It will help mitigate anxiety, worry, fear, and complaining. Every complaint we voice is acting like God isn’t infinitely good. It is an expression of unbelief. We need to come at our churches from this perspective. If we did, we wouldn’t be so quick to take a slight or leave when the going got tough. We would appreciate our pastors and deacons. If we came at our marriages like this, we would be filled with more love, and we would find gentleness and quietness. We would take offense slower and praise more. If we raised our kids this way, we would help them gain self-control, identify their gifts, and guide them towards wisdom and common sense. If we did this in our homes, practiced humility instead of believing we were worthy of worship by all those around us, our homes would be tended with grace, mercy, and kindness. They would be filled with worshipful prayer and warmth.
This is why the idea that I deserve any good thing makes my skin crawl. It steals goodness from everything. It lies and manipulates us into tyranny and evil. Sometimes it is small, like getting a new t-shirt, but the lies mushroom into a world filled with spoiled children, angry women, abused men, a disregard for history, and a lack of wise stewardship of our resources. It creates a world all about me, and that is always a bad thing.
HearthKeepers, we can’t act like the world is out there and we’re safe in here. The world is in our homes, our hearths, and our hearts. We have to hold the line, stand firm in our shield wall, and stay at our posts. We are part of this fight. Stay in it!
So you also, when you have done all that you were commanded, say,
‘We are unworthy servants; we have only done what was our duty.’
Luke 17:10
