Beyond the question of "Am I saved?"

Imagine a man who has worked for the same company for forty years. One day a friend asks him, “Why do you stay? The pay isn’t great, the hours are long, and you could have retired years ago.” He thinks for a moment and answers, “I love the work. Even if they fired me tomorrow, I’d still want to do it.”

Now imagine that same kind of love—but turned toward God.

In the seventeenth century, a humble brother who washed dishes in a Carmelite monastery in Paris said something so startling that, taken out of context, it might sound almost heretical. Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection, in conversation with his friend Joseph de Beaufort, declared:

“Whether I am damned or saved, I will always continue to act purely for the love of God. I shall at least have this good—until death, I will do what is in my power to love Him.” (The Practice of the Presence of God, Second Conversation)

Say what?

Whether I am damned or saved.

This is not a man unconcerned with his eternal destiny. In the pages before that, Brother Lawrence talks about how he endured a four-year trial in perpetual anxiety about whether he was destined for heaven or hell. The answer he found wasn't in a new formula about justification, how to be saved. What he found was the heart of God, Himself.

This is a man who has discovered something so much greater than his eternal destiny that even the question of heaven and hell has become secondary to the One who reigns over both.

 

The Trap of Spiritual Self-Concern

Most of us have been taught, perhaps without realizing it, that the central question of the Christian life is: Am I going to heaven?

Sermons are preached on it. Books are written about it. Many evangelists, well intentioned, begin every dialogue with an unbeliever with, "If you were to die today, where would you go?" Whole theological systems have been constructed around this question, the pivotal question that split the Church in the sixteenth century was surrounding this question.

And maybe that was the problem.

Because there is something subtly wrong with making this our preoccupation.

Notice what happens when “Will I be saved?” becomes the dominant question of our spiritual life. The subject of every sentence becomes I. I must believe rightly. I must do enough. I must feel the right things. I must have assurance. I must avoid hell. I must reach heaven.

God, in this scheme, becomes a means to an end. He becomes the gatekeeper, the judge, the ticket-puncher. Even when we say we love Him, we may actually be loving what He can give us. We are like the child who is sweet to grandmother only because grandmother gives candy. The relationship is real on one level, but it is not yet love.

The Apostle John gave us a piercing diagnostic: ”There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love” (1 John 4:18). Notice how easily our religion can become a religion of fear dressed up in the language of love. We sing hymns to God while quietly negotiating with Him for our safety.

Do we love God because we believe we're going to heaven? Or, do we trust our eternal destiny to He whom we Love, and knowing such Love, begin to find that such questions no longer concern us?

Would a child who loves His father expect him to give him a snake when he asks for bread? Jesus asked this question, once. The answer, of course, was no.

Our confidence, our hope, and even our faith, is all formed by love. And in love, these things cease to become sources of anxiety, because love knows Love.

Brother Lawrence’s statement explodes pretty much every debate over "justification" and "salvation" that's ever been had.

He has stopped using God to secure his own destiny. He simply wants to love God—because God is worth loving.

 

The Witness of the New Testament

Some readers, hearing Brother Lawrence’s words, may feel a flicker of theological alarm. Doesn’t faith save us? Aren’t we supposed to be concerned with our justification? And of course, in one sense, yes. But we must look carefully at what the New Testament actually says about the saving life.

Saint Paul writes, ”And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love” (1 Corinthians 13:13). Note that he does not say faith is the greatest. Love is the greatest. And earlier in the same chapter he had said something even more devastating: ”And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing” (1 Corinthians 13:2).

Faith without love, Paul says, makes us nothing. Not “less than we could be,” but nothing.

Saint James pushes the same point from a different angle: ”What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save you?” (James 2:14). And again, ”You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe—and shudder” (James 2:19). The demons have faith. They believe in God’s existence with more certainty than any of us. What they lack is love.

This is why Brother Lawrence’s apparent recklessness is actually deep biblical wisdom. He has understood that the goal of the Christian life is not to get saved—as if salvation were a thing we could acquire and pocket. The goal is to love God. And anyone who actually loves God is, by that very fact, walking the path of salvation, because ”God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them” (1 John 4:16).

Let's put it this way. Can you have faith without love? Well, you can have a faith of a kind. It's the sort of faith you might have that when you put your money in the bank it will be there when you withdraw it. But do you really think the banker loves you?

Can you have love, though, without faith? Of course not. Faith is part and parcel of love. Love, by its very nature, trusts the beloved. It surrenders to the beloved.

I cannot speak of faith without speaking likewise of love.

If you are praying, constantly, for a stronger faith... try praying instead for a greater love. And in that very prayer, you will find the answer. Faith's prayer is nothing more nor less than to speak in love, to Love, and to receive a Love that cannot but believe. For it is in love that you are drawn the nearest to He who is Love. Stronger faith will not be denied you, precisely because you stopped fixating on it, and you surrendered yourself to love.

The point of this is not to diminish faith for love's sake, but to understand the faith that saves us can never be anything other than the movement of love. This is why faith is a gift from God, but it is also our faith that believes—no one else can "believe" for you. In Love, we are Loved. Our love, in turn, becomes our own in the receiving of Love. This is to say, faith is that which possesses Love, though not as we possess an object in our pockets, or in our drawers. It is a Love that we possess in faith in our hearts, and our love is simply a return of Love to Love, an overflow of infinite Love that our hearts cannot contain and must, in turn, spill over the brim in love of God, which is to say, to love God in all things.

The Greek Word Worth Knowing

The verb Saint John uses for “abide” is menō—to remain, to dwell, to stay. It is the same word Jesus uses in John 15: ”Abide in me as I abide in you” (John 15:4). To abide in love is to take up residence there. It is not a transaction; it is a dwelling place.

When Brother Lawrence says he will love God whether he is damned or saved, he is essentially saying: I want to live in God’s love. That is my home. Whatever else happens, I will not leave that home.

This shifts everything. Heaven becomes not a reward we earn by loving but the very atmosphere of love itself. Hell becomes not the punishment for failing to love but the dreadful condition of a soul that has refused to love. Brother Lawrence is not gambling with his soul; he is recognizing that love itself is salvation, and refusing to love would be the very essence of being lost.

This is where the love of neighbor comes from. I cannot love my neighbor, for all his faults, his annoying quirks, his unlovableness, by the strength of my heart alone. I can only love the unlovable because, as one who is himself unlovable, I have been so loved. As such, the beginning and the end of all things is God, who is Love.

Do you love God more when you pray or worship than when you do the dishes, or scoop up dog poop in the yard?

Do you love God less when you are doing such things?

Do you love God and less when you are dealing with children who are so entirely focused on themselves that they have no concern for your time, and exhibit little gratitude for your care? Why do you care for your children at all, who seem to think not of love but of acquiring something for themselves? Is it because they are in themselves lovable? Do your children merit your love in any way? How tragic would it be if a parent's love was contingent upon reciprocation. This would, then, cease to be love at all. For a love that withholds itself in proportion to what it receives is no love.

God's love for us is an infinite and unconditional love. And it is wholly abiding in His love that we learn to love with similar reckless abandon for love's sake alone, rather than as a kind of "exchange" of goods of measurable value. This is why we love our children, even when they're asking us for a thousand things, and love of themselves rather than love of us seems to be their only concern. And it is in loving this way that they, too, learn love's language. It is in this kind of love that God's love for us fills their little hearts as well.

If we love our children this way, which most parents cannot help but do, we must recognize that this love is a participation in God's love. It is a participation in God, Himself.

As such, let us not be stingy about what people, or situations, or deeds, we allow love to fill. When even the most menial of tasks, no matter how arduous or displeasing, is enveloped in love, the distaste for the task fades away. It becomes, rather, a kind of extension of prayer.

When we pray in love, that love does not end at "Amen." The Amen carries us forward, with the same love, into daily life so that love might envelop all things.

And then, soon, we find that nothing perplexes our troubles us. What does it matter if I should endure something unpleasing, suffering of any sort, or even the hatred of those who do not know love?

Where there is not love, St. John of the Cross once said, put love. And then, you will draw out love.

When we encounter any situation, no matter what it might be, that appears devoid of love... once we enter into it with the love that overflows from God through us and out of our hearts, we can no longer claim that love is absent. Whether the love is poured into a situation through us, or through another person, does not matter. You were never the source of that love, It is God who is the source of all love, and it is in His love that all things, from the ordinary but distasteful task to the greatest pain endured by a martyr, becomes redeemed in love.

 

Why This Liberates Us

Here is the great paradox: when we stop being anxious about our salvation, we are most likely to be saved. When we stop calculating, when we stop trying to make sure our spiritual ledger balances, when we simply turn our face toward God and love Him, the whole tortured machinery of religious self-concern falls silent.

This is what Jesus meant when He said, ”Those who try to make their life secure will lose it, but those who lose their life will keep it” (Luke 17:33). The person who clutches at salvation, who makes their own eternal destiny the main object of their religious life, will find that something has gone strangely cold and small. The person who lets go—who simply loves—will discover that they have everything.

Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, another Carmelite, would later capture this same spirit. I shared this quote a couple weeks ago, but it bears repeating.

In her last days of her illness, her sister Céline was reading her “a passage on the happiness of heaven.” Céline's intention was, in fact, loving. As her sister approached death, she meant to console her with the hope of heaven. But Thérèse stopped her:

That’s not what attracts me… Oh! it’s Love! To love, to be loved, and to return to the earth to make Love loved.

Sit with how strange that is. A young woman in excruciating pain, days from death, is offered a description of heavenly happiness, and waves it away. Not because she does not want heaven, but because she has seen that heaven described as a state of satisfaction, an experiential reward, a better quality of personal feeling, is a counterfeit of the real thing. What attracts her is not a manufactured happiness but Love—and notice that her Love immediately turns outward: to love, to be loved, and then, restlessly, “to return to the earth to make Love loved.”

The Ultimate Trap: "But How Do I Know If I Love God Enough?"

There is a final, subtle trap the ego sets for us when we begin this journey. We hear the call to love God purely, we read Brother Lawrence’s breathtaking words, and immediately our old, anxious habit of spiritual self-concern wakes up. It whispers a new question: “But how do I know if I love God enough? What if my love isn't pure? What if I’m still secretly selfish?”

And just like that, the subject of the sentence has become I all over again. We are back to taking our spiritual temperature, terrified that our love is too lukewarm to count.

If you find yourself asking this, take a deep breath.

The answer is beautifully liberating: You don’t love God enough. And you never will.

If the metric of salvation is the perfection of your capacity to love, we are all lost. Our human love is always a bit tangled, always a little clumsy, and always mixed with our own needs and neuroses.

But Brother Lawrence’s secret wasn't that he possessed a flawless, superhuman reservoir of love. His secret was that he stopped looking at his own love altogether and looked entirely at God’s.

We do not generate love out of our own willpower. As Saint John reminds us, “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). Your desire to love God—even if it feels as small as a mustard seed, even if it is laced with fear—is actually the echo of His love already at work inside you. You don't need to manufacture "perfect love" to cast out fear; you just need to let yourself be loved by the One who is perfect love.

When you worry about whether you love Him enough, you are still trying to rely on your own performance. Let that go. God does not demand a flawless performance; He desires a relationship. If your love feels small today, give Him that small love. He is a Father who delights in the clumsy, broken bouquet of dandelions a child brings Him, simply because the child thought of Him.

Stop trying to measure the quantity of your love, and simply rest in the quality of His.

Love doesn't grow by addition, but by multiplication. Would you rather have a million dollars now, or a single penny that doubles tomorrow and every day thereafter? We've all considered this little exercise before, and we know the wiser answer is to receive the penny.

So if all you have is a single cent's worth of love, then give God that single cent, like the widow who only offered a mite in the coffer at the temple. God will return that single penny, not merely doubled, but multiplied many times over. Then, give God again what you've received, and He'll continue to multiply what's offered.

This is ultimately what heaven is. It's not a place where you experience some kind of quantifiable bliss, in contrast to this world. Heaven is simply being in the presence of God, and in the mystery of His infinite love, he never runs out of love with which to multiply what you offer. And you can begin your heaven, your gift of love now, no matter how small your love might be in the moment. Do not receive God's love like the person who foolishly takes the million dollars and settles. Receive it like the one who gives a penny, and receives an eternity of infinite love in response.

 

Practical Application: Living the Love-First Life

How do we begin to live in this freedom? Here are several ways to start:

1. Notice your inner sentences. For one day, pay attention to how often the subject of your spiritual thoughts is I. Did I pray enough? Was that a sin that I did? Will I be forgiven? Am I making progress? When you notice this, gently shift the subject to God. Lord, You are good. Lord, I love You. Lord, You are present.

2. Make small acts of love without calculation. Do something small today—wash a dish, smile at a stranger, say a quiet prayer—not to earn anything, not to be a “good Christian,” but simply because you love God. Brother Lawrence found God in the noise and clatter of the kitchen as much as in the chapel, because he was doing it for love. Are you doing dishes? Do them in love. Are you sweeping the floor? Do it in love. Are you stuck in traffic? Creep along the road in love. Are you enduring the verbal abuse of a coworker? Suffer it in love.

3. Pray a prayer of pure love. Try saying, in some form: Lord, I love You for who You are. I would love You even if there were no heaven to gain and no hell to fear. You are worthy of my love. This demolishes self-interested religion.

4. Stop checking your spiritual temperature. Many of us are like hypochondriacs of the soul, constantly taking our spiritual pulse. Are we feeling holy enough? Are we doing enough? Do we have assurance? Trust that if you are facing toward God in love, you do not need to keep looking back at yourself to verify your condition. Just keep loving and being loved. You do not become holy by the merits of what you do, even if those deeds be an arduous prayer regimen. You become holy by drawing closer to Holiness, that is Love. You will never do enough, but the Love you receive knows no limit, and in love the smallest deed becomes great, while apart from love, the greatest deed becomes nothing.

5. Embrace the present moment as the place of love. You cannot love God next week. You aren't there yet. Tomorrow is always just ahead of us. You can only love Him now. In this conversation, this task, this breath, this small sorrow, this small joy. You do not need to wait until your prayer time, or when worship is on your schedule. Let every moment, every deed, every pain and happiness, be a prayer, be your worship, because that's how the present moment becomes communion, it's how now overflows in love. The whole eternal question of salvation collapses into a single point: Am I loving Him in this moment?

Brother Lawrence was not being reckless. He was being free. He had learned what most of us spend our entire lives almost learning: that the love of God is not a strategy for self-preservation but the joy for which we were made.

To love God whether saved or damned is not to despise heaven. It is to love God more than heaven. And paradoxically, only those who love God more than heaven are truly fit for it. For heaven, in the end, is nothing but the unveiled face of the One we have loved.