Does God measure our effort or our effectiveness?

So, this morning, while I was leafing through pages and pages of business-related comments on LinkedIn, I found an article by Business Insider[1] that calls for bosses to evaluate employees’ efforts rather than their results. According to “top psychologists,” judging results could end up giving credit for luck instead of skill. The article cites work by Daniel Kahneman, winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize for his work in behavioral economics and author of the 2011 bestseller “Thinking, Fast and Slow.” Kahneman’s premise: We cannot control luck; therefore, rewarding results ignores the effort a skilled but potentially unsuccessful employee exerts, which is infinitely more important to business success than luck.

While I’m not a Nobel Prize winner in anything, I’m willing to go out on a limb and postulate that Kahneman also supports participation trophies. I’m also willing to bet Kahneman has never heard the joke about turning a billion dollar business into a million dollar business.

Here’s the thing, and you will discover this if you read the article, these “top psychologists” equate full-grown adults and their learning style to that of developing children and adolescents, citing the psychological effect of praising a child’s effort as more effective in leading that child to improvement, than in praising his or her actual results. The article even argues that the business world is a place for results, not exclusively for teaching, and compares for retention of knowledge the act of teaching to the test versus teaching for knowledge within the education system. While their argument may be sound for the education system in America, it is wholly misleading and utterly exasperating to think a business could survive such a mentality.

Consider this. Under Kahneman’s philosophy, the business developer who never actually wins work, the car salesman who never actually sells a car or the physician who never actually cures a patient’s ailment will all be evaluated for their efforts equally with the BD personality who wins billions in work for the company or the doctor who effectively diagnoses and treats breast cancer. That’s right, when you consider the actual consequences of Kahneman’s thinking; you realize that his approach risks destroying highly successful business cultures across the country.

Now don’t get me wrong. There is room in the business community for including Kahneman’s ideas as a part of the evaluation process, just not in entirely replacing the onus on winning. Kahneman is advocating evaluating Measures of Performance over Measures of Effectiveness. In essence, he claims the way we get to the end matters more to a business’ long-term quality, than does the end itself. Well, that’s the crux of the billion-million dollar business joke.

Now let’s put this in Biblical perspective. What does the Bible say about God’s perspective on “winning?” Most Christians will argue that God, like Kahneman, honors our efforts over our results, and then they’ll cite Romans followed by 2 Corinthians.

“for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,” (Rom 3:23, NIV)

“God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” (2 Cor 5:21, NIV)

In Romans, Paul is very clear, if the pure, just, and perfect God of Heaven was to evaluate us strictly on results, every human that ever lived past the age of three would basically fail the evaluation and deserve to be fired. Think about that for just a second. The very first sin you committed, whether throwing an unjust temper tantrum at the tender age of four just because you didn’t get that toy you so selfishly wanted or that first piece of candy you stole from the store because you wanted it but couldn’t pay for it and nobody was watching anyway, was enough to earn you a lifelong ban from Heaven. God and sin cannot coexist; therefore, if we choose sin, we cannot withstand the holiness of God.

And yet, here we are, sinners, saved by grace, damned to Hell only if we reject God’s gift of eternal life. But does Jesus Christ’s sacrifice on the cross really mean that God, like Kahneman, values our efforts over our results?

Not entirely. Don’t get me wrong. God is a realist. He created everything in existence and He knows the number of hairs on your head. (Matt 10:30, Luke 12:7) And He knows every sin you have and will commit, yet He sent His Son, Jesus Christ, to become sin and take away the death that results from sin, so that we may live eternally with Him.

“So, if Jesus took away the penalty of my sin, I’m free to sin! As long as I give it the good old college try, failure is an option.”

Not so, Christian. God knows the damage that sin can do, and He cautions us that, while his love, power, mercy and grace are eternal, our selfish choice to return to sin has a cumulative effect on our ability to recognize the glory of His gift over the temporary satisfaction of sin.

“If we keep on sinning because we want to after we have received and know the truth, there is no gift that will take away sins then.” (Heb 10:26, NLV)

God knows the compounding damage sin has on our lives. He knows that repetitive sin hardens our hearts, and damages our relationship with Him. He knows the longer and deeper we dive into a life of repetitive sin, the stronger the habit of sin becomes, and the harder it is for us to climb up out of that hole into His presence. The harder we cling to our selfish sins, the more likely we are to follow them away from God’s burning holy light. So, God does acknowledge the little victories, the daily effort we give in contrast with the daily sin we suffer, on our journey to become more like Him. But He would rather we succeed, knowing that in our success we distance ourselves further from the death that His Son suffered for us.

“Therefore if you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if any comfort from his love, if any common sharing in the Spirit, if any tenderness and compassion, then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and of one mind. Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others. In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death — even death on a cross!” (Phil 2:1-11, NIV)

[1]https://www.businessinsider.com/judge-employee-results-vs-effort-2018-12