Faith and Works

By Jean-Philippe Gabriel — frameworklove.com | January 1, 2026

For a long time, I lived inside the faith-and-works debate. I knew the verses. I knew the warnings. “Not everyone who says ‘Lord, Lord’ will enter the kingdom.” “Faith without works is dead.” Page after page of Scripture seemed to insist on the same conclusion: works matter.

And they do.

But not in the way I once thought.

I used to believe works had to be monitored—counted, evaluated, protected. I obeyed carefully. I kept the commandments. I avoided what I was told to avoid. I had faith, and I had works. And yet, beneath it all, I lived with a quiet anxiety: Am I doing enough? Am I still aligned? Am I safe?

I told myself this vigilance was maturity. In truth, it was fear.

What finally broke the spell was not abandoning theology, but taking Jesus seriously—more seriously than the system I had built around Him.

Jesus spoke of love in a way that made accounting impossible. He spoke of generosity where the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing. Of forgiveness that arrives before repentance. Of mercy without guarantees. Of love that acts and then forgets itself.

At first, I resisted that vision. Because if love acts without keeping score, then works can no longer function as proof. They can no longer function as leverage. They can no longer function as reassurance.

And that is precisely the point.

What I slowly began to see is that works matter theologically—but psychologically, they begin to dissolve. Not because they disappear, but because they stop being about me. They simply happen.

I began to allow myself forms of generosity I once withheld—not because I had calculated them as virtuous, but because love made calculation feel out of place. I found myself doing the right thing more often, not less. And at the same time, I became more aware of how often I fail: in patience, in attentiveness, in care, in the ways I still hurt and disappoint others.

Instead of making me confident, this made me small.

And that smallness was freeing.

I no longer felt like someone building a case for my own righteousness. I felt like someone learning, slowly and imperfectly, how to love. Works were still there—but they no longer stood in the foreground. They were no longer something I “allowed” myself to do in order to remain acceptable.

They were simply the shape love took when it moved.

This is where I finally understood what it means to read Paul through Jesus, instead of Jesus through Paul. Paul’s concern was never that grace would eliminate action. His fear was the opposite: that action would replace love.

The great mistake I made was assuming that if works are not consciously required, they will vanish. What actually vanishes is pride. What vanishes is control. What vanishes is the illusion that we are managing our own goodness.

Love does not abolish works.

It makes them forgettable.

And that forgetfulness is not laziness. It is humility.

I no longer ask myself whether I am “saved” in the way I once demanded to know.

Not because the question is meaningless, but because it no longer governs me.

For the first time, I see what it means to say God is love—not as sentiment, but as a claim with consequences. And once taken seriously, everything widens. Scripture widens. The world widens. Even God’s silence begins to look different.

What once felt like absence now reads as restraint. Love that does not coerce, even belief.

This is the journey I find myself on now—not toward certainty, but toward coherence. And strangely, that coherence feels like liberation.