Christians are given so much grace by God that it’s easy to lose awareness for how desperately it’s needed. Not only is grace necessary for eternal life, it’s significant for daily living and relating with others. If you aren’t thinking about God’s gift of grace, it’s natural to believe you have to earn your place or prove your worth in your relationships. You might even start expecting others to need to earn their place or prove their worth to you. But because grace is the undeserved relationship Jesus gives to those who put their faith in Him, receiving and extending that grace impacts the kinds of relationships you have with others. This article will help you a) accurately identify performance-based relating and b) give you ways to experience grace-based relating.

Signs of Performance-Based Relating

Receiving Performance-Based Relating from Others

You may be on the receiving end of a performance-based relationship if you regularly (not just occasionally) sense that you’re accepted, respected, or cared for only to the degree that you’re doing what the other person wants you to do or are making them feel like they want you to make them feel. In this case, your performance-based loved one may be forgetting how much grace they need and have been given. Your loved one may be like the “unforgiving servant” in Matthew 18 about whom Jesus gives the lesson, “Should you not also have had compassion on your fellow servant, just as I had pity on you?”

Before you confront the one you believe is withholding grace, you can first examine if you’re also deficient in giving grace. Do you need to pull the plank from your eye before removing the speck from theirs? Or could you possibly ask this person to be accountability partners with you and work together to become more grace-giving, rather than zeroing in on their lack of grace?

Falsely Perceiving Performance-Based Relating from Others

There’s also a good chance if you come from a background of performance-based relationships (especially if you grew up in a performance-based home), that you’ve falsely concluded you’re in performance-based relationships even when you’re not.

One way to test if you’re unfairly placing this assumption on any of your relationships is to ask yourself if this person is changing their acceptance of you based on your actions or lack thereof. If they remain consistent in their opinion of you and how they feel about your relationship even when you disappoint or fail to meet expectations, take your guard down, and receive the grace that comes when they speak truth in love to you. This may the first time you’ve accurately perceived and been able to enjoy the blessing of being in a grace-based relationship. It’s also an opportunity to examine whether you’ve been mostly performance-based in how you’ve been relating.

Giving Performance-Based Relating to Others

You may be on the giving end of a performance-based relationship if you’re the one who regularly tends to withhold closeness, care, approval, and love from others when they don’t measure up to your standards or expectations, or don’t respond to your feelings according to your preferences. Becoming more self-aware of your tendencies to have an absence of grace will help you resist it as a default response. Of course, it’s common to struggle with grace-giving from time to time, but if this article is helping you see that you frequently operate this way, you may want to make a serious commitment to change how you relate to others. It’s never too late to learn to accept and offer more grace, and the following practical suggestions can help you get started.

How to Experience More Grace-Based Relating

Perhaps your relationships are not so cut and dry as described above, but you do see how at times you receive or give performance-based relating more than grace-based relating.

If you’d like to be more grace-based in your relationships, here are a few ways to grow:

Focus your Study Time on Grace:

• Regularly revisit the 10 Commandments, consider the Commandments as headings for the group of sins that comes under each one, and be quickly reminded how impossible it is for you to perfectly keep God’s laws. This will help you not demand of others what you also cannot do without His grace. (Exodus 20:1-17, Matthew 22:37-40)
• Each morning ponder the grace of the cross and what it means for your past, your day ahead, your entire well-being, and the future for you and your loved ones. (Romans 5:6-11)
• Some applicable truths you could possibly commit to memory are: Proverbs 10:12, 11:2, 11:9, 11:12, 12:15, 12:16, 13:10, 14:12, 14:21, 15:1, 16:18-19, 16:25, 19:11, 22:4, 29:13

Process Interactions through a Lens of Grace:

• When you find yourself becoming upset with how you’re being treated, before you respond, try to recall the last time you treated someone perfectly.
• Before you’re too quick to forward this article to someone you feel is not giving you enough grace, decide instead to focus only on your weaknesses in grace-based relating.
• When you’re tempted to pull back from someone who has hurt you, do a quick mental review of the last time you hurt them and how they responded to you. Did they lash out? Or did they possibly give you amazing grace?

Adopt Grace-Infused Behaviors:

• Using discernment of course, increase your willingness to simply take full blame in conflict situations and notice what it does for the relationship and for the purification of your soul. The Lord knows the full truth of every detail, so His grace affords you the freedom to lose. Trust Him with your desire for justice. And you might be surprised how your selfless act will influence humility in others. (Psalm 138:8, Proverbs 11:9, 21:2, Matthew 27:14)
• Ask Jesus to show you if a particular behavior of another person is tempting you to withhold love and acceptance based on their behavior, and if you are to learn to love and accept them just as they are without expecting them to change. (Luke 14:27, Philippians 2:3-4)
• Begin valuing and cherishing others as God sees them and not based on your standards. (Ephesians 5:21)
• Practice loving others lavishly, even according to their unique preferences, not in order to perform, earn, or please, but for your own experience with grace and becoming more like Christ. Notice the change in how you feel about yourself and others. (Ephesians 5:1-2)
• Resist agreeing with the messages you hear from the world about what love is. Instead, absorb this truth: “Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends.” Whether you’re 1) receiving performance-based relating, 2) falsely perceiving performance-based relating, or 3) tempted to give performance-based relating, start making new decisions to rest in grace. By grace, learn to be ok with not always being treated well*, not needing to be right, and not always having your feelings perfectly attended to by others. Lay your rights and preferences down because of grace. Others will follow your lead, grace will abound, you’ll look more like Christ, and you and your relationships will thrive. (John 15:13, 16, Romans 5:20, Philippians 2:3-4)

*If you’re in a relationship where you are consistently mistreated, the grace you offer is rejected and trampled on, and you experience fear, please seek additional help. The advice in this article does not fully cover how to handle performance-based relationships that have become abusive. 

Prayer & Blessing

When relating with others, may all Christians remember our likeness to blind Bartimaeus, who sat by the road begging. And when he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to cry out and say, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!”(Mark 10:47)