People often examine their lives by looking first at ordinary moral and religious duties. They ask whether they stole, lied, committed adultery, participated in evil schemes, neglected church, or failed in some other commandment. They may also compare themselves with people who openly do these things. When resisting evil requires real effort, it is natural to hope that this struggle has value before God and will eventually be rewarded.
There is no need yet to decide whether such moral obedience produces any kind of credit before God. That question comes later. The more urgent problem is that such credit, even if it exists, is of no practical use while a more important threshold has not been crossed. A person may resist stealing for years, remain faithful, attend church, give money, and avoid many obvious sins, but none of this can solve the problem of an unforgiving, proud, merciless, or self-righteous heart.
This first threshold concerns a different group of demands. A person must forgive those who hurt him. He must repent instead of defending himself. He must humble himself, show mercy, stop looking down upon others, receive the little ones, and become willing to serve rather than seek importance. He must stop using the sins of other people as evidence of his own righteousness. These matters come first because the Gospel repeatedly connects them directly with forgiveness, judgment, and entrance into the Kingdom.
This changes the meaning of the ordinary moral struggle. Imagine a person who refuses to steal while others around him steal freely. He may lose money or opportunities because he refuses to join them. His struggle may be real and difficult. But if he then looks at the thieves with contempt and thinks that his restraint must place him above them before God, he has missed the more urgent problem. Whether his refusal to steal has some value of its own is not yet the relevant question. He has not crossed the first threshold.
The thief whom he despises may later repent. The thief may recognize himself as an evildoer, stop defending himself, ask for mercy, and humble himself before God. If that happens, the respectable person must be prepared for the possibility that this thief will enter the Kingdom before him. His years of better conduct cannot be presented as an answer to his own refusal to forgive, repent, humble himself, or abandon contempt for others.
This is why there is little sense in carefully counting ordinary moral achievements while the first problem remains unresolved. A person may say that he never stole, never committed adultery, attended church, gave to charity, and resisted many temptations. All of these facts may be true. Their possible value does not need to be denied. The point is simply that they do not answer the question that comes first.
The same principle applies to religious duties. A person may pray, fast, attend services, give money, and observe religious traditions. These things may have their proper place. But they cannot replace forgiveness. They cannot replace repentance. They cannot make contempt for the little ones acceptable. They cannot compensate for self-exaltation or refusal to show mercy.
Ordinary moral commandments therefore remain fully serious. We should resist stealing, lying, adultery, cruelty, gossip, and every other form of evil with all our strength. But we should do this without imagining that success in these areas allows us to postpone the more urgent work. The first question is not how many ordinary sins we successfully avoided. The first question is whether the self-righteous position itself has been abandoned.
Only after this threshold is crossed does it make sense to ask what value belongs to the rest of the moral record. That is a separate question. Until then, arguing about how much credit belongs to honesty, restraint, religious observance, or other good conduct is premature. Even if such credits exist, they cannot be used to bypass the first threshold.