There is a law woven into the substance of how God made the world, and it does not bend for anyone. Not for institutions. Not for governments. Not for the people who love you and the people who have hurt you. Not for you. Not for me.
It operates in boardrooms and bedrooms, in courtrooms and sanctuaries, in hospital hallways and kitchen tables, in every place where human beings interact with one another and with God. It is older than any legal code and more binding than any contract.
This law has a name most people recognize without understanding what it actually costs them: the law of reciprocity.
Most people encounter this law as a social principle. In short, give and you will receive, treat others the way you want to be treated, what goes around comes around. And at that surface level it is true enough. But the law of reciprocity as Scripture presents it is not a social nicety. It is a spiritual reality with weight and consequence, and the place where it becomes most dangerous is the place most of us spend the least time examining: our own double standards.
I have watched this law operate in every arena of my life. In friendships. In marriage. In the long years of caregiving that took me through my father’s death, my mother’s Alzheimer’s, the losses that stacked up one after another until I was barely standing. I have watched it in the professional world. I have watched it in church spaces that preached grace loudly and practiced something considerably narrower. And I have watched it, with more sustained frustration than anywhere else, in the medical system — the institution that demands your complete trust, your full compliance, your most vulnerable disclosures, while reserving for itself every right to dismiss you, delay you, depersonalize you, and move on to the next chart.
I have fought that system on behalf of cancer patients, on behalf of my mother, and I am still fighting it on behalf of my son Jesse, whose autism and OCD and layered mental health needs have made him invisible to a system that was not built to see him. That fight has not made me bitter. But it has made me very clear about what the law of reciprocity actually means when the powerful apply one standard to themselves and another to everyone beneath them.
God does not grade on that curve.
In the World, Not of It
I have given them thy word; and the world hath hated them, because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world. I pray not that thou shouldest take them out of the world, but that thou shouldest keep them from the evil. (John 17:14-15)
Jesus did not pray us out of difficulty. He prayed us through it. And part of what that means, practically and daily, is that we are going to spend our lives inside systems and structures and relationships that do not operate on God’s economy.
The medical system. The legal system. The workplace. The family of origin. The church that disappointed you. The friendship that turned. We are in all of it. We are not removed from it. And we are not permitted, as followers of Christ, to respond to its double standards by developing our own.
This is where it gets uncomfortable, because it is very easy, when you have been on the receiving end of institutional dismissal or relational betrayal, to begin to justify a certain amount of reciprocal unfairness in the other direction.
“They didn’t extend grace to me, so I don’t owe it to them. They held me to an impossible standard, so the rules don’t apply here. They got away with it, so why shouldn’t I?” The logic feels sound when you are tired and wounded and have been fighting longer than anyone around you seems to understand.
But this is exactly where the law of reciprocity becomes a mirror rather than a weapon. And God is the one holding it.
The Measure You Use
Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. (Matthew 7:1-2)
This is the law stated plainly. The measure you use is the measure returned to you. Not approximately. Not eventually, maybe. The text does not hedge. The standard you apply to others becomes the standard applied to you, and the One doing the applying is not a tired human being who can be worn down or outmaneuvered. He is the God who sees everything, forgets nothing, and is not impressed by the sophistication of our rationalizations.
The medical system that has failed my son operates on an obvious double standard. It demands that we as caregivers document everything, advocate precisely, present our concerns within the approved framework, remain calm in the face of dismissal, and trust the process — while the process itself is under no equivalent obligation to document its failures, advocate for the patient it is supposed to serve, or remain accountable when it gets it wrong.
I know this. I have lived this. And I will keep fighting it because fighting for Jesse is not optional and never will be.
But here is what I also know:
I cannot carry that double standard home with me. I cannot apply the same logic to my own relationships, my own failures, my own places of accountability, and expect God to look the other way. The fight for justice in the world is right and necessary. The exemption of myself from the same law I am invoking is something else entirely.
Galatians 6:7 does not leave room for institutional exceptions:
Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.
Whatsoever. That is a comprehensive word.
Hypocrisy Has a Cost
The Pharisees are the New Testament’s most detailed case study in what happens when people develop elaborate frameworks for holding others accountable while exempting themselves from every standard those frameworks demand. Jesus did not handle them gently.
Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone. (Matthew 23:23)
The word translated “hypocrites” here is the Greek hypokrites, which originally described a stage actor — someone playing a role, wearing a mask, performing a character that is not their own. The Pharisees were performing righteousness. They had built an entire system of visible compliance that functioned as a shield against the actual demands of God’s law. And Jesus saw through every layer of it.
The medical system performs care. Institutional Christianity sometimes performs grace. Relationships sometimes perform commitment. And every single one of us, in our less examined corners, performs something we have not yet been willing to actually become.
God is not watching the performance. He is watching the heart. And the heart that demands one thing from others while quietly exempting itself is not hidden from Him no matter how convincingly it plays its role.
What the World Does and What We Are Called To
Living in the world but not of it means, among other things, refusing to adopt the world’s double standards even when those double standards are being applied against you. This is not passivity. I want to be clear about that because I think this teaching gets flattened into a kind of spiritual doormat theology that has nothing to do with what Jesus actually modeled.
Jesus overturned tables. He named hypocrisy publicly. He told the truth to power without softening it for palatability. Being not of the world does not mean absorbing its injustice silently and calling that holiness.
What it means is that the standard we fight for in the world is the same standard we hold ourselves to in private. We do not get a different set of rules because we have been wronged. We do not get to demand from God the mercy we are withholding from someone else. We do not get to invoke the law of reciprocity as a weapon against the institutions that have failed us while ignoring it entirely in the places where it implicates us.
Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets. (Matthew 7:12)
This is not a suggestion sitting alongside other suggestions. Jesus says this is the law and the prophets — the summation of everything God has been saying since the beginning. Treat others the way you want to be treated. Apply to yourself the standard you are applying to them. It is simple enough to say and costly enough to actually live that most of us spend our whole lives circling it rather than landing on it.
The Grace That Makes It Possible
I would not be honest with you if I ended this post without saying this: I cannot do any of what I have described above on my own. I know this because I have tried.
The years of caregiving, the losses, the institutional failures, the relational wounds — they accumulated in me in ways that eventually broke through the surface, and I spent time in a very dark place before God pulled me back out of it. I have been sober since August 16, 2022, but only by the grace of God. That is not a detail I share for sympathy, or applause. I share it because it is the most honest evidence I have that self-managed holiness does not work.
The attempt to hold everything together by my own strength, to absorb everything the world threw at me and keep performing, eventually broke me. What put me back together was not a better performance. It was grace.
It was real grace, not the institutional kind, not the kind that gets announced on Sunday morning and practiced nowhere — the kind that meets you at the bottom and does not look away.
And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. (2 Corinthians 12:9)
The only way I can hold myself to the law of reciprocity in a world that does not play by it is by staying close enough to the One who kept it perfectly. Jesus lived in this world without becoming of it. He was dismissed by institutions, betrayed by friends, failed by every human system He touched — and He did not respond by developing His own double standard. He held the line all the way to the cross. And then He rose.
That is the model. That is the power source. And that is the only reason any of this is possible.
A Closing Thought
The law of reciprocity is not a threat. It is a description of how God made reality to work. It is an invitation to examine ourselves with the same honesty we apply to the systems and people that have failed us. It is a call to be, in the middle of a world full of double standards and performed righteousness and institutional hypocrisy, people who actually mean what they say and say what they mean and hold themselves to the measure they are asking God to apply on their behalf.
It is hard. I will not tell you otherwise. Living in the world without becoming of it is the daily discipline of a lifetime, and there are days I do it better than others.
But the law does not change on the hard days. And neither does the grace that makes keeping it possible.
Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful. (Luke 6:36)
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