Rights and Obligations

When most of us think about contracts, we probably think about legalese, fine print, and language designed to give us less than we thought we were bargaining for. We have been taught, through hard experience, that contracts are something to be wary and suspicious of. So when we talk about covenants as contracts, as we often do in the Church, I wonder if some of our suspicion toward contracts doesn't sneak into those discussions. That is, we fear that despite our best efforts to live up to our covenants, when the time comes to reap our eternal reward, we will get less than what we thought—or hoped—we were bargaining for.

As I’ve learned since becoming a lawyer (and, I know, we lawyers are responsible for the legalese and verbal traps in the contracts that most of us regularly deal with), contracts can be very valuable. People only sign their name on the dotted line if they are going to get something out of it.

Contracts have essentially two features that make them worth entering into: rights and obligations. The rights are the things we get out of the arrangement: the cell phone service, the paycheck, or the house. The obligations are what we have to give in order to get the rights: a monthly payment, our time and labor, or a large sum of money.

While contracts can make us grumble—especially when it’s pointed out to us that, according to the microscopic type on page 32 of our service agreement, we’ll have to pay a huge penalty to cancel—it is important to remember that we only enter into a contract when the rights are more valuable than the obligations. If we are not getting more than we are giving, why enter into the contract in the first place? But that is also true of the other party to the contract as well. In other words, one party’s right is the other party’s obligation and a contract only works if each party considers its rights to be more valuable than its obligations.

With that in mind, let’s look at the contract, or covenant, that we make with God at baptism. In Mosiah 18:8–10, Alma lays out the rights and obligations entailed in this covenant. Our rights are that God will (1) accept us into his fold, (2) number us among his people (3) redeem us, (4) number us with “those of the first resurrection, that [we] may have eternal life,” and (5) “pour out his Spirit more abundantly upon [us].”

Now for the obligations. They are that we will (1) “bear one another’s burdens, that they may be light,” (2) “mourn with those that mourn,” (3) “comfort those that stand in need of comfort,” (4) “stand as witnesses of God at all times and in all things, and in all places that [we] may be in, even until death,” and (5) “serve [God] and keep his commandments.”

While our obligations are not trivial, I think it’s pretty obvious that the rights are more valuable, at least from our perspective. After all, eternal life is the “greatest of all the gifts of God” (D&C 14:7).

But I think it’s that last obligation—to serve God and keep his commandments—that makes us nervous. We know that we aren’t perfect—that we breach this obligation—and we know what happens when we breach a contract in our everyday life: we are assessed late fees and penalties or we may lose the benefit of the contract entirely.

And while it is true that breaching a contract, even in the smallest way, can, legally at least, release the other party from its obligations, it is worth remembering that both sides are better off with the contract than without it. That is, a party to a contract probably doesn’t want to be released from its obligations, even if the other party slightly breaches their obligations, because in doing so it is also giving up its rights. In fact, most modern contracts between sophisticated parties build in remedies for minor breaches.

Our covenant with God does as well. What else could being “redeemed of God” mean? God wants our performance so much that he is willing to accept imperfect performance. He provided the way, through his son’s atonement, for us to remedy any breach on our part. As long as we take advantage of that—that is, as long as we repent of our sins—God will give us all of our rights under the contract. Not some of our rights, or most of our rights, or even all of our rights minus some fees and penalties. We’ll get everything we bargained for. No fine print. No legalese.

And, amazingly, that deal is just as good for God as it is for us.