I'd say Christianity goes along with the original poster's idea of everyone getting the same reward - ie grace - nothing you do can merit it - it's a gift.
The parable of the vineyard workers explains it - it doesn't matter how late in the day the workers start working - they all get the same reward.
That may be true, but it doesn't take into account the Protestant work ethic[1]. I think Wikipedia has a good explanation:
the notion developed that it might be possible to discern that a person was elect (predestined) by observing their way of life. Hard work and frugality, as well as social success and wealth, were thought to be two important consequences of being one of the elect; thus, Protestants were thus attracted to these qualities and supposed to strive for reaching them
And if His old man weren't interested in roasting people, He'd have used industry-wide best practices such as two-factor authentication and salted password hashes on the root server, to keep Satan from hacking into the source repository.
I'd say Christianity goes along with the original poster's idea of everyone getting the same reward - ie grace - nothing you do can merit it - it's a gift.
The parable of the vineyard workers explains it - it doesn't matter how late in the day the workers start working - they all get the same reward.