Obedience

When I was younger, and even into my late teens, I was under the impression that obedience was a necessity to having favor with God. I heard all my life that Jesus loves me, and coupled that was usually the phrase “If you tithe, Jesus will bless you.” Within the fabric of my worldview was this tension that I never liked. But I always stayed in it because the danger of denying good actions at the time was the movement of denying goodness at the same time. It was the movement that said that what matters in honesty and God is okay with your faults and doesn’t expect you to really get over them. Or we’re human and God realizes that – he cares about you loving him and not you obeying his impossible demands. This “honesty” seemed even more deadly – at least my way I was still doing good things. So I chose the approach that if I do good things, then God is in favor with me and blesses me, but if I do bad things, he will chastise me. This is in the Bible, but it is not all there is.

This thought pattern is common too. Many people I have met have this idea that we must have favor with God through obedience, or that my good works will get me one more crown in heaven, or, for the non-Christian, that my good works will get me heaven. The problem here is our view of morality. In his book “The Grand Weaver”, Ravi Zacharias points to a definitive fact that really helps us shape our view of morality: “In every religion except Christianity, morality is a means of attainment.” He goes on to explain that the Hindu and Buddhist use morality to shape and offset their karma, and how the Muslim follows his strict moral code to obtain favor with Allah and hopefully heaven, if Allah so chooses. Christianity doesn’t see morality as a way to attain anything.

But there is more. Zacharias makes a very profound statement about that cracks the door on what morality means to a Christian: “Here the Hebrew-Christian worldview stands distinct and definitively different. Redemption precedes morality, and not the other way around.” We see this in the giving of the Ten Commandments, as Zacharias points out. In Exodus chapter twenty we find a qualifier for the Ten Commandments that not only states God’s authority over law-giving but also states a very indicative statement about the Israelites. Before God gave the commandments he told them, “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.” Here God sets before them that they should do good not because they need to attain anything, but because they are redeemed.

And this is the same in the New Covenant. In the middle of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus looks at his disciples and says,

“You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden. . . Let your light shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven.”

Notice that Jesus said, “You ARE the light of the world”. This is very important because it is an indicative statement. He is not saying, like many evangelists do, that you should be the light of the world and that you must work hard to become it. Jesus says you are the light of the world, which means you are redeemed, that you have a new nature.

Paul pointed this out too when he said, “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast. For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.” Once again we see that good actions do attain anything but redemption gives validation to our good actions. As Zacharias says so well, “Jesus did not come to make bad people good but to make dead people alive.”

So what is morality to a Christian? I was at this point as I kept asking myself, “Why am I being obedient?” It is a valid question. If my salvation is not based on what I do, but on what I have become then what role does obedience have? If I’m made holy as the Bible says then why do I still mess up?

These are questions that I still struggle with. One thing that has really helped me to start to make sense of these longings is to realize the purpose of obedience, thankfully, is not about attaining anything; it is to honor and glorify the one who did redeem me. This is why we are light so that we may glorify our Father.

My obedience is also a very important part of my relationship with God – the Creator/creature, Father/son relationship. My obedience is in direct correlation with my closeness to God. The Bible is very clear that God never leaves you nor forsakes you. You push yourself away from Him. This is what happened in Eden. As we read Paul’s words from Ephesians, he makes a wonderful statement about how we were created in Christ Jesus (made new through redemption) for good works. We are made new so that we can once again glorify and honor our Creator. We do good because of who we are not because of what we want to become. This is obedience: submission to the nature God has given us.