It is Time to Return to Obedience

Our theme for 2021 is “Redeeming the time.”

So this has been an historic week.

But while we have a new president, half the country feels that they have been cheated in the election.

The other half of the country feels that they have finally been vindicated from the last election.

The only thing we can agree on is that we are more divided than ever before.

What we have is a growing vacuum of people in the middle who are not sure what to think or who to follow.

How do we as Christians respond to this?

I know some are terrified right now because they see an administration that will not be as favorable to our concerns.

Others are expecting that this administration will take up the cause of the poor and the oppressed maybe even redistribute some of the wealth.

So that’s where things become difficult because as Americans, we value our freedom and independence.

While some are trying to make their ideal society, traditionally, our ideal society has been that we don’t like other people telling us what to do.

Last week I talked about the Kingdom of God and having a Kingdom mindset.

In these troubling times, we need to remember that as followers of Jesus we are first and foremost citizens of His Kingdom.

We are under God’s rule, He is in charge and we owe our first allegiance to Him.

I’m not sure that, as Americans, we understand Kingdom.

Our system does not allow for an absolute ruler.

There are checks and balances in place precisely to prevent anyone from carrying out their agenda without a broader consensus.

I have travelled in some countries that have monarchies, so I have gained a sense of how kingdoms work.

England and Denmark have constitutional monarchies. Their regents are largely symbolic while the laws are made by a representative Parliament.

Jordan, Cambodia and Thailand are all Kingdoms with some form of democratic system, but the King has final authority and make any changes that are deemed necessary, even dissolving the whole government and starting over.

In a Kingdom, you can still have a great deal of freedom as long as you honor the King.

Not all Kings are despots, the ones that are usually don’t last long.

For the most part, the King is there to keep the peace.

As long as your are not stirring up trouble, you can do what you want.

So why am I talking about Kingdom again when the subject is obedience?

Until you understand the Kingdom of God you will think of obedience from a merely human point of view.

If I had not preached on the Kingdom last Sunday, you might think that by obedience, I want or expect you to obey me.

It’s not about me, or you, what I want, or what any of us want.

It’s about aligning with God who is the rightful ruler of us all.

When we teach about discipleship, about following Christ, we often present it as doctrine - this is what you must believe.

But as I said last week, I was challenged by the church-planting movement, Training for trainers in China

They state clearly that discipleship is not primarily about information, but obedience.

So what does obedience mean?

The truth is that most of us don’t really know, because we think like Americans, as individuals.

If anything, we have a negative view of obedience; that someone is forcing us to do something.

Obedience is essential if we are followers of Christ. It is our appropriate response to God’s goodness and love. It is also how we are formed spiritually into the people God created us to be.

Obedience is essential

Obedience is not a bad word.

Deuteronomy 26:16–19 ESV

16 “This day the Lord your God commands you to do these statutes and rules. You shall therefore be careful to do them with all your heart and with all your soul. 17 You have declared today that the Lord is your God, and that you will walk in his ways, and keep his statutes and his commandments and his rules, and will obey his voice. 18 And the Lord has declared today that you are a people for his treasured possession, as he has promised you, and that you are to keep all his commandments, 19 and that he will set you in praise and in fame and in honor high above all nations that he has made, and that you shall be a people holy to the Lord your God, as he promised.”

Can you hear the love in this passage?

You are God’s treasured possession.

He wants to brag about you to the whole world!

You are holy (set apart) for God.

That’s the whole point of obedience; God wants what’s best for you.

So why do we have a problem with rules and obedience?

Probably because at some time in our lives we had authorities that were not demonstrating godly authority.

Their rules were arbitrary and/ or constantly changing.

They were overly harsh in their enforcement of the rules.

You got the impression that they didn’t really care about you; they were in it for themselves.

Even as a Pastor, I meet a lot of people who have been hurt by church. They once had a Pastor or a church leader that they trusted who hurt them or betrayed them. Maybe the church was so strict that you felt you could never measure up. Or maybe the leaders expected you to be perfect, but it was evident that they did not hold themselves to the same standard.

Ungodly authority doesn’t just turn people away from church, it turns people away from God.

Perhaps when I say obedience you imagine that I’m talking about some harsh rules that you could never possibly keep.

That’s a wound that God wants to heal.

The truth is that if you want to obey God, then you have what it takes.

God wants to help you in your obedience, all of His resources are there to help you.

Obedience is a matter of life and death.

Deuteronomy 30:15–19 ESV

15 “See, I have set before you today life and good, death and evil. 16 If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I command you today, by loving the Lord your God, by walking in his ways, and by keeping his commandments and his statutes and his rules, then you shall live and multiply, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land that you are entering to take possession of it. 17 But if your heart turns away, and you will not hear, but are drawn away to worship other gods and serve them, 18 I declare to you today, that you shall surely perish. You shall not live long in the land that you are going over the Jordan to enter and possess. 19 I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore choose life, that you and your offspring may live,

Obedience is a basic choice.

If you want to obey, you can.

If you don’t want to obey, you won’t.

Even if you appear to comply, you will find a way to express your true feelings. (Standing up on the inside)

When God says that if you obey it will go well with you; that is not a threat, its a fact.

God designed the world to operate in an orderly way.

When we obey God we are submitting to God’s order.

We are living the way God designed us to live and to thrive.

Everything that God forbids, from gossip to murder and from lust to sexual deviance is designed to keep us safe and to make us whole.

Disobedience leads to brokenness.

Broken relationships.

Broken marriages.

Broken homes.

Broken lives.

Obedience or disobedience is basically the problem of good versus evil.

For Israel, evil was embodied in Idolatry - worshipping other gods.

My son Martin accompanied me and my seminary class on a field trip to the NY Metropolitan Museum. We were there to observe artifacts from their Ancient Near Eastern exhibit and make application to our Biblical studies.

After seeing several naked idols some of them with exaggerated body parts and reading the descriptions of their ceremonial use, Martin exclaimed, “ I never understood why in the Old Testament, God was so upset about the people bowing down to idols. Now I see that idols were more than just statues of wood or stone and worship was more than just bowing down to them. …You should really tell people about this. I don’t think they know.”

What Martin wanted people to know is that idol worship offered an alternate view of life and reality. Idol worship invoked the senses and was pleasurable. It involved all of the temptations that we struggle against today. Sex, drugs, hypnotic music and lavish entertainment were all used to entice worshippers into an experience that they would want to repeat over and over again.

If you knew that sin was going to lead to bondage which leaves you hurting and broken, you would never do it in the first place.

When God gives us commands, He is trying to warn us of the danger, but we so often don’t see it until we experience it for ourselves.

The reason we don’t obey is because we think we know better, until we find out that we don’t.

The opposite of obedience is rebellion.

We talked last week about how our sinful nature wires us for rebellion.

We are wired for self-protection, self-preservation and self- promotion.

God’s love is the opposite of that: It gives, it releases and it honors.

In ancient times, the gods associated with idols demanded a sacrifice.

Idol worship was about appeasing them; doing things so that they wouldn’t get angry and harm you.

Some people thought God was like that too.

Saul thought he could change God’s mind by offering a sacrifice, but Samuel told him otherwise.

1 Samuel 15:22–23 NLT

22 But Samuel replied, “What is more pleasing to the Lord: your burnt offerings and sacrifices or your obedience to his voice? Listen! Obedience is better than sacrifice, and submission is better than offering the fat of rams. 23 Rebellion is as sinful as witchcraft, and stubbornness as bad as worshiping idols. So because you have rejected the command of the Lord, he has rejected you as king.”

Rebellion is like witchcraft!

The ceremonies of animistic idol worshippers were designed to try to manipulate the gods into doing their will.

But God cannot be manipulated, He knows your heart.

What you do is important, but why you are doing it is even more important.

God gave Himself for you and for your salvation.

You were already His, but He bought you back with the blood of Jesus Christ His Son.

He loved you before you loved Him and He made a way for you to be restored to relationship.

That’s why God doesn’t care about sacrifice, because your sacrifice can never match His.

God wants nothing less than your whole heart.

Obedience is our appropriate response

Obedience is hearing and responding.

In Hebrew the word for obedience literally means to listen.

The assumption is that if you hear you will respond.

Some of us have selective hearing disorder. We simply don’t hear what we don’t want to hear. “I never heard you say to take out the trash.” But you can hear when your engine is making the slightest noise.

Hearing and listening means that we are actively engaged and ready to respond.

Obedience is hearing and doing.

The doing part is a given; if you hear then you also do.

If you are not responding, then you apparently haven’t heard.

Obedience is simply expected.

We may have a hard time grasping that, but many places in the world still operate that way.

You do what you are told, unless somehow you did not understand.

Obedience is faith in action

Romans 10:16 ESV

16 But they have not all obeyed the gospel. For Isaiah says, “Lord, who has believed what he has heard from us?”

In the OT obedience is simply hearing and doing.

In the NT it is hearing, believing and doing.

There is an assimilation step where you test and decide that the command is genuine and requires a response.

The Greeks invented democracy and with it, the ability to question authority.

They would sit around and discuss things and maybe eventually get around to doing them.

That must be why the Romans soon took over.

They had discussions too, but if you didn’t act quick enough you might be dead.

The New Testament authors used believing and obedience in tandem, sometimes even interchangeably.

Just as the OT assumption was that if you hear you will obey.

The NT writers expect that believing requires obeying.

If you have received the message and accepted it as true, then you will also do what is required.

Jesus connects believing and obedience also, but He also mentions another component …love!

John 14:21 ESV

21 Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me. And he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him.”

Obedience is ultimately an expression of love.

I’m not talking about love as emotion; I’m talking about love as devotion.

Love is a commitment, ask any married person who is still married, especially after a long time.

Words may attract you to someone, but if you are able to build a lasting relationship it is because of what you do....consistently…over and over again.

Obedience, hearing and responding to the other, is what makes a relationship work.

It’s the same with your relationship with God.

Prayers are good, God loves it when we pray, but our actions speak so much louder than our words.

When we pray, we should also listen.

What is God saying? What is God wanting us to do?

Hearing should be followed by doing.

OK, you may need to test it to be sure you are hearing from God, but if you believe that God is saying something you will do it.

Obedience is how we are formed

by “formed” I mean formed spiritually.

God created us in His image.

Sin distorted that image.

Jesus restores us to God’s image.

But we need to be reshaped, remolded and formed into that image.

We do this by following Jesus.

Jesus demonstrates obedience.

Philippians 2:8 ESV

8 And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.

God doesn’t ask us to do anything that He has not already done.

Jesus demonstrated obedience to an extreme that most of of us will never encounter.

Jesus knows what it is like to be human.

He knows what it is to wrestle with your own will, but in the end He submitted to God’s will.

Matthew 26:39 ESV

39 And going a little farther he fell on his face and prayed, saying, “My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will.”

Jesus’ obedience is more than an example, it paved the way for our salvation.

Obedience is contagious.

Romans 5:19 ESV

19 For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous.

So just as rebellion was introduced to humanity and spread like seed throughout the human race; obedience is also a seed which grows and multiplies.

Obedience doesn’t just effect the one obeying, but it has consequences, good ones for so many others.

Think about Noah who build the ark and generations were saved from destruction.

Abraham obeyed and became the father of nations.

Jeremiah obeyed, with great difficulty I might add, and Israel was preserved through exile.

Think of the scriptures, the promises of God, the examples of faith and the generations that preserved it.

All of that comes about through obedience, one person at a time.

God perfects us through obedience.

Hebrews 5:7–9 ESV

7 In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to him who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverence. 8 Although he was a son, he learned obedience through what he suffered. 9 And being made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him,

Jesus was perfected by obedience through suffering.

If that is how it was for Jesus, I believe we can expect the same.

Yes, obedience is hard sometimes.

We have to wrestle with our will to “want to.”

This passage is making the point that it wasn’t easy for Jesus either.

He didn’t have the sinful nature, but he had the sin of the world on His shoulders and all of hell bent against Him.

I think if Jesus did it, you can do it too.

That is the point that the writer of the book of Hebrews is making.

Following Jesus is not about knowing the right things or saying the right things, its about doing the right things namely, doing what Jesus did, walking in obedience to God the Father.

Questions for reflection:

When I say the word “obedience” or “obey,” what do you feel? Have you been wounded by ungodly authority? The first step to healing is asking God to help you forgive that person? Then lets ask God to give you perspective as to what healthy authority looks like.

Do you have selective hearing disorder when it comes to God’s voice? Do you listen when you pray? Are you afraid of what God may ask you to do? Try just letting God tell you that he loves you.

Is there anything that God has spoke to you that you have not acted on? Are you wrestling with your will to “want to”? Talk to God about your struggle as Jesus did in the garden. Or talk to someone who understands. God wants to perfect/complete that which He has begun in you.