Tour De Obedience Part One

I've been thinking about obedience the last several weeks, specifically obedience to God. What I think is that there are a couple main camps that our churches and Christian communities in general find themselves in.

Camp One: The "Grace Means Not Talking About Obedience" Camp. I would say that this camp represents a large minority of evangelical churches that many 30 and 20-somethings attend. To illustrate: a friend of mine attended an excellent church that I was familiar wtih that was extremely centered on grace and the work of Christ. Then he moved and found a new church--one that had some strongly evangelistic folks in it who challenged him to take more risks sharing his faith. His comment: "This new church is hard on me--sometimes I just wish we would just talk about Jesus and leave all this other stuff out!" What had happened? Talking about Jesus had become overly-safe for him because his community seldom specifically linked the work of Christ in a clear and direct way to the work that we are then called to do.

Camp Two: The "Grace is for Sissies, You Better Get Your Butt in Gear Because God Helps Those Who Help Themselves" Camp. In today's church landscape, these are much fewer and further between then they used to be back in the good old days. But they play an important role in the whole scheme of things because much of our Christian culture's movement towards Camp One's direction is a result of too much of this in a generation or so ago.

Camp Three: The "We're Going to Talk about Grace, and We're Going to Talk about Stuff We Have to Do, but We Have no Idea How they Fit Together" Camp. This represents probably the largest percentage of evangelical churches. There's 'grace' sermons to make people feel okay about themselves/God, and then there's the 'to do' sermons that really motivate people to do what we want them to do. But they don't really have all that much to do with each other except that every now and then you've got to preach a good 'grace' sermon in order to make your people feel better about all that stuff that they haven't been doing that you've been telling them to do in all the previous sermons.

What I want to do over the next several days is build a case for obedience. What I want to say is that obedience is essential to our Christianity, that grace is essentially bound up in God calling us to obey him, and that most of us haven't thought much about how God motivates obedience in Scriptures--ergo our obedience is haphazard and faltering. Obedience suddenly feels like duty, whereas forgiveness feels like grace. Suddenly we've created a situation where grace and obedience are somehow opposed to each other. The truth of the matter is that in God's kingdom, these two are never at odds but are in perfect harmony with each other.