Obedience Victory Lap: Clarifications, Qualifications, Hints and Allegations

One of the inherent limiting factors of blogging is that you can't say eveything you'd like to say. Now that I've sketched the basic framework of my argument over the last several days, let me go back and fill in, round out, and clarify some things.

Assertion 1: Obedience to God matters.

To this I would add a couple things:

1. The phrase "Jesus is Lord" was one of the first creeds of the early church. Obviously this has spiritual implications but to the 1st century this was a super-charged political statement. Jesus is Lord, and not Caesar. The good news: the people were free from the tyranny of Caesar. As such, he is to be followed and obeyed. Any gospel that does not include the call to radical and reckless obedience of the Lord of the universe is no gospel at all. "Jesus is Lord" meant that first century Christians obeyed him and sang his praises even as they were being dipped in oil and burnt alive or cast to the lions.

If our parents and grandparents generations understanding of faith over-emphasized will-power and reason to the neglect of the relational and emotional, my generation and the subsequent one has over-corrected. Today, the phrase "Jesus is Lord" flies in the face of our culture's post-modern assertion (both in and out of the church) that "Your feelings are Lord." Here's the good news: we are free from the tyranny of our own (erratic) feelings. The vast majority of my students cannot talk about faith in any way except in therapeutic, emotional terms ("God just really really loves me a whole lot and thinks I'm cool, so that makes me okay and worth something."). While this is definitely true, it is also true that Jesus is Lord and hence obedience is required (and obedience is part of his thinking that we're really cool--more on that later).

2. I would also add the qualifier that because God is a relational God, obedience is never expected of us in a vacuum. It always happens in the context of relationship. God has shown us his love and grace in Christ. He has given us his Spirit. And he has promised to be with us always. His commands are not 'from on high' but in the context of a dynamic, ongoing, evolving, maturing, nurturing relationship.

Assertion 2: Contrary to Popular Opinion, Gratitude is not the Biblical motivator for Obedience

To this statement I would add this qualifier (which is what I really believe): I intentionally over-stated the lack of relationship between gratitude and obedience in order to prove a point. The reality is that gratitude does play a role in our motives for obedience, but it's a secondary or supporting role rather than a primary one. Gratitude for past grace fuels us in the dark and hard times to continue to trust in future grace, even when it seems to us to be slow in coming. David in the Psalms does this all the time, remembering during times of despair what God has done in the past to give him courage and confidence for the future. This is how it should be with us as well.

Assertion 3: Our Obedience is to be Motivated by Faith in Future Grace--God's Promises to Bless us with Every Good Thing in Christ Jesus as We Follow Him

To that statement I would add these thoughts:

My contention at the beginning was that obedience and grace are not opposites, and that living a life of grace does not mean living a life of inconsistent obedience. Clearly, grace is there and operational when we do screw it all up, but that is not the only function of grace. Grace also motivates us to obedience.

It is all of God's grace that to the people who are born orphans living in the Land of the Ruins, he gives us commands that are a better way to live. It is all God's grace that to broken and messy people he forgives us, redeems us, gives us his Spirit, and then tells us which direction we need to go for real life. We simply do not know the way, so he tells us.

He is the Good Doctor, we are the sick ones--his commands are the prescription for health and healing. Like physical therapy for someone who's been physically shattered in an accident, God gives us work to do that will rehabilitate our broken souls. So we take a deep breath, pray for faith, remember that God has actually given us his Spirit to empower transformation in us and to come alongside us, and then we move. Falteringly, flailingly at points, but we do what we can, and God delights in it--he is always patient, always kind, but so unrelentlingly for us that he refuses to call off the program of healing obedience just because we hit a setback or throw our occasional temper-tantrums. Over the long run, we are blessed by obeidence, as is the world all around us: the Land of the Ruins is starving for the People of God to actually be and do as the People of God.

Mercy and grace is not exclusive of obedience. Obedience is not exclusive of mercy and grace. It is both reckless grace and reckless obedience. Neither is watered down or compromised, both are essential to the work and way of our Good Father.

I hope that this has at least been somewhat thought-provoking for folks other than my usual suspects who like to yuck it up with me both on-blog and off-blog. My motivation for blogging on this has been the realization that our 'generational blindspot' spiritually is this lack of thoughtfulness about the importance of obedience.

If you're interested in thinking more about this, a great place to start is the C.S. Lewis article I linked to the other day, The Weight of Glory . It's a short sermon in PDF form that you could read in about ten minutes. My journey towards future grace was more clearly and specifically developed by John Piper's book Future Grace (which is on my top-5 books every Christian should read) but it started with Lewis' first three paragraphs in Weight of Glory nine years ago.