This is the last post of six on obedience. Below are links to the previous posts.
Obedience, Part 2 – Agreeing or Trusting?
Obedience, Part 3 – What Precedes Obedience
Obedience, Part 4 – What Follows Obedience
Lest we be tempted to think this post is about those destined for eternal fire, let’s remember that disobedience is a universal experience. Everyone has disobeyed (and will continue disobeying) God. “If we claim we have no sin, we are only fooling ourselves and not living in the truth… we are calling God a liar and showing that his word has no place in our hearts.” (1 John 1:8,10b NLT)
It’s like any relationship – sometimes we make loving and healthy choices, and sometimes we make defensive and hurtful choices. We are never going to grow out of this while we’re on sinful earth. We will always make mistakes, and we will always need to ask for forgiveness. We will inevitably turn toward God sometimes and away from Him other times.
At the risk of being black and white, let’s assume there are two senses in which we can talk about disobedience. The first sense is what I described above – the individual choices we make as we relate to God on a daily basis. The second sense would be that in which disobedience describes the sum of those choices, the consummation of what path we choose in life (acknowledging that our final state is not the result of adding up our deeds, but rather whether we entered into relationship with God).
God knows how all this works, and in the end He will make it known who is in relationship with Him, and who is not. I cannot pretend to truly understand, but I have some clues as to what disobedience might look like, which are best illustrated by sharing insights from writers who have insightfully described various aspects of relationship with God. By looking at relationship, we can understand also what it looks like to not be in relationship.
Challenged or Comfortable?
One clue suggesting disobedience is feeling comfortable: “free from vexation or doubt” (merriam-webster.com); feeling like you’re great, the world is great, and you can just relax and not think about difficult things. In her book Searching for Sunday, Rachel Held Evans says, “Imagine if every church became a place where everyone is safe, but no one is comfortable.” The presence of God is safe, but also awe-inspiring, humbling, and challenging. If you are feeling comfortable, or if everything is going your way, it may be a clue that you are not in His presence.
In his book The Reason for God, Timothy Keller talks about why he believes it’s important to allow the Bible to challenge us. I believe what he describes is true not only for the Bible, but for all the ways God reveals Himself to us and interacts with us: prayer, nature, the teaching of others, and so on. This is what he says:
In any truly personal relationship, the other person has to be able to contradict you. For example, if a wife is not allowed to contradict her husband, they won’t have an intimate relationship. Remember the (two!) movies The Stepford Wives? The husbands of Stepford, Connecticut, decide to have their wives turned into robots who never cross the wills of their husbands. A Stepford wife was wonderfully compliant and beautiful, but no one would describe such a marriage as intimate or personal.
Now, what happens if you eliminate anything from the Bible that offends your sensibility and crosses your will? If you pick and choose what you want to believe and reject the rest, how will you ever have a God who can contradict you? You won’t! You’ll have a Stepford God! A God, essentially, of your own making, and not a God with whom you can have a relationship and genuine interaction. Only if your God can say things that outrage you and make you struggle (as in a real friendship or marriage!) will you know that you have gotten hold of a real God and not a figment of your imagination.
If God seems to always agree with us, or we always agree with Him – if we are feeling comfortable, in control, like we have things figured out – this is a clue that we are not in relationship and therefore not in obedience to God.
Submission or Performance?
Another clue that suggests disobedience is a focus is on behavior rather than submission. Behavior is a distraction from submission. Valuing God’s will above our own is the hardest continuous thing we will ever do, and in comparison it may be easy to put our efforts into being generous, patient, committed, or kind. But if our focus is on our performance and we are not daily coming up against God’s will and learning to let it be above our own, we are not walking in obedience.
In his book Mere Christianity – in the chapter titled “Nice People or New Men” – C.S. Lewis considers whether becoming nice is the main point of being a Christian. He sets forth a Christian character – Miss Bates – who is not nice, and a non-Christian character – Dick Firkin – who is nice. He then explores what they look like in terms of God’s kingdom.
The niceness, in fact, is God’s gift to Dick, not Dick’s gift to God. In the same way, God has allowed natural causes, working in a world spoiled by centuries of sin, to produce in Miss Bates the narrow mind and jangled nerves which account for most of her nastiness. He intends, in His own good time, to set that part of her right. But that is not, for God, the critical part of the business. It presents no difficulties. It is not what He is anxious about. What He is watching and waiting and working for is something that is not easy even for God, because, from the nature of the case, even He cannot produce it by a mere act of power. He is waiting and watching for it both in Miss Bates and in Dick Firkin. It is something they can freely give Him or freely refuse to Him. Will they, or will they not, turn to Him and thus fulfil the only purpose for which they were created?… The question whether the natures they offer or withhold are, at that moment, nice or nasty ones, is of secondary importance. God can see to that part of the problem.
Do not misunderstand me. Of course God regards a nasty nature as a bad and deplorable thing. And, of course, He regards a nice nature as a good thing – good like bread, or sunshine, or water. But these are the good things which He gives and we receive. He created Dick’s sound nerves and good digestion, and there is plenty more where they came from. It costs God nothing, so far as we know, to create nice things: but to convert rebellious wills cost Him crucifixion.
When we get distracted by performance, we’re not engaging in relationship with God. We are speaking in a language He doesn’t understand; coming to His banquet table with no appetite for what He has prepared.
Let’s imagine I am planning to purchase a car, and the advertisement says “CASH ONLY.” I arrive to purchase the vehicle with only a credit card in my wallet, and the seller has no way to process my card. We are unable to make the transaction. Similarly, when I show up hoping to interact with God and I present my performance, no transaction can occur. I must show up with my will; and when I hold my will out to God, a transaction occurs. Our relationship becomes real.
Conclusion
Pursuing comfort and performance lure me into disobedience. These clues are personal to me: comfort and productivity were the first two idols I identified in my life. Your clues may be different. Our enemy the devil is relentless in distracting us from our Creator and Savior, and in our weakness we are so easily confused. If you’re feeling brave, ask the Spirit to show you what your clues are.
Whatever our clues, they are a reminder that perhaps we have missed the Person who loves us and wants to engulf us in His presence. We are thinking of ourselves – distracted by what we have and what we want. It is in thinking of God that we finally come alive.
We usually begin the journey toward God thinking, “What do I have to do to get this or that from him?” but eventually we have to begin thinking, “What do I have to do to get him?” If you don’t make that transition, you will never actually meet the real God, but will only end up believing in some caricature version of him. – Timothy Keller, The Reason for God
I don’t want to waste my life serving a caricature of God. I want to know the real God. This occurs at great cost to self. But may I never forget that God wants to know the real me, and His cost to enter this relationship is infinitely greater.
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