Obedience from Love

Paul the apostle says, “God … is at work in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure.” Most of us don’t connect obedience with pleasure. We’re used to obeying out of necessity or fear. Perhaps we had parents who made us obey ‘just because I said so’. Now it’s not wrong for parents to expect obedience from children, or bosses to expect cooperation from their employees. But it’s not the best definition or the highest motivation for obedience. The element that’s missing is the ‘want to’ factor that God built into each of us, but is buried deep beneath selfishness and forgetfulness. This takes the ‘ought to, have to, better do it or else God will destroy you’ element out of it. It elevates obeying God to a level of joyful response to all that He’s done for you. Obedience is not something you have to manufacture. It’s something you have to cultivate, then activate, because the desire is already present in you. Anything else is merely outward compliance.
It’s like the boy who misbehaved and was told by his mother to go and sit in the corner. After a few minutes she called to him from the other room, ‘Are you still sitting down?’ He replied, ‘Yeah, I’m sittin’ down on the outside, but I’m standin’ up on the inside’. You could call that obedience, but actually it’s nothing more than outward compliance without the inward response of eager and joyful obedience.

Mr Peter Morphew
Chaplain