Do Church – Teaching them to Obey

1. I don’t know if you get excited talking about obedience. I’ll take you back more than 40 years ago, in the country where I grew up, we had compulsory military service, and when I reached that age, I was very much influenced by rebellious rules and going to the army was the worst thing I could imagine, and one of the things was that you had to obey. There was no way to get around it. Well, a few of us tried, to find a way to do our own things, and sometimes it worked, and sometimes it didn’t. Shortly after that experience, and I should add something to that, during that time, something grew in my heart, and it was not something good. I became more and more, filled with hate, and anger. I think it was always there and I think in that context, it grew. I was a very angry person then, maybe you won’t believe it now.
2. A time after that I met some Christians, and I came to a point where God convicted me and I gave my life to Him. He did a lot of things in my heart and my life. There was a total change of direction, I was going in one direction and God changed me around in another direction. But what happened shortly after that, I ended up with a group of young people, and we were going around helping churches and different ministries and guess where I ended up – among the military. And these people weren’t drafted, they didn’t have to go to the army, but they chose to go. So, I was among professional militaries. And I could not understand how they can choose this, and the worst thing for me was, that some of them were Christians and wonderful people. I had never met people that loved so much and were so generous and God started dealing very deeply with me. I’m not promoting war; I’m not going to go into that discussion, but these people whom in a way I despised so much, they were the most wonderful people. And I thought, I was right that I had so much hate and anger, so, God really dealt with me at that time and changed my heart. I am still so thankful for that, I don’t remember how long it was, probably 2 weeks, but God opened my eyes to many things in a new way.
3. So, we’re going to talk about obedience, and we’ll go back to the scripture we read last week (Matthew 28: 16-20). So, Jesus calls us to a life of obedience and to those that come to Him to be obedient to what He has said. In this world we are used to having things our way, and now Jesus says that we must obey, is it like the army? Well, yes and no. God obviously knows what is best for us. He knows everything and it should be easy to obey Him. He tells us what we should know how we should live and we should do it – like the army. The officer tells you what to do, and you do it. He may not always know what’s best, but you are still supposed to obey. But this is not really the obedience that God is looking for. You know that He could run the world like an army and we would just be puppets who do exactly what He wants and what He says, but God has chosen another way to interact with us. He loves us, that’s the foundation. He invites us and is hoping for our loving response to Him. I’ve often heard it said that love is risky. If you love someone, if you tell them that you love them, and yes, we hope for the response of “I love you too”. But there’s always the risk that we won’t have that response. We never know if we will be loved back. There’s a risk that we’ll be rejected.
4. And the way God works in this world, God loves, He gave His Son, He died for us. He took the risk – many will reject Him. He still gave, and this is true love. True love is not dependent on the response – true love continues. God is love and He operates in love, He could have chosen to operate by force and strength, but He’s chosen to love. And since He doesn’t know what our response will be – we are free to respond the way we want to – He’s looking for a response. It matters to Him how we respond. So, how should we show love back to the God who has given us everything. Sometimes we are really emotional and we sing a song and say, “Oh I love you so much”, and when the service is over, we go out and live our own lives as we want. Is that what God wants? While I think He wants our emotional response, He’s looking for something more.
5. Let’s see what John 14:23-24 says about this. Even when we talk about obedience, it’s the love based on who God is that is the foundation, and He’s looking for our response. Sometimes we’re tempted to think, “well it doesn’t matter so much, God is God, what does He care about what I do?” But He’s looking for our response, it matters to Him, and after we say yes to Him, our journey begins with Him. A journey of learning to live His way. So, when we’re talking about making disciples, it’s not just about getting people to believe what we believe, it’s about helping people to start following Jesus. In the story of Israel in the Old Testament, God was revealed as their God, even described as a bridegroom who loved His bride, a loving Husband, and time and again, we see that Israel was unfaithful to that God. But we see all the time that God wanted to restore them and bring them back. And they had a relationship that we call “a covenant” where they were committed to each other, and the people were supposed to honour that covenant by obeying God. But time and time again, if you read through the Old Testament, they failed. And God actually promised a better covenant, a better and deeper relationship, and God became one of us, and He became that connection, that link between God and man. And now He is calling people to follow Him and we’re called to call people to follow Him. It’s not just something we try out to see if it works and if it doesn’t, we give it up. It’s a life, where we hear and read and understand what He wants us to do. So, how do we keep this relationship? By being obedient. We learn to obey. Even though He was the Son of God, He learned obedience through the things He suffered. But I think it’s a very different type of obedience that we talked about in the army. John talked about, if we love God, we obey Him. The obedience we’re talking about is not learning a long list of requirements, and perfectly following all the rules. We’ve seen that before. If you think of Jesus’ opponents in the Gospels, the Pharisees, they wanted to be perfect in following all the rules, and the more rules, the better, the more detailed, the better, but they didn’t do it out of love.
6. Through the history of Israel, we see the importance of being obedient to God. There were many other nations living in the region which we now called Israel, and many sacrificed to what they thought was an angry God, but that’s not the kind of relationship that God, our God, was looking for. He’s a good loving God and He was looking for ways for us to express our commitment and our love to Him. He was not just looking for sacrifices, you know that they sacrificed animals and all kinds of things. He was looking for something deeper. He desired mercy love and faithful lives to accompany the sacrifices, otherwise those sacrifices meant nothing. We could look a lot deeper into this, but listen to a couple of phrases from the prophet Isaiah. Through Isaiah’s mouth God says this, “I’m sick of your sacrifices, don’t bring me any more of them, learn to be good, to be fair, to help the poor, the fatherless and widows.” And remember John wrote that our response to love is expressed through obedience. Even as we go back and look at the instructions given to the disciples that we read in Matthew 28, we see that it’s not enough just to believe, He’s looking for people that take Him seriously and obey Him and does what He says.
7. But this is very important. We are not called to obey through fear of an angry God. We obey, because we have a relationship with a loving God who loves us. Another story from the Gospels where we can see this, is the parable of the talents, if you remember it, we’re not going to read it. There we see that 3 different people are given talents, and we see that some of them who received these talents, that said that they knew God was hard and they were afraid of God. And it affected what they did with the talents they had received. They didn’t use them in a good way. In contrast to that the 3^rd person knew that God was good and loved, and he acted justly and rightly with that knowledge. And this is a question to ask ourselves, for our own obedience and also when we want others to follow Jesus and obey Him. Is my obedience based on fear to do wrong because I’m afraid of God, or do I want to obey God because He loves me and has given Himself for me? This will have a great impact in how we live our lives.
8. What motivates us? Is it fear of doing wrong or missing something? Or is it a response to the love of God? True response to the love of God without obedience is impossible. So, what are we to obey and what are we to teach people to obey? Well, we have a way to find out. We can read some of Jesus’ teachings, we can see examples of how He treated people and how He lived His life. I’ve said this before, but it’s more a way of life than a list of rules. The Pharisees were occupied in following every dot of the law and condemned everyone else that failed. Jesus was sinless, but He did not come to condemn. He came to serve and to lay down His life. He lived and loved perfectly, in obedience to the Father. So, to obey is not a legalistic attitude. It is a relationship to God and remaining faithful to Him, no matter what happens. This has always been the posture of life that God is looking for. But there is a conflict. This is not how we are taught and programmed to live in our society. This is not what we want, it’s not what I wanted when I was young.
9. Paul writes in (Romans 12: 1-2) to offer our bodies as living sacrifices and be transformed by the renewing of your minds. A living sacrifice – that sounds painful, sacrificing a sheep is bad enough – it is killed. Sacrificing your bodies as living sacrifices, that’s horrible. But it speaks about changing our thinking, we renew our minds, we repent and change our ways. And by following Jesus, being obedient to Him, in the big decisions of our lives, in our daily lives, in the small things, we learn to be obedient and we present ourselves as living sacrifices. But remember it’s not because we’re afraid of God, it’s because we love Him. It’s a way of growing in our relationship and at any cost that may have for us, is small in comparison to our relationship with the eternal God.
10. Obedience is an expression of love which prompts the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit to draw near to us. It’s not an exercise in who is the best rule-keeper, it’s a loving response and an attentiveness to God’s guidance. And remember what Jesus talked about maybe in His last night with His disciples, “He said I do not call you slaves, I call you sons, and daughters”. There is a huge difference, a slave obeys because he must, a son or daughter, knows the will of the Father and wants to please Him. For some, obedience comes to the point of death, we know that from history and even today. And it’s easy to remember even Peter’s response that he was going to die for Jesus, and we can think the same way – I will give everything for Jesus, I’m ready to die for Him, but when someone does something to us, we lose the will to respond as Jesus taught us to do, for instance to “turn the other cheek and to forgive” and that obedience can quickly disappear. But obedience is a way of life for a disciple. It is a life of laying down our lives every day. It’s not easy, but it’s a good life, it’s a life of God.
11. Jesus didn’t come to be served; He came to serve. We are called to the same life. And I think the Lord is calling Stavros to go to the airport, and be blessed Pastors Gail and Brian, have a wonderful trip. We’ll finish this off and we’ll have an opportunity to respond. When you think more practically, when we are called to teach, we tell the new disciples to obey all things that Jesus taught. How are we to teach, how do we know what is the right thing to teach. I think in those days, the rabbis, the teachers, taught very much by example and like Jesus said “Follow Me”, He didn’t just say “Come to My lectures” but He invited people to something much closer, much deeper, and I believe we must have the same attitude with people who want to follow Jesus. It’s great to tell people, “You should do this”, but I think it’s much more effective and much more like Jesus’ way to say “Follow me, I’ll be next to you, I’ll be with you” and we learn from each other, when you walk on the road together with someone. Sometimes, one is going ahead, to show the way and at other times, the other person leads the way and we support one another. So, God is waiting for our response, our obedience, not because we have to, but because we love Him. We should be in the place where we can say, “I want to live your way. Let Your will be done whatever that may mean to me”. We need to follow and obey and to teach others to obey in the same way.
12. Now we’ll have the opportunity to do some of this. We are going to take up an offering, you have an opportunity to give of what you have, and we’re going to sing, and even as we sing, we express the words without thinking, but let’s sing the words of the song as a commitment to God, as a response to Him. But don’t let it stay with that, even when we leave this place, let’s remember every day, that God is looking for my response today. Even on a Monday morning, being faithful to Him.