/ Matthew 11:27–30; Matthew 23:1–11; John 13:12–34; Mark 12:28–31

What is Obedience?

Billy was a strong-willed child. Whenever Billy’s mother would tell him to do something, no matter how simple the task, Billy would do all in his power to do the opposite. If you told Billy to clean his room, inevitably he would find a way to make it even messier. If you told him to stay by your side, he would run halfway across the store. To put it mildly, Billy was a disobedient child. And like many parents, Billy’s mother got exasperated trying to deal with Billy’s behavior issues and strong-will. It really seemed that Billy got pleasure out of disobeying his mother. So, one day Billy’s mother got a knowing look on her face as the idea of the century came to her. It was the first day of school. Billy had already been a nightmare trying to get a shower, eat his breakfast, put on his clothes and Billy’s mother either needed a vacation or a miracle to survive the rest of the day. But then, Divine Inspiration came in the blink of an eye. Billy looked as though he had won. He had delayed mom so much this morning that they were running late. Billy wouldn’t get in the car to go to school. So, with an eerie calm, Billy’s mother looked at him with the sweetest look on her face and said, “Now Billy, do whatever you want! Let me see you disobey that!” With a look of consternation, little Billy got himself in the car and off they went to school, this time with a defeated look on HIS face!

Why is it that we struggle so much with obedience? Well, first off, we don’t often define it well at all. Usually, in our American context when we think about obedience we think about dogs. My sister and brother-in law have a young dog and he has struggled—mightily—with his obedience training. Although his name is not Billy, it very well might be! And so, we often think about obedience as something we want from our animals—at least our dogs—cats don’t obey anybody, they expect YOU to obey them!

So, here is a simple definition of obedience. Obedience is following the commands of someone who is in authority over you. Here are two words we human beings don’t like: authority and over.  In America, we stress the sovereignty or independence of each individual person. We’ve got rights after all! We have rights in this country and we don’t have a king either. Why, this country was founded by folks who didn’t want to obey the authority of King George III and wanted to do their own thing in their own land. So, for Americans especially, obeying authority is something that is hard because of our streak of independence.

But equally hard is coming to terms with someone being over us in a hierarchy. Again, in the United States we have enshrined in our founding documents the notion that all people are created equal and that we have an inherent dignity that means that hierarchies of any kind rub us the wrong way. That the very thought of someone being over us gives us pause and causes us to ruffle our feathers. This is the struggle of all democracies, to maintain a sense of order when the power rests in the hands of the public. After all, that’s what democracy means: power is invested in the people.

The Kingdom of God

But here’s the problem for an American who is a Christian. Simply put, the Kingdom of God is not a democracy. It is not a place in which power is vested in the people. It, rather, is a kingdom and as its name suggests, it has a king. We all know this, we sing it enough, anyway, we have a King, and his name is Jesus.

But somehow, we manage to spiritualize this fact away. We think to ourselves, “Self, yes, we’ve got a King, and his name is Jesus. But he’s wayyyy up there in heaven and we’re down here. It doesn’t look like he’d mind if I just…did my own thing. After all, it won’t hurt anybody (much anyway). And, well, Jesus never specifically spoke about this issue anyway, so I’m not being disobedient…”

So, we rationalize that because Jesus isn’t physically present with us that it really is ok to disobey from time to time. Or again, maybe it isn’t an issue that Jesus didn’t speak to in his life and ministry. Then we feel like we’re on our own and that we just have to go our own way and make up our own minds in our own power.

But both of these ideas, the idea that Jesus is a long way off and that we have to work and decide things in our own power goes counter to everything that Jesus explicitly taught us in the Gospels. Jesus is not really far off, he, being God in the flesh, shares the attributes of God including his omnipresence—his presence everywhere all at once. So, Jesus is as close as your own breath. But secondly, Jesus gave us clear teachings that can give us guidance in each situation. There is no excuse or need for us to go our own way. We can remain obedient to the teachings of Christ in all things.

Teaching to Obey

So far in this sermon series we’ve talked about several things. We’ve talked about the mission of God, that God is a sending God. As the Father sent Jesus into the world so Jesus sends us in the world. And the purpose of that sending is that as we go about our lives, we would be at work making disciples. Disciples are those that have counted the cost of following after Jesus and committed their lives to him. Then we talked about baptism and what that means for us. It is a participation, a communion, in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. It is a sacrament in which we are washed clean and joined into the body of Christ.

And we found this command of Jesus in our theme Scripture for this series, Matthew 28:16-20 which reads:

Matthew 28:16–20 NASB 2020

But the eleven disciples proceeded to Galilee, to the mountain which Jesus had designated to them. And when they saw Him, they worshiped Him; but some were doubtful. And Jesus came up and spoke to them, saying, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Me. Go, therefore, and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to follow all that I commanded you; and behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

So, there it is, quite plainly. As disciples of Jesus Christ, we should have been taught to follow all the commandments that Jesus taught. And that brings up several questions that I think we need to explore:

First, where do we look to find the teachings of Jesus? Do we look to the entire Bible, only parts of it, or what? And this is going to bring us to a tension point that many people struggle with. What do we do when two passages of Scripture seem to be pointing in opposite directions?

Well, let’s go to the easy question first. To find the teachings of Jesus, we look to the New Testament. And more specifically, we look to the four Gospel accounts: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. In these four books we find most explicit expression of Jesus’ teaching. We find the very words and deeds of Jesus in these sacred texts.

Part of the reason I think we have four Gospels is to help us as disciples to know what Christ our King’s will is for our lives. Three of the Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke are quite similar and contain much of the same stories but told in different ways. Why do we need all three? Because repetition and variation are good for us. It helps us to imbibe, that is, drink in, the story deeply into us and the variations help us pay attention to what is happening. The fourth Gospel, the Gospel of John is a very powerful book that gives us yet another perspective on Jesus’ life and teachings and is focused on the “so what” and the “why” of following Jesus. It is highly theological and gives the case for Jesus being God in the flesh—someone who surely should be obeyed.

So, now we’ve determined the primary sources for where we should go to find Jesus’ teachings. Now we must face the thorny issue of what we do when we seem to find two passages of Scripture that seem to be pulling us in two different directions.

Let’s take as a case in point the law of the Sabbath. In the Old Testament we clearly see that God has commanded that no work be done on the Sabbath. It is to be a day of rest. And for many years, it was custom for Christians not to do anything on Sunday because they wanted to be obedient to this command. I’ll bet some of you still wish it was that way.

But there’s two problems with this view. First off, Sunday simply isn’t the Sabbath. The Sabbath starts at sundown on Friday night and ends at sundown on Saturday night. I’ve never heard of a Christian who did nothing on Saturday so as to keep the Sabbath—only Sunday. So, not doing anything on Sunday isn’t even keeping this commandment.

But the second problem is even more glaring then the first. And that is simply put that in the Gospels Jesus and his disciples very clearly do work on the Friday to Saturday Sabbath! Jesus heals on the Sabbath. The disciples harvest grain to eat on the Sabbath. In other words, they look to be violating the Scriptures when they work when God said to not work.

But remember, Jesus is God in the flesh. When we looked at the Sermon on the Mount not all that long ago, we came across several instances in which Jesus said, “You have heard it said…but I say to you…”

These statements clearly show us that when it comes to tensions or even outright contradictions in statements of Scripture that we need to look to Jesus to help us resolve those tension. For instance, when it comes to the Sabbath, Jesus tells the religious leaders that the Sabbath is made for humans and not the other way around. In other words, it is good and even proper on the Sabbath to good for human beings, by healing them and providing them food. After all, the Sabbath was made precisely for our benefit: to give us rest from our labors and time to spend with our families. When we turn living laws that do us good into dead letters designed to enforce our will, we turn God’s law into a farce.

Obeying the Master Teacher

But Jesus took obedience to the commandments very seriously. The problem was that by the time Jesus entered the scene, the religious establishment of the day had distorted the meaning of the Law of Moses to the point that obedience to the letter of the law and not to the spirit had become the norm. As long as the religious leaders maintained the outward appearance of obedience, the rest didn’t matter.

But for Jesus, it is the opposite. For Jesus it goes to our hearts and motivations for our obedience. If we merely obey because we think we should, we have a form of godliness, it’s true, but we don’t have the power that is required to go with it. We are precious little better than those religious hypocrites that Jesus despised in his own day and spoke against.

So, what is to be our motivation? What is to drive us? Well, in this series we’ve studied in detail the Great Commission. But behind that commandment is a driving factor found in Jesus’ teaching. And that driving factor, that motivation, is to be the Great Commandment: Love God and Love neighbor. In short, it is love that makes our obedience genuine. We love God first so we can place ourselves in submission to our Divine Parent’s teaching. But secondly, we love our neighbor so we can keep the commands to do good to them. Remember, this is even how the Ten Commandments are divided: the first four talk about love for God and the rest about love for neighbor. To obey God is to keep the commands.

And above all, Jesus gave this command, that we should love one another. By this one simple fact, that Christians show love for one another, will the world know that we are disciples of Jesus.

But too many people want to focus on minor things by comparison. They’d like to focus on what you listen to, what you watch, how you vote, who you hang out with. They want to focus on your behaviors and not on your heart.

This is nothing short of modern-day Pharisaic nonsense. Looking at what other people do and not at the heart that motivates them is precisely what the hypocrites did in Jesus’ day. And it’s one of the main reasons Jesus was put to death. For the people he hung out with, what he did, and what he didn’t do. And whose standards did Jesus violate? Not God’s, but theirs.

Hypocrites always write their own rules. Even when they claim divine warrant for their rules, it’s always their interpretation of those rules that carry the day. It’s become cliche now but I think it remains true today that if Jesus would walk into some churches he simply wouldn’t be welcome. He would hang out with the wrong people. He would listen to the wrong music. He’d go to the wrong parties where things we don’t approve of are done. And in the end, we’d dismiss him as a poor lost soul, or worse, a destructive influence that needed neutralized…

A Long Obedience

Folks, as we prepare to end this sermon series, I hope that I’ve given you some food for thought. I hope I’ve challenged your notion of what the church’s purpose is here on earth. We are to be Kingdom outposts sent by the Father and the Son into the world to make disciples, baptizing them into the Kingdom and teaching them to obey what Jesus commanded, to love God and love neighbor.

But I hope I’ve also challenged you today to rethink what obeying Jesus might mean. It might mean you get into some trouble. It might mean you get some side-long looks for who you hang out with, where you go, and what you do. But this is the good and productive trouble that actually is in keeping with God’s commandments.

So, be a rebel! Rebel against the stereotypes of what a “Good Christian” should do and go make some friends that would make that type of “Good Christian” blush. Go to the places where it wouldn’t be respectable to go and love God and love neighbor in the process. Get in some good trouble and expand the Kingdom of God.

Church, we have a commission, and we are not going to keep it by staying within these four walls. We must go. Go to the hurting, the helpless, the needy, to the sinner and not the saint. They need us. They need Jesus. They need love.  Will you Go? Amen.