My Talk last Friday on Obedience

Good Evening!

Thank you so so much for having me here, this evening, to speak. I’m really honored and I hope and pray that whatever it is that I’m about to say will be a help to you. Let’s just pray for a minute.

O God, because without you we are not able to please you, mercifully grant that your Holy Spirit may in all things direct and rule our hearts; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

I’m pretty sure that I was asked to talk, this evening, about Obedience because I have six children. My life is consumed with making them do what I say. “Do this,” I say, “go here. Pick up that. Stop crying. Stop teasing your sister. Get in the car. Put your shoes away. Do your math. Stop Crying.” The big question, ruling over the hearts of all my children is, Am I going to obey? Its a good choice, in my house, to obey me. If I, as your mother, of course, I’m not your mother, but just go along with me for a minute, and I say, say you’re ten years old, and I say, ‘I want you to practice the piano and then clean the kitchen, and then get quick to your desk and do your math,’ you have a few options. The first best option is to do all those things. You say, “Yes Ma’am”, we say that because my husband is from the south. You say, ‘Yes ma’am,’ and you high yourself over to the piano and get going. But there are some other choices. You could say, ‘Yes Ma’am’ and go sit on the piano bench, and quietly pull out your ipod, and quietly play Clash of Clans. And I might not notice for a few minutes, but if I did notice, would that have been a good choice? What’s the word for what you just did? That’s right, you were disobedient. There’s one more option. You could say, ‘No Ma’am, I won’t go practice the piano.’ But no kid in my house has ever said that. Well, maybe one said it once, but they never said it again.

The key for me, as a mother, is that if I did not cause and direct and encourage and move my children to obey me, I would be a bad mother. And the reason that I would be a bad mother is because, its my job to train up and guide my children toward safety and goodness, but also, at the most basic point, if my children don’t obey me, and their dad, they will have a really hard time obeying God. And if you can’t obey God, you will always and forever be unhappy. There’s a horrible little song, well, and I actually like it, because it was my grandmother’s favorite song in the whole world, which is weird because she was an opera singer, but she would sing this at us, not with us, but at us, when we were not in a good way. “Trust and Obey” she would sing, “for there’s no other way to be happy in Jesus, but to trust and obey.” “Oh Gramma,” I would fuss, “you don’t know me at all. I don’t even want to be happy.”

So let’s look together at a terrible text in the Bible. This text might make you, as it does me, recoil in horror. And you may wonder what kind of person I am, coming here and talking about what I’m going to talk about. But the first passage we’re about to look at, in its difficulty, in its violence, demonstrates the guts of obedience. It will illumine for us that God is good, despite what we think deep down. And then we will see that obedience is the open door to knowing God. And finally, we will see that delayed obedience might be disobedience,but with God, it is better than nothing.

So, hopefully a slide will flash up there. And I will quickly read a moment in the Bible of which you may or may not have heard.

1 And Samuel said to Saul, “2 Thus says the LORD of hosts, ‘I have noted what Amalek did to Israel in opposing them on the way when they came up out of Egypt. 3 Now go and strike Amalek and devote to destruction all that they have. Do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.'”

Ok, just quickly before we go on. Samuel is a prophet. He hears God’s actual words and speaks them and writes them down. He is a good prophet. He faithfully proclaims God’s word for Israel. He is trustworthy. None of his words ever fall to the ground, he is never wrong when he speaks what God tells him. And so he is sent by God to Saul, who is the first king of Israel. God wants Saul to go kill all the Amalekites. So, your first thought might be, that’s not very nice. Or, you might think, my God wouldn’t say that, and if he did, he wouldn’t be my God. And, as we will see, Saul kind of agrees with you. Not because he thinks killing is bad, but because sheep are delicious and camels and donkeys are useful. Let’s carry on, skipping quickly over some,

7 And Saul defeated the Amalekites from Havilah as far as Shur, which is east of Egypt.

Ok, so Saul goes to kill the Amalekites. He defeats them.

8 And he took Agag the king of the Amalekites alive and devoted to destruction all the people with the edge of the sword.

Was he supposed to keep the king of the Amalekites, Agag, alive? No.But he does kill all the people.

9 Saul and the people spared Agag and the best of the sheep and of the oxen and of the fattened calves and the lambs, and all that was good, and would not utterly destroy them. All that was despised and worthless they devoted to destruction.

What we have here is a clear moment of disobedience in the scripture. This is Saul saying to himself, ‘I’m going to do what suits me. I will obey as far as it is expedient for me to do so, but not beyond that.’

Now, before we carry on, let’s think for a minute about a hard part of Christian theology that will help us understand why God would command someone to go kill a lot of people. This is a hard truth, but it is central to our ability to draw close to God. This truth is that human beings are disobedient. You and I and everyone outside of this room, and in the town of Binghamton, and carrying on over the oceans to every corner of the world, are not able to obey for a very simple reason. We don’t want to. We can’t obey because we don’t want to.

When God created us, given the free choice, by God, to love him and be related to him, and obey him, the very very first thing the first humans did was disobey. Disobedience, we could call it sin, separates the human person completely from the love and presence of God. And, their, the first humans, decision to disobey has been passed down to us, mother to child,father to child. We agree, generation by generation, with the decision to disobey. We do not love God, we do not do what he says, we don’t want to, we won’t given every opportunity that we have. We are, by nature, that means the essence of who we are, children of wrath. The New Testament describes us this way:

“None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God. All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one.” Romans 3:10-12

God is holy, and just, and fair and so he cannot just ignore our violation of his law and our destruction of his creation. In Romans 6:23, he says, the wages, or the fair payment for sinis death, both physical and spiritual. This is an incredibly dismal diagnosis.

And, just to go down a little bit more before we go up, occasionally, in the Old Testament, God would occassionally use one group of people, in this case, Saul and his army, to exercise his justice on another group of people, in this case the Amalekites. It wasn’t the people acting on what they thought was just, as we can see from Saul’s behavior, it was God’s direct, verbal, command. It wasn’t, either, a feeling or an intuition. God spoke to Samuel who passed the verbal message onto Saul.

I know this is offensive and upsetting, but It will help to make a crucial distinction.

These are one time commands to specific groups of people in specific historical settings. There is never anywhere in the Bible any indication that Christians or people who believe in God should ever act on their own or on the basis of these past events to strike out violently against another people. The only sword that God has given the Christian now is the word, the Bible.

Why then this episode that we are reading?

Most all the violence in the Old Testament pointed forward to one particular moment, which we will talk about in just a second. It was God warning humanity of what we all are owed. So for the Amalekites, God was doing the just thing. This, by the way, is why you should be really careful about praying for God’s justice. We don’t really desire justice. What we’re looking for is mercy.

12 And Samuel rose early to meet Saul in the morning. And it was told Samuel, “Saul came to Carmel, and behold, he set up a monument for himself and turned and passed on and went down to Gilgal.” 13 And Samuel came to Saul, and Saul said to him, “Blessed be you to the LORD. I have performed the commandment of the LORD.”

Mmhmm. Now we have disobedience And Lying.

14 And Samuel said, “What then is this bleating of the sheep in my ears and the lowing of the oxen that I hear?” 15 Saul said, “They have brought them from the Amalekites, for the people spared the best of the sheep and of the oxen to sacrifice to the LORD your God, and the rest we have devoted to destruction.”

And now we have the blaming of others.

16 Then Samuel said to Saul, ” 19 Why did you not obey the voice of the LORD? Why did you pounce on the spoil and do what was evil in the sight of the LORD?” 20 And Saul said to Samuel, “I have obeyed the voice of the LORD. I have gone on the mission on which the LORD sent me. I have brought Agag the king of Amalek, and I have devoted the Amalekites to destruction. 21 But the people took of the spoil, sheep and oxen, the best of the things devoted to destruction, to sacrifice to the LORD your God in Gilgal.”

Boy, Saul digs in deep here. In all this disobedience Saul reveals something about himself. Jesus says in the gospel of John, ‘If anyone loves me, he will keep my word.’ John 14:23. Obedience to God is the outward and visible sign of love for God. What is missing for Saul?Love

Samuel says to Saul

22 “Has the LORD as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the LORD? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to listen than the fat of rams. 1 Samuel 15:1-22

From God’s perspective, love for him isn’t a feeling our hearts, but obedience in thought, word and deed, and we are called to love him with all our heart and soul and strength and mind.Who can do this?

Let me hang that there and talk about this sacrifice that Samuel is alluding to. In the Old Testament, a person who understood that they had disobeyed, that person could take an animal and that animal would be killed and the blood poured out. The animal dying was a visual, quite a strong visual, that the person should have died. Has a lamb done anything? No, the lamb was perfectly obedient. A lamb did everything God designed him to do. He just went on being a lamb. He never frolicked through the field and thought, you know, I hate God, I don’t want to eat this stupid grass, I’m going to go do something contrary to what I have been made to do. What a ridiculous thought. But this is what separates us from every other creature and plant and rock and spring of water on earth. All of them, All of creation does what God designed it to do. There is no disobedience in the natural world.Only in us is there disobedience. We are the ones who wake up and say, No, I’m not going to love you and do what you say. So the lamb was killed in place of the disobedient person. Its not good,as Samuel has just saidlike obedience. Except to show the devastating effect of sinThe blood flowing down everywhere,An innocent life struck downwhen it should have been you.

Jesus once had a young man come up to him and ask how to be saved. “How can I be saved,” asked the young man.

And Jesus said, “well, follow the law. Obey what God has commanded.”

And the young man looked at Jesus and said “I’ve kept the law. I have obeyed.”

“Really?” said Jesus, “Then sell everything you have and give it all to the poor.” Because the first point of the law is to love God with everything in you and love him only, over everything else in your life. Show me, Jesus was saying, that you love God.

But the young man loved his stuff, his wealth, more than anything. And so he went away sad. He didn’t do what Jesus said because he didn’t love God. And Jesus’ friends, looking on, said, oh my word, how can anyone be saved? You’re right, said Jesus, to ask such a question. No one can be saved because no one can obey. But with God, all things are possible.

With God, obedience is possible, salvation is possible, not because you are suddenly going to obey, but because Jesus obeyed perfectly for you. All those lambs, those innocent, sweet lambs, pointed forward to one moment, in the very center of time, to the lamb that God would himself provide. God, in Jesus, is the lamb. He is perfectly obedient.Like every plant and animal and force of nature, he never once disobeyed God. But unlike them, his obedience can count as your obedience. His life for yours. His blood for yours. Jesus did what you cannot do.

I said, at the beginning, that obedience is an open door to knowing God, and you might have thought that I was talking about your obedience. And then I said that you couldn’t obey, thereby, hopefully backing you into a corner of utter despair, into a room with no windows and no doors.

But then, as you stand there in that dark roomwith no way out,someone comes in an opens the door.In this case God himself is the one who opens the door.Jesus himself is the door.When Jesus died, violently and brutallyand his blood poured outit was the first and only complete injustice in all of human history.God himself was willing to die to be obedient when you didn’t want to.

Did I overstate it, in the beginning,to say that God is good?He is good.He made a door of mercy for you,absorbing in himself the justice that you are owed.

Jesus told a story one day about two sons. The father said to the first one, ‘Go into the fields and work for me today.’ This first son said, ‘Yes Sir, I will go.’ But he didn’t go. He wandered off and played Minion Rush. So the father said to the second, ‘Go into the fields and work for me today.’ This second son said, ‘No’. No one listening to this story would believe that a son would ever say ‘No,’ out loud. But the point is well taken. Every single one of us says no to God every single say. Or, if we pretend we’re saying yes, we’re like the first son and a liar. But the second son did something amazing. After he said no, walking away from his father, he changed his mind, he had a change of heart. We could say that he ‘came to himself’.He turned around and went to the field to work.

This is the call. We’ve all already said no. The sheep of our lives are bleating in God’s ears. He knows who we are and what we’ve done. But we can turn around. We can go back the other way. And the reason we can turn around and obey, now, is because Jesus first obeyed. His obedience counts for you, if you ask him to give it to you, and then, painstakingly,like a loving fatherhe begins to help you towards real obedience.

When you do, when you turn back towards him and ask for him to save you, for his blood, his death, to count for you, then you turn out to be the second son, who said no, but then said yes and went into the kingdom of God after all. And what is the result of that? Glory for God and happiness for you.