Obedience

 

This morning I sought the Lord regarding my continued frustration in efforts to eat right and lose weight. I felt ashamed and that I had failed once again to demonstrate my love for Christ via the obedience path.  I've learned to continue to seek the Lord even when I've failed to obey Him as I should, but I came with hesitation, clutching the fig leaf of my own failure in an effort to hide the vulnerability of my sin. 

As I prayed, these thoughts came: 

You have great trouble trusting in the Lord rather than in your own efforts to renew yourself.  Don’t give up trying, but do give up the unreasonable despair you feel when you fail.  Your obedience is not the price God requires for loving Him.  Your obedience—and this is a “wrong” sounding truth to which a performance-based Christian would object—is not required at all.  It is only when the requirements are lifted that obedience becomes possible for weak human flesh.  Satan works hard to link the quality of your obedience to the quantity of your blessings so as to keep you under the law rather than under grace.  God's grace is not partial, nor does it depend upon you beyond your willingness to accept what He offers; God's grace flows wholly from the shed blood of Christ.  Obedience is not an “up front” cost of loving Jesus.  Obedience is a result of entering in to Christ’s love, not an admission price.  

It isn't that obedience is unimportant, but that it is not a requirement for entering into Christ's love.  It is in abiding in His great love that we are enabled to obey. When we reverse this process and make obedience the required outward sign that proves we belong to Christ, we become vulnerable to despair.  We must daily realign our focus from the self-judgment of examining our own performance to the enormous grace given us in God's love through Jesus.  

When Christ's blood placed us under grace rather than under the law, our focus was freed to be placed upon His love rather than upon our the quality of our own obedience.  

Everything always begins with His love.  

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But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

Romans 5:8