When Jesus was spending His last evening with His disciples before His crucifixion, He told them, “Those who know my commands and obey them are the ones who love me, and my Father will love those who love me. I will love them and will show myself to them” (John 14:21). John reiterated this statement in 1 John 5:3: “Loving God means obeying his commands. And God’s commands are not too hard for us.”
Obedience to God’s commands wasn’t a new theme in the Bible – in the Old Testament, God often spoke about obeying the law and His commandments. As Christians, we do talk a bit about obeying God, but we usually relegate it to either 1) living in compliance to the rules we see set forth in the Bible, or 2) quickly carrying out an action that God has revealed to us (“go help that lady carry her groceries,” or “go tell that guy about Jesus,” or “go be a missionary to Africa”).
There is an aspect that many things spoken by God are actions, either of the body or of the heart (“Do not let your hearts be troubled. You believe in God; believe also in me,” Jesus told His disciples (John 14:1) and “Do everything without complaining or arguing,” Paul wrote to the Philippians (2:14)). But obedience is much more than just carrying out a task, assignment, or even posturing your heart or mind to believe the truth.
True obedience goes beyond an action. Someone can tell me to hike to a waterfall, and I can obey that request in so much as I walk to the waterfall and walk back. But if my heart isn’t engaged, it’s compliance, not obedience.
Obedience is carrying out the desire of a heart. It’s capturing the essence of what the person in authority wanted. (I’m not going to get into it here, but obedience can only happen when someone complies with the instructions given by an authority – if there’s no person in authority, it’s not obedience when they do what they’re asked to do.) Obedience is more than just actively doing what the person asked – it’s going beyond to fulfill the heart behind the request.
Let’s say that my mom asks me to make a cake. Let’s even say that she asks me to make a chocolate cake for my sister’s birthday and hands me the recipe. I can comply to the smallest possible extent by mixing up the cake batter. I can even obey to a fuller extent by putting it in a pan and baking it. But if I want to be fully obedient, I’ll take that recipe, mix up the batter, put it in the proper pan, bake it for the perfect amount of time, then cut and shape it and ice in the perfect way to delight my sister. I’ve done more than carry out what was required; I’ve carried out the desire of the heart of my mom to make something worthy of my sister’s birthday.
Our obedience to God is more than a “thou shalt not.” It’s more than doing to the letter of the law what God has told us, either in His word or by revelation. It’s capturing the heart of the One who told us to do it. I can keep myself pure, physically. But if I realize that God’s mandate for purity is more than just not having relations before marriage – it’s who He is, at His heart (Proverbs 30:5) – I will be able to carry out that “rule” in a way that honors God rather than just meets the letter of the law. As a final note, let me tell you from experience that it’s much more fun to obey than to comply. When you comply, your heart isn’t in it, and you’re doing what’s required as little as possible and at as little expense to yourself as possible. When you obey, carrying out the heart behind the request or rule instead of the letter of the law, you can do it with delight, giving generously of yourself for a greater good or greater cause – even if it’s just moving with the Holy Spirit to obey God’s
