Christian Obedience is Not What You Think It Is

Exposing the Lie of Performance-Driven Faith

“God utters me like a word containing a partial thought of him. A word will never be able to comprehend the voice that utters it. But if I am true to the concept that God utters in me, if I am true to the thought of Him that I was meant to embody, I shall be full of his actuality and find him everywhere in myself, and find myself nowhere.” — Thomas Merton

"For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven,
And do not return there without watering the earth
And making it produce and sprout,
And providing seed to the sower and bread to the eater;
So will My word be which goes out of My mouth;
It will not return to Me empty,
Without accomplishing what I desire,
And without succeeding in the purpose for which I sent it." — Isaiah 55:10-11

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The Christian notion of obedience has been much maligned by fearful hearts over the centuries. Like the servant with one talent whom Jesus preached against, these fearful ones love to reduce their faith to transactional formulas they can control. “The Bible commands, and I obey. The Bible says sing, so I sing. The Bible says serve, so I serve. The Bible says study, so I study.” 

They do this in a vain attempt to secure their place in heaven. 

But Christian obedience has nothing to do with the letter of the Law. 

The Apostle Paul tried very hard to make this clear (Romans 2:25-29, Romans 7:4-6, Romans 8:1-11, 2 Corinthians 3:5-18, Galatians 3:1-5, Galatians 5:18). But fear makes us deaf, so we cannot hear that truth. Fear makes us blind, so we cannot see the heart of God, which is consumed not with judging us but with setting us free.

Obedience is not about performance. It is not about conforming to a social norm. It is not about falling in line with the requirements of the religious elite. 

No. Obedience is about becoming. Obedience is about risk (remember the Parable of the Talents?). Obedience is about braving the unknown — especially the unknown in you.

You serve God. But you are not a slave. You are a song. You are an opus, a symphony, a soul-piercing aria that’s never happened before. You and God are composing this music together. You are not static. You are not passive. You are active and unfinished. You are emergent. You are unfolding.

Obedience is about the courageous surrender to this vulnerable pursuit of your own wholeness. It is not about roles, or masks, or social status games. It is not about conforming to structures or forms or somebody else’s ideas about what holiness is. Rather, it is about your wholehearted surrender to the maturation and unveiling of the creative word God spoke into you at the beginning of time.

You are a seed. You’ve come here to bring something new to life. Something glorious and true and beautiful and good. Something birthed out of the wild dance between you and the divine. Something of God, but also of you. 

But for a seed to become what it is meant to be, it has to die. It must surrender itself entirely to the dark unknown of its own mystery. It must die to the shell of identity it thinks it is, in order to invite the divine possibility of what it might become. 

Death and resurrection … Death and resurrection … Death and resurrection. That is the divine pattern of becoming. Being tenaciously faithful to that emergent process is obedience in the Kingdom of God.

You are not beholden to what other people think you are, or ought to be. You are not beholden to what religion or society or your parents or the world expects you to be. You have but one light you must follow. One beacon in the vast dark of the universe that illumines the path you must obey. It is your courageous pursuit of the answer to this one, sacred inquiry:

What is the secret word God spoke into me when he spoke me into being? What is required of me to set it free?