for the sake of obedience.

i've been thinking about obedience a lot lately, namely how hard it is and the reasons we are supposed to obey. obedience to God parallels the reasons why kids obey their parents--they don't obey out of sheer fear of their parents, or because they have been yelled at without love, essentially being degraded, or because they will be rewarded. kids obey their parents because they love them and don't want to disappoint them. it comes from a deeper relationship with their parents than kids who don't obey experience.

i can see this so closely in my own view of obedience with the Lord. my obedience must be grounded in love, not out of fear of something God will do to me if i don't have a quiet time, not so that i will be rewarded with the american dream sometime in my life.

i think this can relate a lot to how we see church. we kind of try to "trick" people into obedience by using fear, or telling people how miserable they will be if they don't obey God. or maybe obedience is the "cool" thing to do, being a christian is "cool." so we see church as needing to be cool and fun, and making all the bible studies cool and fun. but if someone truly needs change, they need an encounter with Jesus, not anything else. everything we teach about Jesus needs to be first and foremost rooted in a foundation of a love for him.

i want to pray, not that someone, or myself even, would stop doing something, or start doing something else, but that they would encounter this love of Jesus with such immense clarity that they have no choice but to obey; that they will be blinded by love for him and this is what will change their lives.

i want to stop working so much out of actions and putting so much weight on what i am doing, on my "successes," and bring it back to what God is doing or isn't doing. i want to be faithful to God alone, and not to what looks like success to this world.