Learning to Obey Him

Learning to Obey Him

Read | Romans 8:2-4

When did you last hear a sermon on obedience? The topic doesn't typically draw large crowds, as it sounds too much like following orders or submitting to laws and commandments. After all, didn't Jesus come to set us free from all that? No, not really. As today’s passage tells us, He came to set us free from the law of sin and death “so that the requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us.” In other words, He set us free from disobedience. Christian liberty frees us to obey our Father’s commandments.

In Still Higher for His Highest, Oswald Chambers expresses it this way: “True liberty is the ability earned by practice to do the right thing.” Doing the right thing is obedience. Hebrews 5:8 says that “although [Jesus] was a Son, He learned obedience from the things which He suffered.” We have to enroll in the same school of thought and practice.

At first the lessons seem simple; we just do what our teachers tell us. But then we learn to discern the Shepherd’s voice for ourselves. He tells us that we must live by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God (Matt. 4:4). Under His guidance, we study the Bible and find to our amazement that some passages we had swept under a doctrinal rug are being applied to us by the Holy Spirit. We are often confused, thinking certain passages applied only to Israel, the church, or the end times. We squirm and wiggle, but with patient persistence, the good Spirit bears down until we finally obey God’s voice. The Lord is patient---slowly but surely teaching us how to be obedient to His voice.