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THE RIGHT WAY TO OBEY

What is the role of obedience in the salvation process? If you want to get an argument going in Christian radio, that might be just about the quickest way . . . right up there with a “crossfire” debate on Roe v. Wade. We’re going to carefully and graciously do some discussing of the above question – the first one, not the second – but first, here’s a little Tuesday book review.

If you’d like to shed a few tears and also fall right out of your chair laughing, you can’t do any better than the recent book, 365 Ways to Criticize the Pastor, written by Rev. Pat Jobe of Tanner’s Grove United Methodist Church in Forest City, North Carolina. Subtitled “A hilarious and moving tale of transformation,” this clever one-year diary is written in the voice of Sister Beverly Roberts, a cranky old widow whose husband has recently passed on. And the bulk of the book is her ongoing diatribe and harangue against the Rev. Arnold Chister, who pastors her home church, Treadwell Freewill Baptist. And boy, she just can’t stand this guy. If only the board knew all that was going on. Why don’t the deacons do something about this upstart? Etc. Etc. She laments, early on: “If my husband, Basil, was living, he’d die over this.”

Some of her verbal daggers against the pastor are about things as mundane as his looks. Why doesn’t the man get a haircut? she shrieks into her daily journal. Is he that clueless? But when he does, she writes down: “He got his hair cut. His nose is too big.” Two days later, February 18, the scandalous Rev. Chister lets Frank and Ellen Green join the church.

“He’s been in mental hospitals,” she writes, “jails, flop houses from here to New York City. Poor thing, she’s short-order cooked all over the place to hold the family together. Of course, they’re not going to contribute anything to the church. What is that man thinking? The deacon board has to seriously look at his goings on.”

Down in March, we begin to see the first chinks of God’s love digging through her armor. She finally drags herself to an AA meeting to accompany her alcoholic son, Wilson. Disaster! “Lord, they do smoke some cigarettes,” she writes down later between hacks and coughs. “I couldn’t stay.” A few weeks after that, she grumps again to Dear Diary, this time about the landscaping at the church. “The grass needs mowing,” she snips. “The deacons need to either hire a new preacher or a goat.”
And it goes on like this for quite a while. Sometimes you laugh; other times you shake your head. She goes down to the Post Office – it’s April 15 – to file her taxes.

“You Know Who’s down [there too],” she sighs, “licking stamps and collating copies. I just smiled when I saw him. The man will be late to his own funeral. And we’re supposed to find all this charming. There’s a last straw out there, and I’ll find it.”

But bit by bit, entry by entry . . . you know, something happens. Sister Roberts, who has tantrums over kids being noisy in church, and about Rev. Chister running vans to round up the teenagers for services on Sunday, begins to slowly love the kids herself. She ends up with a few foster children actually staying at her house when their dad is accused of killing their mom. Early diary entries have a bit of a racist tinge to them – “Dear Lord, what are THEY doing worshiping in our church?” – and now one of her foster charges, Sarah Jane, has a black boyfriend, Charles, who comes over and cuddles with her on Sister Roberts’ couch. What is the world coming to? “Give me some help here,” she cries out to God, as the make-out sessions escalate. “How do I convince two jet engines to head for the hangars for a couple of weeks?” When “S.J.”, Sarah Jane, starts her period, the old lady sighs in relief. “Good! Now if she’ll just do that for about the next ten years, I’ll be so grateful.”

But as grace slowly works on her heart, this defensive, diatribing old lady begins to melt. She starts to love other people. She gets ice cream for the kids and later muses: “Maybe this is my ministry now. Ice cream.” When 289 kids show up for VBS – “the little darlings” – she concedes with just a hint of appreciation:

“Rev. Mister Chister wandered around like a lost puppy, grinning and hugging and telling them God loves them.” And then adds, of course: “Don’t get me started.”

But by the time you get to Entry #365, you realize with a start that grace has come along and changed this woman. She’s more caring now. She’s more obedient to the claims of the gospel, which tell us to love one another. Once, when playing the wet nurse is driving her crazy, she confesses to God:

“Here I am playing Mother Teresa to three teenagers, so, of course, under my breath, I sin about every three minutes. It’s a good thing grace is sufficient to every need. Had it any outer limits, I believe I could find them.”

Well, friend, I certainly urge you to find 365 routes to your nearest Christian bookstore, and get yourself a copy. 365 Ways to Criticize the Preacher. But here in our radio series on grace – how abundant and free and limitless it actually is – it’s important to put this clear Bible pillar on the table right now. Here it is: GOD’S GRACE IS ALWAYS ACCOMPANIED BY GROWTH AND OBEDIENCE. In the course of a 365-day period, the man or woman who is basking in God’s grace also is determinedly seeking His will. And doing it!

We’ve been appreciating so much the insights from a “Week of Prayer” special issue of the church paper in my Adventist denomination, and author John Fowler quotes from the legendary Dietrich Bonhoeffer, German theologian, who writes this in his book, The Cost of Discipleship:

“Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.”

And you know, the Bible actually teaches us that it IS grace which empowers us to be obedient children! Without grace, we couldn’t do it! The children of Israel proved that. Notice Romans 1:5:

“Through [Jesus] and for His name’s sake, we received grace and apostleship to call people from among all the Gentiles to the obedience that COMES FROM FAITH.”

Notice: we receive grace from Christ. We express our faith in His gift of salvation. And that very faith, girded by the reality of grace, calls us to obedience. Peter joins Paul, over in his own first epistle, in exhorting believers to good deeds and God-honoring lifestyles. Then writes this in chapter five:

“I have written to you briefly, encouraging you and testifying that this IS the true grace of God. Stand fast in it.”

Back in Paul’s letter to the Colossians, he uses an interesting turn of phrase, when he observes:

“All over the world this gospel is BEARING FRUIT and growing, just as it has been doing among you since the day you heard it and understood God’s grace in all its truth.”

The great challenge, friend, is always this: to seek obedience, and uplift it, and honor it, and want it in our lives, and glorify heaven with it . . . without allowing obedience to become part of the BASIS of our salvation. To always make grace and Calvary the foundation of our eternal life, and obedience our grateful, God-honoring response. The great historic stream of Bible study and new light we call the Protestant Reformation clearly labels justification as a one-time, instantaneous gift . . . and sanctification as the subsequent, work-of-a-lifetime FRUIT of a heavenly home that has already been guaranteed. We’ve mentioned several times on this program the encouraging soundbite from C. S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity, where he observes that, of course, “real faith” takes careful note of what the Redeemer asks us to do. It wouldn’t be real faith if we went out and ignored the wishes and desires and commands of the Friend who has saved us.

“Thus if you have really handed yourself over to Him,” Lewis writes, “it must follow that you are trying to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way. Not doing these things in order to be saved, but because He has begun to save you already.”

Which is why we say that grace itself empowers us to obey. The promise of eternal life, the guarantee that God’s love will never cast us out – these are the gifts which give us the confidence and peace within which a life of true obedience can flourish. And friend, with humble gratitude to heaven for its leading in the work of the Body of Christ, we lift up this model as the very heart of the Reformation.

This Pastor Fowler kindly reminds readers that before we come to Christ and receive grace, our lives are so empty! They’re bereft! Bankrupt!

“The grace of God,” he writes, “has not come to redeem us from one kind of emptiness to place us in another kind of emptiness. Having come into God’s family, we bear fruit of God’s love through the power of His grace. Cheap grace that ignores obedience and fruit bearing places a limitation on God’s grace.”

What kind of child, knowing the full measure of his Father’s goodness, would say: “Dad, just give me half a loaf”?