The Desolation of Disobedience

Copyright  by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

Human beings were originally created to experience obedience to God as pure joy. How great was our fall that today so many of us tend to dislike the very idea of it? How far have we departed from what we were intended to be that “obedience” has become such a dirty word, even in the Church?

The stubborn drive for complete personal autonomy is nothing new to our race as a whole. What does seem new is the tendency for contemporary believers to embrace the idea that it is possible to adopt the trappings of our culture’s radical individualism while at the same time presuming to conform ourselves to the image of Christ. To imagine that we can be good Christians and also abhor being in submission to anyone, much less God, is to indulge in a particularly dangerous form of self-deception. How can we expect to become more like Jesus and have the heart of a servant when we run from the very term “servant”?

It is through a sincere desire to become obedient to God and, to a lesser extent, to those people He has seen fit to put over us in various capacities that we progress in the Christian life. This is a tough nut for many of us to swallow. There are, of course, sometimes reasons for this that go beyond sinful willfulness on our part. If, for instance, we grew up with parents or other authority figures who demanded unquestioning loyalty from us while simultaneously being lovelessly abusive we will find it more difficult to trust God enough to submit to both Him and His proxies. It is not helpful to assume that the wounds of our past have no bearing on answering the call to obedience we are faced with today.

Taking this into consideration the fact remains that too much of the 21^st Century Western Church appears to have been taken captive by the attitude that living in a liberal democracy means never having to bend the knee to anyone, including those in the congregational hierarchy. Ask any number of pastors who have lovingly confronted erring church members only to be angrily rebuked (and often then watch said members walk out the door) and the reality of this trend becomes apparent. A large percentage of “church hoppers” are those who simply will not put themselves under submission to anyone. These people may stand on the idea that they are “responsible only to God” for their actions, but they forget that our Lord has appointed shepherds to watch over His flock during His physical absence. Submission to Godly authority should trump our surrounding secular society’s philosophy of unlimited personal freedom. That it often doesn’t shows that Post-Modern Christians apparently spend more time immersing themselves in the culture than seriously reading their Bibles.

The sad thing is that authentic freedom and real joy only come through trusting in God enough to forsake the false freedom of radical personal autonomy. To become obedient to the One who loves us perfectly, and thus perfectly has our best interests at heart, is the only thing that will give us the abundant life that the world falsely promises to those who are “Captains of their own souls”. If we instead persist in the kind of pride that informs us that no one should ever be in any kind of authority over us, even divinely-assigned authority, then we ultimately condemn ourselves to relational desolation. Unrepentedly willful independence from God and those who He has appointed to guide and love us is, in the end, self-defeating in the worst sense of the term. It leaves us isolated and unable to dwell in the love we need to truly live. Such “freedom” is not freedom at all, but bondage.