Comfort for Our 2020 World in Need of Loving Obedience

The COVID-19 pandemic has created a new dynamic for families who are now directed to stay home for several weeks.  Extended family time together has come with the extra strain and stress of many spouses and parents working from home and taking on the unexpected task of homeschooling their children.  For these fragile family and community relationships to sail smoothly through this lockdown period requires not just obedience but loving obedience.  The same holds true in order for us to belong in the family of God but in this case even more is required; we are to give perfect loving obedience to God. 

So what does God demand of us? One might say that God demands obedience from us. And that is certainly true. Yet that answer does not cover the depth of God’s demands. It is possible to act in ‘obedience’ but to do so in such a way that God is not pleased (cf. Psalm 50; Isaiah 29:13; Joel 2:13; Matthew 23). God is not pleased with external or ritual obedience. He desires obedience from the heart. God wants our love. 

Christ teaches us this in Matthew 22: You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself: On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets.  It is possible to obey God without loving Him (an empty obedience).  However, it is impossible to love without obeying (cf. John 14:15).

Furthermore, God requires perfect love, complete love, love for both God and our neighbor. The summary of the law emphasizes this when it says, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your mind.” Three times the word “all” is repeated. And the reference to heart, soul and mind certainly emphasizes the fact that God demands that we sacrifice our whole self as a living sacrifice of love and gratitude to God.

Through God’s law we come to know what miserable people we are. We have wandered away from God through our disobedience. We have lost all the wonderful gifts which God had given us.  At creation, we were given gifts such as purity, integrity and uprightness. Now we are left with none of these gifts and we are unable to do any good. We cannot keep all these commands perfectly.  Tragically we are all inclined by nature to hate God and our neighbor.

God’s laws -what we call covenant laws - are summarized in the Ten Commandments as we find them in Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5, and they are worked out further in Scripture. Unlike the civil and ceremonial laws of the Old Testament, these laws do not pass away. They remain in force always. Just as God’s covenant with man is eternal, so these covenant laws will apply eternally. They are the standard by which we must govern our daily life at all times. And when we examine our lives in the light of these commandments, we realize that we fall grievously short of that obedience which Christ requires of us.