How to Be Obedient to God

What Does the Obedience of Faith Mean?

When many Christians hear the word obedience, we immediately think about self-control, discipline, and doing what we are told. That is not always wrong. Obedience can describe actions. But Paul does not simply write about obedience in Romans 1:5. He writes about “the obedience of faith.” The question is whether faith itself is being joined to human effort or whether Paul is describing an obedience that belongs to faith.

through whom we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith
Romans 1:5 ESV

A common approach says faith includes believing Christ and then cooperating with grace through keeping His commands. That can sound spiritual, but it creates a problem with the way Paul speaks about grace. Ephesians 2:8 says salvation is by grace through faith and that it is not our own doing. Romans 11:6 says that if something is by grace, it is no longer on the basis of works. Otherwise grace would no longer be grace.

I do not believe Paul suddenly mixes the two together in his opening sentence to Rome. Grace does not begin the Christian life only to hand us back to self-effort. Paul will later say that the righteous live by faith, and the same distinction is already present here. Faith receives. Works perform. The obedience Paul connects to faith must be read in that light.

In the Case of Faith, Obedience Is Belief

John 3:36 gives us one of the clearest places to see the relationship between believing and obeying. John places the two ideas directly beside one another:

Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life
John 3:36 ESV

The contrast is not between a believer who behaves well and a believer who behaves badly. It is between the one who believes and the one who does not obey. In the case of faith, obedience is belief. That does not mean the word obedience can never describe anything else. It means we cannot turn the obedience of faith into an achievement that earns or even helps earn what grace gives.

Faith is not a wage. It is not a spiritual skill we master until God owes us life. We believe because God gives what we could never manufacture for ourselves. That is why obedience of faith cannot begin with our performance. It begins with receiving Christ and trusting Him with our life.

Faith Is Given, Not Earned

Paul speaks in Romans 12:3 of a measure of faith God has assigned. In 1 Corinthians 13:2 he can even speak of “all faith” in the setting of first-century spiritual gifts. I believe faith operated as a spiritual gift in those days and could be given in differing measures. That does not change the central point: it was given. It was not earned.

Paul also tells Timothy that even when we are faithless, God remains faithful because He cannot deny Himself. Jesus says of those who belong to Him, “I give them eternal life, and they will never perish.” Our security rests in His faithfulness, not in our ability to keep our faith at the same emotional strength every day. Christ does not save us and then wait for our faith to become impressive enough to keep us saved.

Growth still matters, but it grows from what we have received. Jesus used the picture of the vine and the branches to teach dependence, not self-sufficiency. Abiding in Christ is believing the truth and depending on His indwelling life. If we desire stronger faith, we go back to the vine. We learn His love and mercy. We humble ourselves before Him and let Him renew the way we think.

Faith Produces a Different Kind of Obedience

There is something important in the order of the phrase itself. Our obedience comes from faith. We are not obedient first and then rewarded with faith. Faith comes first, and what follows grows out of it. That is the difference between religious performance and life in Christ.

Faith includes allegiance, trust, confidence, and dependence. At salvation we trust Christ with our life. We accept His offer of life because we believe He is life. How much more complete could trust be than placing your eternal life in someone else’s hands? That trust is not the finish line of obedience. It is where obedience begins.

The object of faith matters more than trying to measure how impressive our faith feels. The object is Christ and what He accomplished. As His love becomes more precious to us, that love changes the way we live. We are not trying to generate a holy life from a rulebook. We are learning to live from a life already given to us.

Love That the World May Reject

The love of Christ is not the same as the love the world celebrates. Christian love can cost us something. We may tell someone the truth about Christ because we love that person and receive rejection in return. Jesus and His apostles were not loved by the world for preaching the cross. If their message had been nothing more than agreeable feelings, they would not have been persecuted.

I also do not believe Scripture gives us a basis for telling every unbeliever, without distinction, “God loves you.” Yahweh does not love everyone in the same intimate sense in which He loves those He adopts into His inheritance. The invitation of Christ is available to all, while faith and belief are gifts from God. That does not mean we attack people, mock them, or go around telling people Yahweh hates them. It means we let Scripture define divine love instead of replacing it with a worldly version that never offends anyone.

When Faith Feels Dull, Go Back to the Beginning

Salvation can begin with tremendous joy, but I have had times when my enthusiasm for faith felt like it had moved to the back burner. The faith was still there, but the excitement was not. Difficult seasons can pull us toward the Lord or tempt us to move away from Him. When that happens, I have found it helpful to go back to the beginning and remember what first made His grace precious.

When Love Comes Back Into Focus

Melissa once told me about a married couple we will call David and Joan. They were a pillar couple, the kind Melissa and I could look to while we were newly married and learning how to navigate our own struggles. Then, about a year into our marriage, Joan called Melissa and told her she was thinking about leaving David. Their marriage had been struggling for a long time, and Melissa was blindsided. She had no idea. Joan was beside herself and grasping for direction, and Melissa remembers wondering what advice she could possibly give to a woman whose marriage she herself had looked up to.

At that point Melissa was still in the first year of marriage, very much overwhelmed with love for me. Her mind went immediately to the love she knew Joan still had for David and how tragic it would be if they walked away from one another. So when Joan asked what Melissa thought about leaving, Melissa asked a simple question: “Do you love him?” Joan paused, then answered yes, confidently. She had just gotten off the phone with her best friend, an older Christian woman with years of marriage behind her, who had asked her exactly the same question. Melissa could hear Joan’s voice perk up. Something had come back into focus. More than twenty years later, David and Joan were still married, more in love and happier than they had ever been. They went back to the beginning and built from there, and what they built became stronger than ever.

Cherish the belief we received at salvation. Are we living by that faith and by the love we first knew in Christ, or have traditions, fear, and self-discipline taken its place? The answer is not to produce a new foundation. It is to build again on the One we already have.

Keeping Christ’s Commands Without Returning to Law

A familiar teaching says that if you love Christ, you will keep His commandments, and then turns those commandments into a list of rules taken from everything Jesus said before the cross. Jesus was born under the Law, and He was the greatest teacher of the Law who ever walked the earth. But believers are not under the Law. We are under grace. Understanding the New Covenant keeps us from treating every pre-cross command as though the Law of Moses were simply transferred onto Christians.

I have often said that keeping the commands of Christ means cherishing them, holding them tightly, and making them precious. This is not accomplished by better rule keeping. It is done freely by faith. Yahweh did not remove the old system only to give us another religious rulebook. He gave us a Counselor who guides rather than a system that keeps us obedient through fear of punishment.

A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you
John 13:34 ESV

Jesus later tells His disciples that He no longer calls them servants but friends, and He commands them to love one another. He also reminds them that they did not choose Him, but He chose them and appointed them to bear fruit. The command is not an invitation to build another ladder toward God. It rests on what He has already done and on the love He has already shown.

Friendship with Christ Is Not On and Off

John says Jesus loved His own “to the end.” I do not hear anything in that statement that sounds like believers moving in and out of His love, friendship, or fellowship according to their performance. His love for His own was not repeatedly broken and repaired. It was a perfect love that endured.

So what was the command at the heart of this? Believe. Believe in His love. Have faith in His love, not your own ability to keep yourself near Him. Christians are not in and out of fellowship with Yahweh. Biblical fellowship rests on Christ, not on passing a daily behavior test.

That is also why Christian identity cannot be reduced to how successfully someone looks religious. What Does a Christian Look Like? asks the same performance question from another angle. We can learn religious habits without learning dependence on Christ. Grace moves the center of attention away from our appearance and back to His life in us.

We Don’t Need Better Rule Keeping

If we want to feel close to God, the answer is not to build a better rule system. We need to desire His fruit rather than the fruit of the world and allow the Counselor to teach us how to live from our new divine nature. Living from that nature does not always feel natural to the flesh, but it does come spiritually as our minds are renewed.

Romans 12:2 calls believers to be transformed by the renewal of the mind. Romans 3:27 speaks of the law of faith rather than a law of works. Those ideas belong together. The Christian life is not lawlessness, but neither is it a return to law as the power that governs us. We love Christ. We can serve from the heart because we have already been brought near.

We do not need better rule keeping. We need genuine desire, a desire that does not grow from fear of punishment or the promise of some special reward. We have received our reward in Christ. The more clearly we see what we have received, the more freely we can live the abundant life that is already ours.

That kind of life will not always be applauded. Paul preached Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles. Jesus said He is the way, the truth, and the life, and He warned His disciples that the world could hate them because it hated Him first. The cross will never fit comfortably inside a message built only around popularity and good feelings.

Trouble does not prove Christ has failed us. Jesus told His disciples that they would have tribulation and then said, “take heart; I have overcome the world.” The enemy could not give life and could not raise himself from the dead. Satan is no more. Christ has overcome the world, and everyone who believes shares in His resurrection life. Life is too short to live like the dead. We can trust the One who gives life and live from what He has already given us.