Why Obey?
A sermon preached at First Presbyterian Church, Burbank (March 7, 2010), and the Chicago Presbytery (March 22, 2010)
2 Peter 3:8-15a
8But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day. 9The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.
10But the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything in it will be laid bare.
11Since everything will be destroyed in this way, what kind of people ought you to be? You ought to live holy and godly lives 12as you look forward to the day of God and speed its coming. That day will bring about the destruction of the heavens by fire, and the elements will melt in the heat. 13But in keeping with his promise we are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, the home of righteousness.
14So then, dear friends, since you are looking forward to this, make every effort to be found spotless, blameless and at peace with him. 15Bear in mind that our Lord's patience means salvation.
The summer before I started high school, my parents made me get a job. This was not in my plan for the summer. As a typical teenager, steeped in the art of persuasion, I tried everything I could think of to talk them out of it (you know, arguments like: “But I have the rest of my LIFE to work!”). No matter what I tried, they remained firm in their decision. After my eighth grade graduation, I soon found myself at a nearby resort every Saturday morning, cleaning cabins. I hated this. I hated getting up early, I hated cleaning up other peoples’ messes (especially at an age where cleaning my own room seemed to be a monumental task). Most of all, I hated being forced to do a job that I didn’t want to do.
Only one thing kept me going: The resort owners came around regularly to check my work. I worked so that I wouldn’t get caught not working. I didn’t want to get in trouble. Needless to say, I worked with a grudge in my heart and a scowl on my face.
Do you ever feel like the living the Christian life is a job you don’t want to do? Obedience can feel like quite a chore, and at times following Jesus feels more like drudgery than joy. The commands of Scripture to love our enemies, to give generously, to serve the poor among us, to care for one another, and to walk faithfully with our Lord are meant for our good, but sometimes they feel like just the opposite. Why should we obey when we don’t feel like it?
Our passage today from 2 Peter speaks to the issue of obedience. The passage begins with the author writing about what to expect at the end of the world, referred to here as the “day of the Lord.” The day of the Lord is a time when God will return to bring about a “new heaven and a new earth, where righteousness dwells” according to verse 13. The old earth will pass away, and there will be no more pain or sorrow. Instead of creation’s ongoing struggle, there will be peace. Righteousness will dwell on the earth.
Some of you may be wondering what others in the early church wondered: “Well, where is this day? Why hasn’t the Lord come back? And why should we bother obeying when God will fix everything in the day of the Lord, anyway?” This question becomes even more pressing when we see injustice or experience suffering. The recent earthquake crises in Haiti and Chile are just one tragic example. Closer to home, we may know friends or family members struggling with chronic illnesses, loneliness or financial ruin. We may be in the midst of a time of great suffering ourselves. With all that’s wrong with the world, what’s God waiting for? God promises us this new heaven and new earth, so why hasn’t God come back already?
But let’s wait just a second. This time will indeed be a time of great celebration, but we also know from today’s passage that the day of the Lord will be a time of adjudication as well. 2 Peter verse 10 ends by saying that “the earth and everything done on it will be found out.” Yikes! Now maybe we might feel a bit more hesitant about wanting this day to come. Everything that is done will be found out. In another translation, this verse reads “Everything done on the earth will be disclosed.”
A logical move to make here would be to say, “Well, we’d certainly better behave, because Jesus is coming back, and he knows what we’re up to!” And in a sense, this is true. Not in the Jesus-is-out-to-get-us sense, but in the sense that God is always present with us, and knows our hearts, our minds, and our actions. Scripture tells us that we will face our creator someday. And this should give us pause when we are tempted to live lives of purposeful disobedience, taking no notice of God’s Word to us. God is real, Jesus is coming back, and we are called to live our lives in light of this truth. So yes, this is one reason to obey. The Lord does know our hearts and see our actions, and according to 2 Peter, upon Christ’s return, everything will be found out.
Yet, praise be to God, this is not the full message of the good news or this passage. For the gospel is genuinely GOOD news, not just warning that God is watching our every move like some sort of temperamental cosmic babysitter, waiting for us to mess up. We do not serve a God who desires the same begrudging obedience I gave when I cleaned those cabins. Living in obedience because we’re afraid of judgment can be a bitter and resentful way to live, and it is not the way to abundant life that Christ proclaims to us in Scripture. Wisely, Scripture gives us other, more important and joyful reasons to live in obedience in light of the Lord’s day to come.
First, we are to live in obedience because the Lord, in his infinite grace and love, is waiting for us to turn to Christ with our lives. The start of 2 Peter 3, verse 9 reads: “The Lord is not slow in keeping [the Lord’s] promise...Instead the Lord is patient with you…wanting all people to come to repentance.”
Most of us aren’t naturally very patient. We’ve probably all been in a situation recently where someone has pushed us to the brink of our patience. Spouses can be good at doing this. I don’t have any children, but I’ve heard that they are great at this. Someone gets under our skin and just pushes and pushes and pushes, until finally… we snap. We say something we shouldn’t, we storm from the room, or we internalize our anger and let it eat away at us. This is a very human response to being pushed. Yet, God does not snap. God does not act out of momentary spite. Unlike the popular children’s book about crazy hippos, God does not ever “go berserk.” God is patient, even when we haven’t earned this patience. Even when we live lives of willful disobedience.
Why is God patient with us? The answer is here, at the end of verse 9: “…the Lord is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.” God is patient because he wants us all to turn to Christ. God waits so that all people have a chance to turn from the darkness to the light. Think of all those who have not heard the good news of the Gospel. God, in love, is waiting for them. Think of times in your life (maybe you’re in one right now), when you wandered away from living in faith and obedience. When we wander away and allow ourselves to be drawn in by wealth or power, fame or familiarity, idolatry, safety, or selfishness, the Lord is waiting for us. God wants to take away the bondage of our sin and the pain that it inevitably causes ourselves and those around us. Verse 15 puts it this way: “Our Lord’s patience means salvation.”
Therefore, in its most life-giving form, our obedience is our loving response to a loving God who wants to save us, care for us, and heal us. As further evidence of God’s love, in verse 13 God promises a “new heaven and a new earth.” Not only can we be free from sin’s bondage when we turn or return to the Lord in repentance, but one day we will no longer be surrounded with sin’s devastating effects. We will be part of the new heaven and the new earth, where righteousness dwells. The reason for obedience is that when we obey, we are serving a good, merciful, loving God who offers us freedom, grace, and healing in Christ.
Secondly, we are to obey because our obedience is for our good. Verse 14 instructs us to “make every effort to be spotless, blameless, and at peace with God.” Why? Not only because it brings God glory but because it brings us life. This is vitally important to understand: the Lord calls us to obedience not just for God’s glory but also for our good. God is not a cruel master, asking for obedience to a host of random manipulative tasks. The lives Christ calls us to live—lives of obedient sacrifice, discipleship, justice, holiness, and love—are lives that bring life and wholeness to us and to those around us.
Put another way, lives of disobedience turn us into prisoners. Earlier in 2 Peter the author reminds us that people are “slaves to whatever has mastered them.” In Octavia Butler’s novel The Parable of the Talents, Butler writes of a future world where crime is rampant and the government has become utterly corrupt. One of Butler’s characters, Len, loses her mother to an addiction when Len is only a teenager. This addiction isn’t to drugs or alcohol, but rather to a virtual reality room where she can be anywhere she wants. In a broken world, Len’s mother spends her days in virtual Paris or the virtual Bahamas, relating to virtual friends. When Len enters the room to talk to her mother, she is berated for interrupting her mother’s ongoing fantasy. What started out as an enjoyable activity has actually become a trap. Len’s mother has become a slave to her virtual world, and cannot escape it. Her own desire for escape has mastered her and turned her into a prisoner.
This caution from 2 Peter continues to be a prophetic one for us today. Human beings continue to be “slaves to whatever has mastered them.” What turns you into a prisoner instead of a free disciple of Christ? You know the hurdles for your own obedience (and we all have them!). Though living in slavery to sin may be fun for a moment or a season, but will ultimately bring despair. Something that seems fun or rebellious or life-giving for a season ultimately brings despair. Christ came to set us free from this bondage. Thus, we are to live lives of obedience because this obedience helps us walk in the life-giving freedom of the Gospel not only today—right now!—but also tomorrow, next month, and next year, in all its joy and peace.
“But wait,” you may ask. “I do my best to follow Jesus. I make mistakes sometimes, but with God’s help, I always get back up. But my life is hard. I’ve served God faithfully, but my family can’t make ends meet. Sometimes people at work make fun of me for being a Christian. My mom was just diagnosed with cancer. You say that obedience brings life and peace, but it doesn’t feel like it to me. Not right now. My obedience isn’t life-giving. It’s exhausting.”
Friends, this is where the message of the good news about life-giving obedience intersects with the cross of Christ. It’s easy to sell life and peace—any self-help book or spiritual guru can do that. Yet Christianity is about the resurrection and the cross. Death and life. It would be dishonest not to admit that sometimes obedience feels nothing like joy or peace. Sometimes it feels like utter exhaustion, or frustration, or even suffering. In these moments we must not forget where our own Lord’s obedience led him. Christ was obedient even unto death.
Even so, his death was not the end. Christ’s crucifixion, his obedient death on the cross changed everything, for our God is so big that even death cannot contain him. Christ’s death and resurrection changed the world. We do not serve only a crucified Lord—we serve a risen one. Our God has conquered sin and sin’s ultimate end: death. For this reason we have both a present and a future hope.
Our obedience is life-giving both because it helps to unbind us from sin’s entanglements and because it allows us to know our Lord more intimately, to follow him more closely, and to begin to be transformed into his likeness. Please don’t get me wrong—our obedience to God is not what saves us. Only Christ’s work can do that. But through our obedience—by following after Jesus even when it is hard, we begin to know Christ. In Philippians 3, the apostle Paul puts it this way: “I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain the resurrection from the dead.” When we are suffering, we aren’t alone. Christ has suffered on our behalf, and Christ suffers with us in our pain even now.
Indeed, we are invited to encounter the hope of the cross and resurrection in the big sufferings of life and in the daily, common struggle to just get through the day. Not everyday was the day of crucifixion for Jesus in his ministry. Some days, we can only imagine, involved walking from one town to the next town with nothing but the heat, hunger, and the disciples’ innocent, but perhaps annoying questions to keep him company. We follow after Jesus’ obedience in those common moments as well. And as we journey with him we are invited to slowly learn that obedience to him is not about fear that he is looking down on us; it’s about the intimacy of knowing he’s next to us on the journey. This is the intimacy of getting to know him in our daily lives whatever challenge—big or small—may come our way.
While I was cleaning those cabins back in high school I worked because I was afraid of “the day of the Lord” in the form of the “checking in of the owners.” To draw the parallel to our Christian lives, I was being obedient so I wouldn’t get in trouble, and this made my work full of resentment. But what I didn’t tell you earlier was that I didn’t clean those cabins alone. The resort owners’ daughter, Jessie, cleaned them with me. While I begrudgingly scrubbed bathtubs at a snail’s pace, Jessie worked diligently and professionally. I would often quickly proclaim an area of the cabin “good enough” and she would return to carefully double-check each room for any oversights. I thought she was crazy to, but as the summer wore on, she shared with me the reasons behind her diligence.
While I was working just so that I wouldn’t get caught not working, Jessie worked hard because she loved her parents—the owners. She also knew that her obedience worked in her favor. The money she made cleaning those cabins paid for her skating lessons and her soccer uniform. The rental revenue her parents received from the cabins eventually helped send her to college. She worked hard because she knew her parents had her good in mind. While I worked solely out of obligation, Jessie worked with love.
A funny thing happened that summer. Jessie’s diligence started to change my perspective. I began to realize that my bad attitude was actually making the work harder. I eventually joined her and began to work industriously too. And do you know what? The work—though those cabins were exactly the same—got easier. The cabins were cleaned much more quickly when I wasn’t dragging my feet every step of the way, and when we got done early, we often had time to go swimming in the nearby lake, washing away all of the sweat and Windex from our labors.
Just as Jessie taught me, our lives of obedience can teach our friends and families what it means to serve God in love. And this can change their lives, as they turn to the Lord themselves and live out the repentance and holiness 2 Peter talks about.
But remember: living a holy life isn’t merely to be an example for those around us or because God says so. When we follow after Christ, a miraculous thing happens. We find peace with God and within ourselves because we are no longer slaves to sin. We begin to know Christ and to have fellowship with him and with one another. And even when our lives are difficult, we remember that the “day of the Lord” is coming, that Christ suffers with us, and that our present sufferings are “not even worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.”[1]
So as you go out to your community, your job, your family, your home today, remember the message of 2 Peter to you and God’s promises of freedom that come with obedience to Christ. This week, and every week, “make every effort to be found spotless, blameless, and at peace with God” (v.14) by God’s abundant grace and the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
[1] Romans 8:18.
