Experiencing God through obedience- Last week's sermon.

Experiencing God through obedience


10 If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. 11 These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.

Jn 15:10-11



What is the first thing that comes to your mind when I say “obedience”?
Legalism? A way to make God happy with you? Rules? Do you groan inwardly when you hear it? Does it remind you that you are not good at it? Is it a word that inspires- ready?- happiness or joy in you? Or is it a word that inspires fear, depression, and sorrow?
Jesus seems to think that somehow this word has something to do with Joy. In the text we just read, Jesus has just laid out to the disciples some tough stuff, about being pruned, loving others, bearing fruit, and caps it off with obedience- complete obedience- and then says that these things are to result in joy, it’s all been said for their joy.
Do you see it as joy? Why does Jesus? Can we see obedience the way Jesus did? What would that look like? How would that change our lives as believers?

My goal is to help you see obedience the way Jesus saw obedience. I want to show you first that Christ’s obedience to the Father is a model for our obedience to Christ- not just in what He did, but in why He did it. It might be that we do not see obedience as joy because we are not obeying for the same reasons that Christ obeyed. And then I want to show you some ways that Jesus thought about obedience, what some of the “whys” are for Him, so that we can follow his example. I want to show you three specific ways that Jesus thought about obedience that help reveal the “whys”. One relating to love, one relating to light, and one relating to life. In these we will try and see how the Son experienced the Father through obedience, and how we can experience God through our obedience as well.

Jesus is a model for us

We all know that Jesus is a model for us, in what he did, and how he lived. But I think that Jesus is a model for us not just in what he did. We can just look at Jesus life and say “oh, he acts this way” or “he does these things”, and repeat them, and that is good to do- but maybe there is more to his example. The gospel of John seems to imply that there is a bit more than that. It is easy to make the case from the gospel of John that it is not just what Jesus does that serves as an example for us, but how he relates to the Father that serves as an example for us. What I mean is this- the incarnate Son- Jesus in the flesh- related to the Father in a special way, a way that is a model of our relationship to the Son. It is not just in our doing that we should follow his example, but in our motives. We should not just do what Jesus did, but do what he did for the same reasons he did it!
The gospel of John does lay out for us that we should mimic not just what Jesus did, but His entire relationship with the Father. We do not have time to study these passages in depth. Let me just name a few for you to show you what I mean.
- In 17:21 we are told that the Father and Son share in a Unity, and in 17:21 and 23 we are told that the Son and believers will share in unity.
- In 17:8 we are told that the Father gave words to the Son, and the Son, we are told again in 17:8, gave words to the disciples.
- In 17:18, we are told that the Father has sent the Son into the world, and in that same verse we are told that the Son is now sending the disciples into the world, in the very same way.
- In 17:22 we are told that the Father is to give the Son glory, and in that same verse we are told that the Son is to give glory to believers.
- In 5:20 we are told that the Father hides nothing from the Son, but reveals his works to him. In 15:15, guess what we are told? That the Son hides nothing from the disciples, but reveals his works to them.

Are you starting to get what I mean here about some parallels between the Father’s relationship to the son, and the Son’s relationship to believers? Look even at the verse we started off with today-

15:10 If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love.

So what is my point? My point is this- if the relationship that the Son has to the Father is a model for our relationship to the Son, then maybe we can look at how He obeyed the Father and learn about how we are to relate to Him in our obedience, and in doing so maybe we can find a way to see obedience as Jesus did- as Joy. And that is the goal of this message, to help us see obedience as Jesus saw obedience. I want us to understand what Jesus means when he talks about keeping His commandments in the same way that He has kept the Father’s commandments. Not in the degree of perfection to which we keep them, but in the motives behind why we keep them, and the relationship we have in which we keep them.
So let’s take time now and look at three ways that Jesus thought of obedience, and then look at some applications as to how we then can tie that to our obedience, and how that relates to experiencing God through our obedience, as the Son experienced God through His obedience.


Obedience and Love

The first one we will look at is Love.
Jesus makes a strong connection between his obedience to the Father and His love for the father in John 14:31.

31 but I do as the Father has commanded me, so that the world may know that I love the Father. Rise, let us go from here.Jn 14:31

He wants the world to know that He loves the Father, he wants that to be seen in his obedience. Jesus obeyed the Father because he loves the Father. Now, Jesus’ obedience was often painful, costly, not easy. But nonetheless it was the result of love. Just because love is at the heart of it does not make it easy. But the fact that it was painful and costly shows the love even more, doesn’t it?
So first we see that: Obedience is Joy when we are motivated from love to obey.

And, as we have seen, there is a pattern, because Jesus also then tells us that our obedience to Him is to be based in love.

15 “If you love me, you will keep my commandments. Jn 14:15

We are all familiar with this verse and this concept. But it should lead us to some very practical questions-

- Is your obedience to God grounded in a love for God, and do you try and ground it more and more?
- When you are faced with those moments when you need to submit like Jason talked about last week, do you look to love for God to lead you on?

We see from this that if we have an obedience problem ultimately what we have is a love problem. This is crucial to understand, especially in the midst of the cultural Christianity that pervades the day. Many are looking for solutions- how can we get Christians to obey? How can we get them to show mercy to the world? How can we get ourselves to get up and get out there and reach lost people? How can we end the constant compromise we see around us, as statistics pour out of research institutes telling us that the lives of evangelical Christians are no different than the lives of the unsaved? And many mistakes are being made to fix this. The fix for this disobedience is a renewed love for God, because an obedience problem is a love problem, and the church in America suffers from a deep, deep lack of love for her Savior. This, I believe, is because we have lost the gospel. We do not know the gospel, and without the gospel we do not come to love God.
I don’t want to preach a sermon within a sermon here, but let’s stop and realize how we get love for God. Because if we want obedience with Joy we are going to need love for the Savior. We love Him because He first loved us, we are told, and we see his love for us at the Cross. So, without an understanding of the cross, we lack a love for Jesus, and therefore lack any real motive for obedience. We are left only with things like fear or duty to motivate us.
Listen, brothers and sisters, in the scriptures we see examples of costly obedience and worship that come about as a result of an encounter with Jesus’ mercy. Consider Paul, the great cost of leaving all in his life behind and preaching Christ- why did he do it? Because of his understanding of the gospel, and the mercy he finds there-

8 Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ 9 and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith— Php 3:8-9

Do you see the gospel tied to his willingness to obey at great cost?
We can think of Mary in john 12 pouring a years wages of perfume out on Jesus, and why? The mercy of having her brother Lazarus raised from the dead in John 11.
We see the demon possessed man in Mark 5 set free from his possession, and the result? Jesus tells him to go and proclaim the mercies of God, and he does it all over the Greek speaking world, the first missionary in scripture!
The examples are easy to find, encountering the mercy of God, seeing that He first loves us, even when we hated him, this leads to love for God.
And so, brothers and sisters, I need to ask if your story could be found to be the same. Do you have a love for God that springs from an understanding of the mercy he has shown you? And has that resulted in an obedient life in which you do hard things for God?



But why does love for God make obedience joyful?
Is it just that we want to please him because of all he did for us? Yes, that is a part of it for sure. But it’s not just that.
We can understand why love makes obeying joyful if we understand better what God’s laws are.
I was always confused by David in the Psalms saying how he loved the law of God.

20 My soul is consumed with longing
for your rules at all times.
Ps 119:20

Why is this so? Does this sound like us? Do we love God’s rules for our life? We tend to see God’s rules as arbitrary, things he has just made up to test us perhaps. Things we have to do because God says so. But what we fail to see is that God’s rules are reflections of His character. We are told not to lie because He is truth. We are told not to cheat each other because he is Just. We are told not to kill because he is not death, he is life. His character dictates his laws, and to understand this makes his laws beautiful, if we think He is beautiful. If we love Him, if you claim to love Him this morning, you will love His laws and want to do them, because they are merely a reflection of Him. They are who He is. So the one who truly loves God truly does love His laws. And in this way we are set free by the gospel, because as we come to see the mercy given to us, our heart is changed, and now we love God, and that love for God changes us into those who love His laws as well, as we see them reflect his character. I will tell you this- the area in which you sin and struggle most will be the area in which you see the laws of God as a reflection of God’s character weakest. When we are told to obey God, we are told to be like God, to act like Him, or act in such a way that reveals His character.

Maybe an analogy will help. Let’s pretend you go to an art museum, and while you are there you see this painting that has this color in it, this blue color, that is the most beautiful thing you have ever seen in your life. You fall in love with it, you cant take your eyes off of it. There is our “love” component. Now, you go home, and what do you do? Do you paint everything the very opposite color, some red, or orange? No, not if you really love this color. You paint your room, perhaps your whole house in it! You love it! You want to make everything look like that color, because you love that color. This is obedience- when we obey we are making ourselves look like Jesus. And we want to do that because we love Him, and all that He is. It would be silly to say we love Jesus, the one who is truth, and then build our life on lies, wouldn’t it? It would be inconsistent to say we love Jesus, full of grace, and then show no mercy to those who we need to forgive, wouldn’t it? If we love him, we will obey Him, because we will want to make everything look like Him!
And that brings me to my second point.

Obedience and Light

Christ certainly obeyed the Father because he loved the Father, and we are to obey Him because we love him. But there is more to it. Christ saw obedience tied to love for sure, but he also saw it tied to light. What do I mean by “light”? I mean what you would mean when you talk about Christians being “lights” in the world. The idea of letting something be known to the world. Jesus obeyed in order to be to be a light for the Father, and that brought Him Joy!
Let me explain this. In John chapter 5 we encounter a fascinating discussion between Jesus and the Jews, in which Jesus tells the Jews basically that he does nothing of his own initiative.

19 So Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise. Jn 5:19

30 “I can do nothing on my own. As I hear, I judge, and my judgment is just, because I seek not my own will but the will of him who sent me. Jn 5:30

Not his own will- all that he does he does because he sees the Father doing it. He does this so perfectly that when Phillip says to Jesus in John 14 “Show us the Father” Jesus says,

9 Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you so long, and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? 10 Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own authority, but the Father who dwells in me does his works. 11 Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me, or else believe on account of the works themselves.
Jn 14:9-11

Jesus obeys the Father in order to show the Father to the world- to see Jesus is to see the Father, because he does what the Father does. Do you see where I am going with this? Later on in john 14 we find another one of our parallels- Jesus takes this relationship that he has in mimicking the Father to show him to the world and he gives it to you-

21 Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me. And he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him.” 22 Judas (not Iscariot) said to him, “Lord, how is it that you will manifest yourself to us, and not to the world?” 23 Jesus answered him, “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him. 24 Whoever does not love me does not keep my words. And the word that you hear is not mine but the Father’s who sent me.
Jn 14:21-24

At first it seems like Jesus ignores Judas’ question. Judas asks “Lord, why are you going to manifest, or show, yourself to us and not the world?” And Jesus says “people who obey me, to them I will manifest myself.” Why?
Why did the Father show the Son all that he did? So that he could do it. Right? And why will the son show us all that He is? So we can do the same. Jesus Himself tells us that we are being sent into the world in the same way that He was sent into the world. Not that we are going to be saviors of the world, but in that we are going to put the Son on display in the same way that he put the Father on display. There are other similarities, but this is key. Look at how he speaks in chapter 15-

15 No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you. Jn 15:15

This sounds very much like chapter 5- “the Father reveals to me, and then I come and reveal to you. I saw so I could do, so that I could obey- you see, and you see so that you can obey. I manifest myself to you, now you go obey! You will experience me as you obey, as I come alongside you and reveal more and more of myself to you so that you can obey and show me off more and more!”
Do you understand how this changes how we see obedience? This is life changing if we get it. Listen, do you want to understand more and more and experience more and more of God? Then obey Him! Do not go and say to God “Lord, please, reveal more and more of your will for me and my life, please”, if you have a book full of revelation that you ignore! If you are not obeying what you already know, then get to work obeying it and showing Him to the world!

Think of it this way- go back to the paint analogy. You see this color blue, and you love it, and you paint everything with it. Now, you have this bucket of paint, let’s call the color “God”. And you have this paint brush, let’s call the paint brush “your will”, or “your actions.” Dip the brush into the bucket, and paint! You see? Not just your house- all the world!
Listen, it is great to want to just sit and stare and the blue painting. That’s good. That’s great if you want to just stare and stare at God. But, if you really love that color, and you live in a world that is red, don’t you want to make more things blue? Believers, what I am saying is this- your job is to go and paint the world by your obedience the color of God!
Are you doing it? Let me ask you- this week- what color did you paint the world? What bucket are you dipping your brush- your actions- in? Oh, that Christians would wake up and open their eyes and see that they have been using the same bucket of paint as the world. How we need to repent.
And believers, those of you in here who love God, who love to stare at the color of God, who are mesmerized by the mercy of your Savior in the gospel- do you understand how exciting obedience is when you see that what you are to do is to paint everything that color?

It should break our hearts that we live in a world that hates the color of God. They hate it. They want to erase His color from everywhere they can. In a world where every headline every day should be “God again brings the sun up upon rebels who hate him”, in a world where he constantly flows out His mercies to those who could not care less- those who say they love God should be, above all others, out there with brush in hand, painting and painting and painting. This is rebellion- obedience is rebellion against the world and it’s ways. It is being light in the midst of a people who hate light and want darkness. But how exciting that we would be given such an honor- to go and paint the world the color of God. For Joy to paint this community the color of God. Who wants in on that? Who wants to be a part of that? And listen- not the color of social justice, or the color of mercy, or the color of good deeds- the color of God! Bringing Christ’s mercy to the world in the Name of Christ for the sake of the lost, that individuals would be saved from the wrath of God, just as you were. Do you not want at least that much for them?
Do we love Him? Let’s paint everything the color of God! How? By obeying all of His commands all the time, and in living different lives before the world in the Name of Jesus!
You see, this is why it doesn’t make sense when we find Christians who say sin doesn’t matter. When they act lightly about sin, when they watch movies packed with it and laugh, when they shrug it off as if it does not matter. How can those who really love God do such things?

If we love God, we will want to be a light for Him, and obedience will be sweet and full of joy- why? Because we want the world to see Him!
I feel so bad for those who labor to try and show Christ and try and do so with no love for God, not wanting to be a light for him, just out of duty. Think of it this way- imagine a record company hires you to go out and market a music group. Your job is to go out and show the world how great this music group is. And it’s a punk rock group, and you hate punk rock. And you have to go to all this clubs, and all these underground music venues, and listen to all this music you hate, and try and talk to people about this group whose music is terrible, and you need to dress in a way that fits in, and you need to get a Mohawk and purple hair and some piercings, and you get the picture. You hate the music, you hate the band, you don’t want to show them off to the world! But what if it was your favorite band? Who had a message you really believed in, who were just amazing musicians. Do you see the difference? How many are you are like the first group, and not the second? How many are you find joy in obeying, in order to show Christ to the world?
You may be dying to experience God, dying for Him to reveal more and more of Himself to you, but you hate obedience, and don’t want to be a light for him, and you wonder why the revelation doesn’t come. Love Him, and then obey Him, and you will encounter Him more and more. What will that look like? Maybe He will call you to do something hard, and you wont know how to go about it. But you will step out in faith, and he will make the way as you go. Maybe he is saying to you “speak to your neighbor about me.” and you think “theres no way, when would I get the chance?” But do this- pray, and tell God you are willing, and you will speak, and ask for the way. And see if he does not reveal to you where he is at work! I remember one person telling me about how they were feeling a desire to give money to a certain missionary, and they just didn’t have it. So they prayed, and the next day cleaning out an envelope they found the exact amount they needed. Now, in that incident they had an encounter with God, and were given a powerful reminder of God’s mercy and provision- they were reminded, they learned, they experienced God at work!
Obedience and Life

And yet there is still one more aspect of obedience that makes it exciting and joyful!
Jesus obeys because he loves, and he obeys to be light, but he also obeys because for him it was life. It was sustenance. What I mean by “life” is that it was the most real, exciting, fulfilling thing.
Look with me at John 4-
Jesus has just spent a hot afternoon talking to a sinful woman, revealing, for the first time, that he is the Messiah. He shows mercy. He shows love. He does the work of the Father. And then look at what he says-

31 Meanwhile the disciples were urging him, saying, “Rabbi, eat.” 32 But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you do not know about.” 33 So the disciples said to one another, “Has anyone brought him something to eat?” 34 Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work. Jn 4:31-34

Do any of us see obedience as food? Look, we take great joy in food, don’t we? We look forward to it, it gives us energy, it often is what comforts us. Can we say any of this about obedience? Jesus said obedience is His food.
Let me see if I can explain what this is like. Because I really do think that we can experience the same thing- we can see obeying as really living, as fulfilling, as joyful. And every one of you who has ever obeyed, especially in something tough, you will know this to be true.
We as humans seek “life”- things that are really exciting, and fulfilling. You often hear people who do crazy things, like jump from planes or climb mountains or take great risks, you hear them say “now this is living!” And what do they mean? They mean it stirs them, it is energizing. I am not going to say to you that obedience is the same thing, don’t worry! All of that might just be chemicals in our brain. What I am getting at is this- we seek something more, we seek something greater, we seek to live on an edge, for a cause. To be part of a revolution. We seek life. And obeying Christ brings this- when we obey, when we truly obey, especially when there is great cost, we are really living. There is excitement, there is danger, there is discomfort, there is purpose, there is a greater cause- it just makes us feel alive- it helps us to kind of understand what Jesus means when he says it is his “food.”
I wonder if we have ever felt that as a body. I wonder if we have stepped into that Crisis of belief that Blackaby speaks about, and trusted God, and really lived? Maybe when those who first started Joy did what they did they felt it. Maybe when you went out of your comfort zone and talked to someone you didn’t know you felt it. Maybe every day as you fight and defeat sin you feel it- it is that feeling of “yes, this is right. This is God’s will.”
Maybe a good way to describe it, sadly, a way we can relate to more, is to say it is the opposite of how we feel when we sin. We feel like we have embraced death. We feel empty. Alone. Cold. Fruitless. This life I am speaking about is the opposite feeling. Sound good?
Obey.

The Time of Joy
Understand- this all does not mean that obedience is easy. Because it is joyful does not mean that it is easy. And often we will have to obey not because of any results or good things we will see right then. Sometimes there will be no feelings of life, yet it is life nonetheless. Sometimes we wont see how we are painting anything the color of God by not cheating on our taxes, or giving our tithe, or helping our neighbor fix their car, or sharing the gospel with a family member who doesn’t care. But we are. We still are. And we can in those moments obey and set our eyes on what we WILL have one day. Because brothers and sisters, a big part of the joy that comes from obedience is not found in this world. The time for joy might not always be here, it may be future. But we can hope in that, and do as Christ did-

Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, 2 looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.Heb 12:1-2

So, let’s go and obey, with our eyes set to the future. Let’s go and look at His rules as reflections of Him, and lets go and paint the world the color of God, in absolute rebellion against the attempts of the enemy to remove that color from the world, and let’s go and do it in love- deep, passionate, desperate love, as we look to our Savior who loved us when we did not love Him, and who without fault obeyed the Father, and with joy laid down his life for us all.