Obedience Is Not The Goal

Genesis 12:1-4a reads:

Now the Lord said to Abram, "Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed." So Abram went, as the Lord had told him.

Abraham was left with a crazy decision. Was he going to let the world choose what was rational or was he going to let God? We all know that he gave it all up to follow God. But his struggle was not over after he made the initial decision to pack up and leave. From that day on he was faced with a decision every moment he chose to continue traveling. Every step was another decision to continue in the promise. The life of irrational obedience to God is not one in which we make one decision in the past, are baptized, and have a conversion experience and are all done. Eventually, the irrational decision becomes who we are and we are confronted with a new area of our life that needs to change. Our spiritual journey is one in which we must take steps every moment of every day and continue on the way that God has placed us on.

A sculpture does not instantaneously develop from a piece marblet. It must be carefully designed and chiseled into the wonderful work of art by a master craftsman for it to become a beautiful sculpture that all can see. It is the same with us. We must lose some of what we were in order to become what God wants us to become. This losing what we were and becoming what we are not is obedience.

However, we must be careful in being obedient. The process of becoming obedient is not the goal. Too often it becomes such and leads to dying spiritual lives and dying churches. There is nothing more dangerous than replacing the proper goal with a false one. For Abraham, the goal was not beginning the journey or the journey itself. Obviously, it was necessary for him to begin the journey and to continue every day to become the Person of the Promise, but his obedience was just a necessary tool to get to the goal.

When we make obedience the goal of our faith, we fall into the pit of legalism. Legalism is the inevitable conclusion of setting the goal one or two rungs too low on the ladder. Legalism usually does not focus on a bad thing; it just focuses on the wrong thing. Legalism is just a good intention made into a wrong goal.

To avoid the legalism of obedience, we must keep focused on what the real goal is. The goal, as children of the Promise, is the same goal that Abraham had: To be a blessing. Obedience is just one of the rungs on the ladder that gets us there.