MORE ON OBEDIENCE

By Andrew Murray

        How well we know the parable of the vine! How often and how earnestly we have asked how to be able to abide continually in Christ We have thought of more study of the Word, more faith, more prayer, more communion with God, and we have overlooked the simple truth that Jesus teaches so clearly, ‘If ye keep My commandments, ye shall abide in My love,’ with its divine sanction, ‘Even as I kept My Father’s commandments, and abide in His love.’

        For Him as for us, the only way under heaven to abide in divine love is to keep the commandments. Do let me ask, have you known it, have you heard it preached, have you believed it and proved it true in your experience: obedience on earth is the key to a place in God’s love in heaven? Unless there be some correspondence between God’s whole-hearted love in heaven, and our whole-hearted, loving obedience on earth, Christ cannot manifest Himself to us, God cannot abide in us, we cannot abide in His love.

     If we go on from our Lord Jesus to His apostles, we find in the Acts two words of Peter’s which show how our Lord’s teaching had entered into him. In the one, ‘God hath given His Holy Spirit to them that obey Him,’ -he proves how he knew what had been the preparation for Pentecost, the surrender to Christ. In the other, ‘We must obey God rather than man’ -we have the man-ward side: obedience is to be unto death; nothing on earth dare or can hinder it in the man who has given himself to God.

    In Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, we have, in the opening and closing verses the expression, ‘the obedience of faith among all nations’ (1:5; 16:26), as that for which he was made an apostle. He speaks of what God had wrought ‘to make the Gentiles obedient.’ He teaches that, as the obedience of Christ makes us righteous, we become the servants of obedience unto righteousness. As disobedience in Adam and in us was the one thing that wrought death, so obedience, in Christ and in us, is the one thing that the gospel makes known as the way of restoration to God and His favor.

    We all know how James warns us not to be hearers of the Word only but doers, and expounds how Abraham was justified, and his faith perfected, by his works.

    In Peter’s First Epistle we have only to look at the first chapter, to see the place obedience has in his system. In ver. 2 be speaks to the ‘Elect, in sanctification of the Spirit, unto obedience and blood-sprinkling of Jesus Christ,’ and so points us to obedience as the eternal purpose of the Father, as the great object of the work of the Spirit, and a chief part of the salvation of Christ. In ver. 13 he writes, ‘As children of obedience,’ born of it, marked by it, subject to it, ‘be ye holy in all manner of conversation.’ Obedience is the very starting point of true holiness.
        In ver. 22 we read, ‘Seeing ye have purified your souls in your obedience to the truth,’ -the whole acceptance of the truth of God was not merely a matter of intellectual assent or strong emotion: it was a subjection of the life to the dominion of the truth of God: the Christian life was in the first place obedience.

     Of John we know how strong his statements are. ‘He that saith, I know Him, and keepeth not His Commandments, is a liar.’ Obedience is the one certificate of Christian Character.

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Yours in Christ,
Paul N. F.