Love, Trust, and Obey

I recently read a church sign that said, “Closeness to God is not about feelings. It is about obedience.” Agree or disagree? “If it feels good, do it” is a lifestyle campaign that has been around for years now and smacks against everything we know from scripture about righteousness. Proverbs 14:12 says, “There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death,”i so we know that how we “feel” about something will not provide full-proof clarity in God’s eyes. On the other hand, being obedient to God’s law as an exercise as opposed to an expression of love for Him will come up lacking. 

I recall a conversation I had several years ago with a very powerful woman working for a multi-billion-dollar public company. Her moral compass was set in the right direction, but her intensity and aggressive style struck fear in those around her. I knew her on a much more personal level and enjoyed seeing her delight in the pleasures of becoming a grandparent. In a particular conversation, she referred to how having grandchildren improved her relationship with her daughter-in-law. I could only imagine what it must have been like to get one’s bearings with a mother-in-law like this hard-charging successful lady. She was smart and determined and ventured across any boundary she, in her own mind, felt necessary. Addressing the improved relationship, she made the comment, “It’s kind of hard to not appreciate the people who love your children most.” That made perfect sense. This professional, who was also a grandma, was oriented to demand compliance from others with regulations, policy, and standards. She loved rules, but when you added love to the mix, everything she expected, past or present, felt entirely different. Her intensity had been a style of delivery, but a heart that was pure and righteous and love-centered transformed intensity to passion that was agreeable. 

We have a very natural motivation to fall in love with our Heavenly Father and our brother, Jesus. In I John 4:19 John writes, “We love Him because He first loved us.” There are commands for obedience, however, that are simply impossible to achieve without being love-born. Mark 12:31 says that Jesus taught, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Matthew 10:37 records these words of Jesus: “He who loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me. And he who loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me.” The reality is we cannot experience loving our neighbor more than ourselves or loving another more than our own children unless it is the love of God that has taken residence in our hearts. We cannot simply obey these commands. We have to love with the love of God first before we can truly fulfill these commands. 

The sign read, “Closeness to God is not about feelings. It is about obedience.” We will never be able to obey our way into intimacy with the Divine One. We must love our way to intimacy with Him and it begins with the love He first showed you and me. John, too, explained this in 14:23-24: “Jesus answered and said to 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. He who does not love Me does not keep My words.” C.S. Lewis wrote in his book, Mere Christianity, that obedience is “not hoping to get to Heaven as a reward for your actions, but inevitably wanting to act in a certain way because a first faint gleam of Heaven is already inside you.” 

The underpinning of closeness with God is love with God. The love relationship we experience with one another breeds trust, relying on proven outcomes. Recently, my husband and I took an evening walk in the woods with our two oldest grandchildren, Israel, who is 8, and Julia, who is 6. The fall colors were vivid and there were plenty of leaves to play in as we explored the evidence of woodland life. We eventually reached the far side of the woods from our property when one of the kids spotted an old deer stand. It had been there a while, but it was still sturdy. Immediately, both the kids wanted to climb up to the blind which was about 10 feet high. Izzy went first, but about halfway up the rungs, he was growing less confident in its stability. He began to gently shake the joints of the apparatus and call out reports of which one seemed more secure than the other. 

Izzy finally decided that in his best judgment, he should abort. Down he came and Julia could hardly wait for her turn. Up she went without a moment’s hesitation, applying the instruction we had given her. There was no checking for safety features or stable connections. Once she reached the blind, she took every caution to manage her movements carefully and took no risks. At this, Izzy decided he would go all the way up after all. Izzy asked her, “How can you do that without being scared?” Julia said, “Because I knew if I fell, Poppy would run to catch me and if I died, I’d go to heaven because God loves me.” Okay, Julia’s analysis may have been six-year-old basic, but there are a few takeaways. She trusted in Poppy’s proven track record of looking out for her safety, but more to the point, she knows her Poppy loves her and doesn’t want any harm to come to her. In the same manner of reasoning, she credited God with the very outlook she’d just assigned her Poppy. God loves her and will safely gather her to Heaven. Love comes first, trust comes next, obedience follows. 

In Part 5 of Ken Boa’s Eight Spiritual Essentials, he writes, “We won’t want to obey God if we don’t first trust Him. We won’t trust Him if we don’t love Him, and we can’t love Him if we don’t know Him” Christian blogger Tiffany Hudson stated it well when she said, “I like to think of obedience as God’s love language.” When John wrote in 1 John 5:3, “For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments. And His commandments are not burdensome” , it would seem apparent that absent love, the commands would indeed feel heavier. 

I came across a most fascinating account from a survivor of the Titanic recently. Her name was Jessie Leitch, and she was the niece of John Harper, a Scottish evangelist who died when the ship sank. Jessie was the daily caregiver of John’s only child who had lost his wife in childbirth. The night the ship hit the iceberg, Harper got his five-year-old daughter, Annie, and his niece, Jessie, up to the deck from their stateroom. She said, “There was not opportunity for farewell.” That was the last Jessie or little Annie saw of John Harper. Two months after Jessie and Annie had survived that night in lifeboat 11, she shared, “The last day we spent on the Titanic was Sunday. Mr. Harper asked me to read the chapter at our morning Sunday prayers, and later we went to the Sunday morning service. The day was quietly and pleasantly spent, and when Annie and I went to look for Mr. Harper at about six o’clock to go to dinner, we found him earnestly talking to a young Englishman whom he was seeking to lead to Christ. That evening before we retired, we went on the deck, and there was still a glint of red in the west. I remember Mr. Harper saying, ‘It will be beautiful in the morning.’”

It certainly was a morning like no other for Mr. Harper. There are various accounts of his fervent proclamations of Jesus that night as the ship went down. He loved God so much and he trusted God so much, he died in full obedience declaring the glory of the Lord. “Closeness to God is not about feelings, it’s about obedience.” I suppose John Harper could have left his feelings out of it, but I’m so very thankful he didn’t.