Have you heard the word, “obedience” used lately in public discourse, not counting church? My guess is that if you have heard it, it was in the context of “blind obedience” or in some other pejorative manner. The concept of obeying someone else runs counter to our modern sense of independence and self-direction. Find your own way! Follow your heart! Think for yourself!
Just a quick skimming of the Bible brings out passage after passage on obedience, submission, even becoming a servant to others. Ouch! It’s almost un-American! But, obedience is a useful concept, right? Don’t get me wrong. I’m a big fan of understanding and choosing and may even have authority issues from time to time. But, I’ve been thinking about what obedience allows us to do. As a Christian, of course, there is the specific moral duty to our Creator. Apart from that, there are some very practical benefits to obedience in general.
The first, and frankly, not the most compelling for me, is that obedience allows us to cooperate with others. The side of the street that one drives on may seem, and actually be, arbitrary. If I were the only driver in the world, I’m not sure I could reason myself into choosing one side of the street over the other. But in a world of millions of drivers, I can obey the traffic laws and get where I’m going in cooperation with the other drivers on the road, or, I can risk my life, do it my way, and probably not get where I want to go. I don’t do this obedience out of a special reverence or affection for whoever decided that the right side of the road is the correct side. I have no idea even who that person was. Life just works better when we cooperate.
A much more interesting benefit of obedience, I think, is that it allows us to accomplish things we don’t understand. It allows our work or actions to be better or smarter than we are, in a sense. It allows us to go beyond ourselves, be more than ourselves, not less.
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David Hamilton
