when obedience is an expression of God's love

This week we returned to our study of Philippians. We began what will be at least a two part meditation on verses 12 and 13 of chapter 2. This little portion begins with Paul's call to the Philippians to continue in their obedience whether he is present or absent. Many of us have negative feelings that immediately boil up when we hear the word, "obey" - especially when someone is telling us to do obey. Many have good reasons for these negative feelings. Many have suffered from the abuse of authoritarian figures who demanded, in God's name, our obedience to their demands - in many cases this sort of abuse was perpetrated by a family member. Perhaps less harmful, but disturbing and destructive nonetheless, are the cases where leaders in the church castigate those in their charge, debasing the person in the process. However, Jesus does call us to certain sort of obedience so we need to come to terms with what this obedience looks like.

New Testament scholar, Gordon Fee, comments that in his appeal for continued obedience that Paul is echoing his words from earlier in the letter (1:27 vv.), where he urges the Philippians to live their life in a manner worth of the gospel: "But that automatically means obedience to Christ, the only kind of obedience to his own words that Paul could care anything about. In his view faith in Christ is ultimately expressed as obedience to Christ, not in the sense of following the rules but of being devoted completely to him. This appeal, after all, closely follows the twofold reminder of Christ's own obedience (2:1-11) that led to the cross and of his present status as Lord of all (Fee)."

Let's now unpack what Fee is saying and implying as we ponder what obedience to Christ is about and how it should feel to us. Here we get some help from Jesus' words to his disciples in John 15:9-11:


"As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. 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. I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete."


In this passage we have a theological backdrop for Paul's line of thinking about obedience in Philippians 2, and, in both passages (John and Philippians) we are invited to contemplate our obedience in light of Jesus' obedience.


We usually think of obedience as a conforming of our will to what is morally right. This way of thinking is not without merit but it proves ultimately to be an inadequate and incomplete conceptual framework in which to think about Christian obedience to God through the gospel. A more helpful framework is suggested by our passages at hand. In these passages we see Jesus, the God-man, our new humanity, keeping a command because of love, but even more importantly we meet a commandment that is unlike the commandments with which we are familiar. The commandment Jesus keeps (John 15) by not regarding equality with God as something to be exploited (Philippians 2) is a commandment which is formed from divine love, shaped by divine love, and an expression of divine love. This is the love into which we are invited to abide.


So, when Paul calls the Philippians (and us) to obedience he is calling us to obey the gospel - to confess to God through Christ that our lives and wills are broken and that in order for us to love him, neighbor, and ourselves we must be transformed from within by and through his loving and empowering presence. In thinking of obedience in this framework we are invited to understand our brokenness and sin as symptomatic of a lack of God's love. As people of the new covenant, eternally forgiven, we come to understand that at the center of our spiritual formation must be a tenacious and courageous repentance of our lack of love, coupled with a daily asking for more of God's love. Rather than conceiving of our problems within the framework of a need to conform our will to what is morally right - we are challenged to think of our lives as incomplete until we find fullness in Christ by being saturated in the self-giving love shared between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. As Christians we are called to see our lives as moving more and more towards the day when our obedience, like that of Jesus, will be itself an expression of divine love.


Case Studies for Discussion Questions:


1. Someone finds their job a great place to escape from their family. Round this character out in your head and imagine some areas in which this person has not experienced God's love as she needs to. Offer examples. How should this "character" you have imagined repent and for what should she repent?


2. Someone is a poor steward of the gifts God has given him. He is sometimes thought of as lazy but really he is just addicted to self-sabotage. Imagine this character in your head and think of some ways he needs to experience God's love. What should he repent of?


3. Imagine someone who is either addicted to sex or to the approval of others. How does God's love need to be experienced by this person? What does he or she need to repent of and what sort of prayer should they pray when they ask for God's love to be poured out on them?