BitterSweetLife

Counterintuitive Triumph

Defiance gets better press, but if you’re trying to change the world, obedience is smarter. It’s smarter because it’s easier; you can dig a canyon with spades and blasting powder, or you can channel a river through a gorge and watch the earth move. If you’re trying to redirect your life, defiance is spades and explosions but obedience is the river.

As we all know, change begins with one person (you)—and on the road to change it’s easier, ultimately, to obey Christ than to defy our ingrained vices. Of course, to obey Christ is to defy the world. But the issue is not one of mere semantics.

This is the idea behind verses like 1 Peter 1:14:

“Behave like obedient children. Don't let your lives be controlled by your desires, as they used to be” (The Bible).

Peter, the friend of Jesus (subsequently his theologian), urges the disciples to defeat their habitual sins in a counterintuitive way—by obeying their Father. In effect, Peter is saying “Defy your old controlling passions; do it by obeying.”

Alcoholics Anonymous has picked up on this principle, but few of us have. We’d prefer to simply try and heroically buck the evil status quo, but this is just a sexy path to burnout. Rather, to obey Christ is the key to change, and therefore to freedom. We look at Christ and this overt act of obedience achieves the indirect end of defiance. In terms of breaking away from besetting sins, obeying is the most insolent act conceivable. To obey is to defy.

Such obedience, this compliance with a stronger will, leads to freedom. I can go out on the town and resist, one by one, greed, lust, drunkenness, pride, the lure of bright lights and sordid appetites…or I can simply obey my Father (“Stay with me,” he says) and the battle ends there, under his motive force.

As Jesus said, “If the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed” (John 8:36, The Bible). Living in Christ’s name is real freedom.

But obedience cannot be forced. That’s why most of us try assertive defiance first. I walk off on my own and pit my own desperate strength against each foe in turn—my “freedom” becomes a series of last-ditch fights with my habitual failures—which have become a pack of junkyard dogs.

There's a little wanna-be hero in us all. Thinking to assert our independence, we abandon one positive command—Stay with me—for a horde of negative injunctions, disconnected from the source of change. Don’t do that, you can’t go there, stay away from that, no, no!—we give the route of self-correction a spirited try. And the world applauds, even though we fail nine times out of ten.

All the while, God is waiting for us to obey the command that has already been spoken, and that would rescue us if we listened.

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