#51. Obedience is More Fun
Do you see a good romp in the bush as part of obedience training? How about planting some seeds? Reading fairytales? Learning to slice cucumber? Counting out buttons? Weaving scraps of yarn into the stick-loom hitched together from backyard branches? Drawing a map of the neighbourhood? How about singing nursery rhymes? Collecting snails? Climbing trees?
Teaching children to obey everything Jesus commanded is not just looking for the red letter imperatives in the gospels and telling these to our children. To obey all Jesus commanded is to interpret all of Scripture the way he does, to interpret reality the way he does, and to relate to all things in the way Jesus created them to be used. To consider, to arrange, to handle, to use, to know all things as from, through, to and for the Lord Jesus.
Obedience is usually associated with commands, laws, rules, a code. Do and don’t. Shall and shan’t. Will and won’t. Can and can’t. Major moral crossroads. Costly sacrifice. Deprivation. Restriction. Punishment. Control. We think any restraint somehow strangles our freedom to be ourselves. This is because we live on the downside of Genesis 3. It’s hard to imagine obedience without such a thing as disobedience, isn’t it? We approach obedience as people who have been expert disobeyers since birth. We relate to obedience only through the negative, as people found lacking. Our fleshly nature is prejudiced against it. It’s hard to imagine obedience as a feature of the perfect world. As something fun.
But before there was disobedience, obedience was completely delightful. All creation hummed with it—everything at its best, most alive and most interesting. When the world was in its original state of perfect obedience, every cell conformed entirely to God’s goodness. It was good and it would have felt supremely good. That conformity to goodness—the inherent, constant, permeating obedience—didn’t make everything less; it didn’t reduce Adam and Eve to flat templates of humanity.
Apart from Jesus, there has not been more interesting and more interested people than un-fallen Adam and Eve. Obedient humans have been the most full, most real and true, most complete people. The world before the Fall was perfectly fun and completely happy. When the world was in perfect conformity to God’s goodness, it was most vibrant. Most itself. The departure from obedience was the undoing of every element of the created order. From that first departure from God’s goodness, disobedience has been dehumanising. It distorts us, reduces us and makes us miserable. Humans de-humanising and disconnecting from the decaying world brought the new experience of disappointment. Death dimmed the brilliance. The world became less interesting, more dreadful. Less fun.
Obedience is not straightforward now. It can be costly and painful. But, the strain of obedience is a temporary, contextual ‘between-the-gardens’ problem. It is the low point on the story arc, an arc which started before Creation and will settle in the New Creation. We need our pictures of obedience to be tinted with the pigments of the Beginning and the End, the Before and After, the Then and Not Yet. An idea of obedience formed based only on what we see now is monochrome and repellant. Misunderstood obedience, obedience that has become untethered from God’s beginning and the end he is bringing about, is miserable. It is minimum rule-keeping, rather than maximum person-becoming. Obedience wired into the Creation and New Creation pulses with a bigger Life, even when the wire snags on some of the debris of this fallen age.
When teaching children to obey, we are often preoccupied with the “no”. We think of obedience only in post-Fall terms. Some of us feel bad for interrupting childhood pleasure (so we might be inclined to permit where we should restrain). Others of us think obedience is only about restraining or correcting sin (and we forget the innate pleasure of obedience). Both perspectives forget where obedience started and where it is going. Obedience and happiness and life belong together. Obedience existed before sin and will outlast it. When we care about obedience in our families, we are tuning in to the God’s purposes for us as humans and the goal for which he has redeemed us.
A life of obedience isn’t a legalistic life. An obedient life is full of everyday human activities brought back into their right place by Jesus. An obedient life is rippling with energy and interest, always deepening. Distinctively Christian obedience training is marked by a right enjoyment of all that God calls good. It expands our scope for pleasure. Obedience will involve relating rightly to all things God has made, so getting better at handling all created things excellently. It frees us to dig our toes into the sand, to give our full attention for a minute of frog-watching, to figure out how to turn the bole of a tree into a bowl for the table. Obedience to Jesus in this age will involve a lot of filling and subduing the earth, cultivating all the creation within our reach, in a restored relationship with God, each other and the created world. Learning to obey Jesus will grow us into people who get better at doing the things humanity was first created for. Really fun things. In Christ, obedience brings some of the brilliance back. Things on earth as they are in heaven.
Being present and intentional in the work of discipling our kids does not mean helicoptering. Obedience training is not a constant drill of facts and instruction. It isn’t micromanagement, explicitly teaching every virtue and moral lesson by rote. It’s not that we make obedience fun, like a cheap gimmick to bribe our children into doing what they ought. Obedience is not a bitter pill crushed in a spoonful of honey, or a zucchini blended into a chocolate cake. When we’re pursuing obedience on God’s terms, things are more fun and more interesting, because obedience makes people and things more truly themselves. It gives true freedom and deep pleasure.
We can be quite attentive to our responsibility to train our children even while they are quite oblivious of the fact. Mature obedience training runs along grooves God has already formed in the landscape. Most of our work is to keep the bulldozers away as we learn (alongside our children) to do all things in a godly way. There are points in which instruction and restraint are needed, but when there is ample relationship and time and goodwill, when there are plenty of ideas and beauty and Things To Do, the training is rather light-handed. Vitalised obedience is far more interesting, far more fun than disobedience. It draws from a deep well that tastes like Creation and New Creation.
When Jesus revealed that he is the completion of the law, the living water, the living vine, the living bread, the good shepherd, the lamb and the altar and the temple and the great High Priest; when he revealed he is the king, the Son of Man given dominion over all things forever, the one who precedes and outlasts all things; the one for whom and through whom and from whom all things exist; the one who upholds the universe by the word of his power—when he revealed all this, Jesus was revealing that nothing is outside the scope of being his disciple. Teaching someone to follow Jesus is more than teaching them to read the Bible, pray and tell the gospel to others. It is helping them relate to all things as under Christ Jesus. Being mothers who raise disciples will mean being whole people, learning to fill and subdue all parts of Creation, the way we first were commissioned to before the Fall—learning all these things and helping our children learn the same. We have been redeemed to come back into a rightly ordered relationship with all things in the created world. Obedience is more than keeping rules. It is bearing God’s image—the likeness of Jesus—in his world. So, for God’s glory, and the holy fun of it, go learn to play with everything, as unto the Lord.
