© 1984 Adair
The part of the text to which I call your attention lies in these words, “By faith Abraham obeyed.” Obedience—what a blessing it would be if we were all trained to it by the Holy Spirit! How fully would we be restored if we were perfect in it! If all the world would obey the Lord, what a heaven on earth there would be! Perfect obedience to God would mean love among men, justice to all classes, and peace in every land. Our will brings envy, malice, war; but the Lord’s will would bring us love, joy, rest, bliss. Obedience—let us pray
for it for ourselves and others!
Surely, though we have had to mourn our disobedience with many tears and sighs, we now find joy in yielding ourselves as servants of the Lord. Our deepest desire is to do the Lord’s will in all things. Oh, for obedience! It has been supposed by many ill-instructed people that the doctrine of justification by faith is opposed to the teaching of good works or obedience. There is no truth in the supposition. We preach the obedience of faith. Faith is the fountain, the foundation, and the fosterer of obedience. Men do not obey God until they believe Him. We preach faith in order that men may be brought to obedience. To disbelieve is to disobey. One of the first signs of practical obedience is found in the obedience of the mind, the understanding, and the heart; and this is expressed in believing the teaching of Christ, trusting His work, and resting in His salvation. Faith is the morning star of obedience. If we would work the work of God, we must believe on Jesus Christ whom He hath sent (John 6:29).
Brethren, we do not give a secondary place to obedience, as some suppose. We look upon the obedience of the heart to the will of God as salvation. The attainment of perfect obedience would mean perfect salvation. We regard sanctification, or obedience, as the great design for which the Savior died. He shed His blood that He might cleanse us from dead works and purify unto Himself a people zealous for good works (Titus 2:14). It is for this that we were chosen: we are elect unto holiness. We know nothing of election to continue in sin. It is for this that we have been called: we are “called to be saints” (Rom. 1:7; 1 Cor. 1:2). Obedience is the grand object of the work of grace in the hearts of those who are chosen and called. They are to become obedient children, conformed to the image of their Elder Brother, with whom the Father is well pleased.
The obedience that comes of faith is of a noble sort. The obedience of a slave ranks very little higher than the obedience of a well-trained horse or dog, for it is tuned to the crack of the whip. Obedience that is not cheerfully rendered is not the obedience of the heart, and consequently is of little worth before God. If the man obeys because he has no opportunity of doing otherwise—if, were he free, he would at once become a rebel—there is nothing in his obedience.
The obedience of faith springs from an internal principle and not from external compulsion. It is sustained by the mind’s soberest reasoning and the heart’s warmest passion. The man reasons with himself that he ought to obey his Redeemer, his Father, his God; at the same time, the love of Christ constrains him so to do; thus what argument suggests, affection performs. A sense of great obligation, an apprehension of the fitness of obedience, and spiritual renewal of heart work an obedience that becomes essential to the sanctified soul. Hence, it is not relaxed in the time of temptation nor destroyed in the hour of losses and sufferings. Life has no trial that can turn the gracious soul from its passion for obedience, and death itself only enables it to render an obedience that shall be as blissful as it will be complete. Yes, this is a chief ingredient of heaven: we shall see the face of our Lord and serve Him day and night in His temple. Meanwhile, the more fully we obey at this present, the nearer we shall be to His temple gate. May the Holy Spirit work in us, so that by faith—like Abraham—we may obey!
I preach to you, at this time, obedience—absolute obedience to the Lord God; but I preach the obedience of a child, not the obedience of a slave; the obedience of love, not of dread. I urge you, as God will help me, in order that you may come at this obedience, that you should seek after stronger faith. “For by faith Abraham obeyed.”
In every case where the father of the faithful obeyed, it was the result of his faith; and in every case in which you and I shall render true obedience, it will be the product of our faith. Obedience, such as God can accept, never comes out of a heart that thinks God a liar; but it is wrought in us by the Spirit of the Lord through our believing in the truth, love, and grace of our God in Christ Jesus. If any of you are now disobedient, or have been so, the road to a better state of things is trust in God. You cannot hope to render obedience by the mere forging of conduct into a certain groove or by a personal, unaided effort of the resolution. There is a free grace road to obedience, and that is receiving by faith the Lord Jesus, who is the gift of God and is made of God unto us sanctification (1 Cor. 1:30). We receive the Lord Jesus by faith, and He teaches us obedience and creates it in us. The more faith in Him you have, the more obedience to Him will you manifest. I was about to say that that obedience naturally flows out of faith, and I should not have spoken amiss; for as a man believeth so is he, and in proportion to the strength and purity of his faith in God, as He is revealed in Jesus Christ, will be the holy obedience of his life. Consider the kind of faith that produces obedience.
It is, manifestly, faith in God as having the right to command our obedience. Beloved in the Lord, you know that He is Sovereign and that His will is His law. You [believe] that God—your Maker, your Preserver, your Redeemer, and your Father—should have your unswerving service. We unite, also, in confessing that we are not our own, but we are bought with a price (1 Cor. 6:20). The Lord our God has a right to us that we should not wish to question. He has a greater claim upon our ardent service than He has upon the services of the angels; for, while they were created as we have been, yet they have never been redeemed by precious blood. Our glorious incarnate God has an unquestioned right to every breath we breathe, to every thought we think, to every moment of our lives, and to every capacity of our being. We believe in Jehovah as rightful Lawgiver and as most fitly out Ruler. This loyalty of our mind is based on faith and is a chief prompter to obedience.
Cultivate this feeling always. The Lord is our Father, but He is “our Father which art in heaven” (Matt. 6:9). He draws near to us in condescension; we must not presume to think of Him as though He were such a one as ourselves. There is a holy familiarity with God that cannot be too much enjoyed; but there is a flippant familiarity with God that cannot be too much abhorred. The Lord is King: His will is not to be questioned; His every word is law. Let us never question His sovereign right to decree what He pleases and to fulfill the decree, to command what He pleases, and to punish every shortcoming. Because we have faith in God as Lord of all, we gladly pay Him our homage and desire in all things to say: “Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.”… May we enter into that true spirit of obedience, which is the unshaken belief that the Lord is right! Nothing short of this is the obedience of the inner man—the obedience which the Lord desires.
Furthermore, we must have faith in the Lord’s call upon us to obey. Abraham went out from his father’s house because he believed that, whatever God said to others, He had spoken to him, and said, “Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house” (Gen. 12:1). Whatever the Lord may have said to the Chaldeans or to other families in Ur, Abraham was not so much concerned with that as with the special word of command which the Lord had sent to his own soul. Oh, that we were most of all earnest to render personal obedience!
It is very easy to offer unto God a sort of “other people’s obedience”—to fancy that we are serving God when we are finding fault with our neighbors and lamenting that they are not as godly as they ought to be. Truly, we cannot help seeing their shortcomings; but we should do well to be less observant of them than we are. Let us turn our magnifying glasses upon ourselves. It is not so much our business to be weeding other people’s gardens as to keep our own vineyard. To the Lord each one should cry, “Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?” We, who are His chosen, redeemed from among men, called out from the rest of mankind, ought to feel that if no other ears hear the divine call, our ears must hear it; and if no other heart obeys, our soul rejoices to do so. We are bound with cords to the horns of the altar. The strongest ties of gratitude hold us to the service of Jesus; we must be obedient in life to Him who, for our sakes, was obedient unto death. Our service to our Lord is freedom; we will to yield to His will. To delight Him is our delight. It is a blessed thing when the inmost nature yearns to obey God, when obedience grows into a habit and becomes the very element in which the spirit breathes. Surely it should be so with every one of the blood-washed children of the Most High, and their lives will prove that it is so. Others are bound to obey, but we should attend most to our own personal obligation and set our own houses in order. Our obedience should begin at home, and it will find its hands full enough there.
Obedience arises out of a faith that is to us the paramount principle of action. The kind of faith that produces obedience is lord of the understanding, a royal faith. The true believer believes in God beyond all his belief in anything else and everything else. He can say, “Let God be true, but every man a liar”
(Rom. 3:4). His faith in God has become to him the crown of all his believing, the most assured of all his confidences. As gold is to the inferior metals, such is our trust in God to all other trusts. To the genuine believer, the eternal is as much above the temporal as the heavens are above the earth. The infinite rolls, like Noah’s flood, over the tops of the hills of the present and the finite. To the believer, let a truth be tinctured with the glory of God, and he values it; but if God and eternity be not there, he will leave these trifles to others.
You must have a paramount faith in God, or else the will of God will not be a paramount rule to you. Only a reigning faith will make us subject to its power, so as to be in all things obedient to the Lord. The chief thought in life with the true believer is, “How can I obey God?” His great anxiety is to do the will of God, or acceptably to suffer that will; and if he can obey, he will make no terms with God and stand upon no reservations. He will pray, “Refine me from the dross of rebellion, and let the furnace be as fierce as Thou wilt.” His choice is neither wealth nor ease nor honor, but that he may glorify God in his body and his spirit, which are the Lord’s. Obedience has become as much his rule as self-will is the rule of others. His cry unto the Lord is, “By Thy command I stay or go. Thy will is my will; Thy pleasure is my pleasure; Thy law is my love.”
God grant us a supreme, over-mastering faith; for this is the kind of faith that we must have if we are to
lead obedient lives! We must have faith in God’s right to rule, faith in the rightness of His commands, faith in our personal obligation to obey, and faith that the command must be the paramount authority of our being. With this faith of God’s elect, we shall realize the object of our election, namely, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love (Eph. 1:4).
Dear friend, do you have this kind of faith? I will withdraw the question as directed to you, and I will ask it of myself. Have I the faith that leads me to obey my God? For obedience, if it be of the kind we are speaking of, is faith in action—faith walking with God; or, shall I say, walking before the Lord in the land of the living? If we have a faith that is greedy in hearing, swift in judging, and rapid in self-congratulation, but not inclined to obedience, we have the faith of hypocrites. If our faith enables us to set up as patterns of sound doctrine and qualifies us to crack the heads of all who differ from us, and yet lacks the fruit of obedience, it will leave us among the “dogs” who are “without” (Rev. 22:15). The faith that makes us obey is alone the faith that marks the children of God. It is better to have the faith that obeys than the faith that moves mountains. I would sooner have the faith that obeys than the faith that heaps the altar of God with sacrifices and perfumes His courts with incense. I would rather obey God than rule an empire; after all, the loftiest sovereignty a soul can inherit is to have a dominion over self by rendering believing obedience to the Most High.
“By faith Abraham obeyed,” and by faith only can you and I obey…. I leave this word with you. Remember, “By faith Abraham obeyed.” Have faith in God; and then obey, obey, obey, and keep on obeying, until the Lord shall call you home. Obey on earth, and then you will have learned to obey in heaven. Obedience is the rehearsal of eternal bliss. Practice by obedience now the song that you will sing forever in glory. God grant His grace to us! Amen.
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Charles H. Spurgeon (1834–1892) was a renowned British Particular Baptist preacher and prolific author who served the Metropolitan Tabernacle for 36 years and preached to about ten million people in his lifetime.
Published by The Banner of Sovereign Grace Truth, used with permission.