Obedience Costs

“Though he were a Son, yet learned he obedience by the things which he suffered;” (Heb 5:8 AV)

This verse is packed with both doctrine and hard to answer questions.  If we get stuck on the latter, we will miss the personal application.  The obvious object of this verse is the LORD Jesus Christ.  Without a firm grasp on New Testament doctrine, one might assert a heretical view of the humanity of Christ.  Learning obedience might be assumed to mean that Christ had a neutral, or worse, nature from which He had to overcome.  Much like we do.  We were created in the image of Adam.  We were given a nature to sin.  A predisposition which we, by and act of the free will, act upon.  We sinners by nature and by choice.  This is not so with Christ.  He was incarnated without the fallen nature of Adam.  He was incarnated with a perfectly sinless spirit and nature.  When he learned obedience, it was not to overcome disobedience that was part of His nature.  Rather, when He learned obedience, we experienced subjugation and a human being to a divine Father.  Again, we can get caught up the mystery of the incarnation and miss the point entirely.  Jesus showed us the way of obedience, and that way often requires suffering.

I grew up in one of the snowiest areas of our country.  Tucked in between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, we routinely received snow by the feet and not be the inches.  One of the snowiest places in the entire U.S. including Alaska, is at the eastern end of Lake Ontario.  Weather coming from the west would pick up moisture from these two Great Lakes and dump it off shore.  There are picture of snow twenty to thirty feet high as a Highway Department truck blew the snow from the road onto the fields on either side.  It was this kind of weather that assisted us in learning the principle above.  My father had a Sears two-stage snow blower.  It was barely used.  He had something better and cheaper.  He had eight boys.  We lived on a corner lot, which meant we had twice the sidewalk to clean.  We had a driveway that could fit seven cars.  It was a small parking lot.  When it snowed, those of us at home would shovel.  No blower.  That was for my dad.  There were times when it would take the better part of a day.  This was not a choice.  We were told to shovel, and that is what we did.  The harder the task, the more we learned obedience.  Suffering was a matter of breaking the will.  Suffering to the breaking of the will is the only way to learn total obedience.

Sacrifice, suffering, persecution, hardship, labor, striving, etc are seldom preached anymore.  God has not changed His mind.  God is still the same God.  Affirmation, worth, motivation, encouragement, etc, are the themes of today’s pulpits.  It is producing shallow saints who continue to define their faith by how it affects Self rather than how their walk glorifies God.  Obedience is often motivated by reward.  That is God’s design.  However, if we concentrate only on the reward and not the cost, then struggling with obedience is reduced to a total sum game.  The reward must exceed the cost and the reward must be immediate and discernable.  The problem with this thinking is reward for obedience is often abstract.  Surrender, humility, maturity, joy, peace, etc, cannot necessarily be measured.  Even more unfortunate, those abstract rewards God gives are valued less than material reward.  We will not suffer to learn obedience because we value the material over the spiritual.  Christlikeness, by definition, means we learn obedience by suffering.  Only when we exercise the heart to follow that the will might be broken do we begin the process by which we learn obedience.  Jesus did not overcome a sinful nature.  Rather, He experienced what it required for man to be obedient.  He experienced it through suffering.  If we are to be like Christ, it requires no less.  There must be a cost paid.  There must be discomfort.  Pain is a real possibility.  Estrangement, loss, persecution, etc. are possibilities.  The question remains, how much like Christ do we want to be?