Duty and Delight

Some thoughts on the subject of duty and delight...
Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth.  (2 Timothy 2:15)

All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work.  (2 Timothy 3:16-17)

I remember talking to a new associate member (now a brother) of my fraternity, Theta Xi, probably about three years ago now.  I remember him having some interesting views on how and when we ought to read our Bibles.  For him, he said he did not want to read his Bible out of a sense of duty, but rather out of his love for God.  It would be hypocritical of him to read the Bible when he didn't feel like it, like he wasn't being authentic or real or true to God and himself.  To him - and I largely sympathize with this idea - God doesn't want our begrudging obedience and teeth-gritting submission - he wants our hearts and our affections!  He wants us to want to read the Bible, not just to read the Bible! 

So how do we navigate this mess?  Do some people read the Bible with the wrong motives?  Yes, almost certainly!  I know that sometimes I have read the Bible simply to increase in knowledge.  Sometimes I have placed myself over the Word, in a sense, trying to master it.  But we ought to see ourselves as mastered by the Word, instead of vice versa.  We aim to be humble and contrite, though we fail.  I know I have come to the Word before without perfect humility - indeed I probably have never come with perfect humility.  There is a tendency to walk like the pharisees who killed Jesus, for whom the law had been perverted from a great carrier of God's good purposes to a scorecard on the way to self-justification.  Beware this tendency.

So what is the solution?  Do I wait until my heart is right in order to do the right thing?  Do I wait until I just feel like it in order to diligently study the Word?  Do I wait for a peaceful heart so that I can read attentively without a heart in turmoil?  Do I wait until I have cleaned up my act before I bring my heart and mind before the words of our spotless, clean, and altogether holy God?  Dare I wait?  (I have a suspicion that waiting in this way is a dishonest form of hiding.)

I trust that it is obvious to you that the answers to these questions cannot be yes.  We will never attain the perfection that would have us just naturally run to the Word out of the goodness of our own hearts.  (The entirety of the Bible attests that we are not good.)  On the contrary, if we let our hearts run on cruise control, there are plenty of evil inclinations that would seek to keep us as far away from the cutting Sword of Truth as possible.  And indeed, if such a perfection (or approach to it) were theoretically possible - that we would just naturally run to God's Word - what would be the means by which that habit of holiness is worked in us?  How does our love for God and his Word grow?  How would we come to be the sort of people for whom it is natural (or close to natural) to wake up in the morning and thirst after the Words of Life?  I take it for granted that as a Christian you do actually want to become that sort of Christian, so it is a live and relevant question as to how that will happen in us, and I hope this post reawakens the urgency of that question for you.

It is my assertion that you should not wait until the right thing seems easy or appealing or natural or fitting with your plans before you actually do it because your inaction can be a sin when you know the right thing to do.  So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.  (James 4:17)  These words are blunt and comprehensive and cutting and clear.  I sin when I don't do what I know I should. 

I know I should regularly study the Word.  When I don't, I am sinning against God.  In what way?  Am I hurting anyone?  Yes!  First, I am, maybe unwittingly, declaring God to be irrelevant and less important than the other things that I did instead.  I have offended God, first and foremost.  Second, I am cutting off the process of change and help that God has going on in me.  Soaking myself in his Word is a primary means by which I am being changed into the person he is making me.  He is making me into my true self, but a self that is far more like Christ than I am now.  Third, I am hurting those to whom I would be able to give help if I gave myself more fully to the process of what God is doing in me.  I am grieving God and hurting myself and other by neglecting his Word.

I certainly believe the Bible teaches us that our righteousness is as filthy rags and that God doesn't want us to just go through the motions.  We can be sitting in Church - it is a good thing to go - and our hearts can be far from God.  The Israelites made sacrifices, which God had instructed them to do, but they also neglected justice and were called out for it by the prophets.  God wanted their obedience more than just their sacrifices, and in their sacrifices, true love of God and true repentance had been left behind.  They were left with a shell of what the reality was supposed to be.  Today, much of Christianity walks this way.  God is a word that is used and abused, but the weightiness of his reality has not altogether come to settle on the Church.  There is a semblance of love for God that is really a love for others things that have been baptized into Christian terminology.  But oh, that we would forsake all the fakes and instead long - heart, soul, mind, and strength - for a true love of God that he must put into our hearts as a gift! 

So we should read our Bibles.  Period.  Simple.  That, I think, is the duty of the Christian if he is to live out 2 Timothy's exhortations.  I do not intend to spell out a reading schedule and give rules for how it should look.  Suffice it to say that I think you should do it, and not too infrequently.  Do it so that you are actually growing in your knowledge of God.  Do it in such a way that you will be competent with the Word, so that you will not be ashamed, so that you will be able to exhort and rebuke on its authority and not your own.  Have an honest conversation with God about what that ought to look like.

So there's the duty.

But what about the delight?  How do we guard against it becoming a hollow ritual?  How do we connect our duty to the love?  Let's listen to John for a minute.

If you love me, you will keep my commandments.  (John 14:15)

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.  These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.  (John 15:10,11)

For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments.  And his commandments are not burdensome.  (1 John 5:3)

This does not require a ton of elaboration, but our keeping Christ's commandments is wrapped up inextricably with loving Christ.  From John 14:15, they do not seem to be identical.  However, love for God is definitely the proper grounds for keeping his commandments.  We do not love God when we do not obey.  Right acts flow from a loving heart.  Indeed, trying to keep the commandments of God from a heart that has never experienced the grace of Christ in the cross is futile, exhausting, and ultimately unfruitful. 

I take it that the love of Christ will compel us to do what is right as we seek him.  Therefore, the tendencies and thoughts of my heart that would take me away from doing what is right cannot be from a true love of God.  Therefore, the thinking that says we should wait until conditions are perfect before we obey cannot be thinking that is grounded in a true love of God.  Its natural effect is disobedience, if indeed I have correctly interpreted continued inaction as disobedience. 

So we jettison this idea, but what do we replace it with?  How do we guard against hypocrisy?  I think grounding our love of Christ in the work of Christ and the commands of Christ is essential.  First, my own working for Christ is not me trying to save myself.  It is not me trying to perfect myself so that he will like me.  This is definitely not the Gospel, and it is exhausting and unbiblical and offensive to God.  Christ's completed work on the cross on my behalf while I was still a sinner must be seen as prior to and preeminent over anything I do as a Christian.  I don't have to save myself.  This is a freeing truth. 

Second, a meditation on the longsuffering of Christ's love gives me patience in tribulation.  As I think about the road Christ walked, the consistent tempations he withstood, and his agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, two things happen.  One, I fall more in love with this Savior.  Two, the way I think about obedience is changed.  Christ suffered and died and walked a long, hard road for the joy that was set before him.  He did something that, in some sense, he didn't want to do - he asked the Father if there was another way - but he did it out of obedience to the Father because the long-term good and joy of it was exceedingly better than the short-term relief would have been.  If Christ had been okay with the levels of inaction that we are often okay with, he might have never shouldered the cross, and we would have been rightfully damned.  Let's praise his glorious grace!

Third, we must see Christ's words to us as loving.  If God is love, he does not cease to be so when he speaks to us.  God the Father is a good father.  He knows how to give good gifts.  He gives better gifts than we do.  What God the Father purposes to give you is infinitely better than what you purpose to give yourself.  You are just too blind to see things that way.  I am most of the time.  God is so good and loving, and he is good and loving in his words to us, including his commandments.  They are meant for our good.  They are meant for our joy.  God wants us to be happy, but he knows that nothing will make us happier and more joyful than himself.  God purposes to give us himself, but he will not do this apart from his holiness.  We cannot divorce the goodness of God and his purposes of joy from his commandments.  These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.  God's giving and our keeping of his commandments is love.  Beg the Holy Spirit to awaken your heart to this life-changing reality.

Let me bring it all back to my original discussion.  I think it is loving to God to set my heart toward a long term obedience in the daily opening of his Word, even on the days when I don't feel like it.  On those difficult days, may our hearts mirror Jesus' cry - "not my will, but Yours".  We may be doing it for the joy that is set before us, a joy that we know is real, even if we don't taste it immediately.  We fight a difficult battle in an age of instant gratification and multiplied distractions.  But we love God by fighting this battle. 

And here is the good thing.  It is only by perseverance in the Word that we will come to love the Word.  It is only by perseverance in anything that we will come to be "natural" at it.  Take piano playing.  Nobody loves playing the piano the first day they try it because they don't know how to play yet.  It is only by persistent hard work that the freedom comes of being able to sit down and let your fingers fly. 

You are naive if you think you can glance the Bible over every once in awhile and listen to a few sermons and experience all God has for you in his Word.  The Bible is both very clear and convicting but also a difficult book to read.  There are all sorts of ideas and places and things that are foreign to us, but God put them in there for a reason.  He put them in there so that we could devote ourselves to figuring it out. We will never figure it all out.  Parts will always remain hard.  But daily getting in there is worth it, and our delight in it will grow over time.  The more you read the Bible, the more you enjoy it.  The more you study God's Word, the more you enjoy it.  The more you integrate yourself into the Church, the more you benefit.  The more you invest, the more you get out.  If you don't feel joy in it now, read diligently anyway, and ask God to work on your heart.  Stick to that for three years, and tell me how you are doing then.  I bet you that your heart will be singing of the goodness of God's Word then.

This argument is parallel to relationships and marriage.  Many today think that romantic love is the basis of marriage, but it's not.  Covenant is.  That doesn't mean that feelings of love are not important.  It simply means that because of my covenant, I am called to perform actions of love whether or not I have feelings of love.  And I believe over time that if you really give yourself to acting in love towards another, your feelings of affection for that other person will grow.  This perspective, if taken seriously would save many marriages where spouses have fallen out of love, think that they're married to the wrong person, and think the solution is divorce.  No, the solution is faithfulness to you're covenant.  The solution is acting in love no matter how you're feeling. 

To those who are considering divorce because they're out of love, to those who simply don't feel the urge to read the Word, to those in numerous other circumstances where you're heart is not in a thing, am I saying that you should just suck it up and obey?  Yes, but I am also calling you to a perspective that would change your mind from thinking about it in that way.  Doing the right thing is always preferable to the alternative, no matter how you're feeling, because God is doing something in you, and what he is doing is exceedingly good.

Whew.  This has been a long blog entry.  I pray that it will bear fruit in your obedience to Christ.  I pray that God would get all the glory from that fruit.