Posted by
Jack on Friday, January 11, 2008 1:16:10 PM
"Teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you." Matthew 28:20
To suggest that Christians should obey the teachings of Jesus is bordering on a works based salvation. It goes against salvation by grace. So it makes it easy for us to ignore the difficult commands of Jesus like "Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you," Matthew 6:44.
The problem stems from our misunderstood reason for obedience. We do not obey so as to obtain or secure our salvation. We obey Jesus because we know that He knows what is best for us and our society. We don't have to know why we should "Love our enemies". All we need to know is that Jesus said we should "Love our enemies."
We obey Jesus because He is the Lord. As Lord, He knows best.
We do not "Love our enemies" because they are loveable. If they were loveable they probably would not be our enemies. We love them because we choose to love them. Love is a matter of choice.
Love is not merely the absence of hate. We may not seek revenge but this does not mean that we Love. Jesus goes on to say that we should "pray for those who persecute you," Matthew 5:44.
I worked with an employee that was out to get me fired so that she could take over my job. She secretly made phone calls to my superiors and told them false stories. As a result my company put pressure on me to resign, which I did. And sure enough, this employee was promoted to my position. It was tempting to try to get revenge. My wife still thinks that I should have done something to get back at this employee. But this would have been against the command of Jesus. So I dropped it and moved on. The result was that I got out of a high pressure job and found myself self employed, which I wished that I had done sooner. The lady who inherited my job found herself out of a job soon after because my company choose to close down our business.
It pays to obey.