(1 Peter - Part 12): As Obedient Children — A.W. Tozer

Obedient Children as the Assumed Posture of Believers

Now, in the book of 1 Peter, 14th verse, as obedient children, not fashioning yourselves according to the former lusts or ignorance. I don't intend to read further than that, because we've been reading these verses, but there is a phrase here that has no verb in it, as obedient children.

We break in with those words, as obedient children, we break into, rather unceremoniously, a long apostolic exhortation, filled with words, words of action. He says, for instance, gird up and hope, and be holy.

The little phrase as obedient children, when there is no verb in it. He does not even say here, be obedient. Then we'd have a strong exhortation, but it isn't here. He does not exhort us here to be obedient.

He says, as obedient, do so and so. To make a point of this, in order to show you that Peter is not here exhorting us to obedience, he is assuming obedience by the fact that we are believers. Peter wrote to the brethren who are elect according to the foreknowledge of God, and so on, scattered throughout Pontus, Asia, and Cappadocia.

He assumed by the fact that they were brethren, that they were elect, that they were saved unto obedience. He assumed that they would be obedient children. So he did not say, now be obedient. Though I do not say that might not have been said elsewhere in scripture.

But I do say that Peter here did not. He only said, assuming that you are believers, I therefore gather that you are also obedient. So now, as obedient children, do so and so. What we are said to do cannot come within the scope of our examination today.

So we are going to talk about this, obedient children, and point out that obedience is taught in the entire Bible, and that it is one of the toughest requirements of the Christian life. And yet, apart from obedience, there can be no salvation.

Salvation without obedience is a self-contradictory impossibility. Because the essence of sin is rebellion against the divine authority. Let's sort of relax and shove that around a little, look at it from all sides, and note that the essence of sin was rebellion against the divine authority.

Sin as Rebellion Against Divine Authority

Thou shalt not eat. And the day thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die. But Adam and Eve, in spite of the strong prohibition, stretched forth their hands and tasted of the fruit. And thus they disobeyed and rebelled.

And in their rebellion brought sin upon themselves, for sin was rebellion. It says in Romans 5, by one man's disobedience, that by one man's disobedience, that stern word from the Holy Ghost through Paul, by one man's disobedience.

So disobedience wrought the downfall of the world. And in John 3 it says plainly that sin is lawlessness. Sin is disobedience to the law of God. And it says in Ephesians 2 that the people of the world are children of disobedience.

Children of disobedience. Now that word children there, as here, does not mean, I think in Spanish they say niña, in Scots they say bairns, in English we say toddlers. It does not mean that. It means it is an idiomatic expression.

And it means that it springs out of and rests upon and is characterized by. As when someone reached a certain age and was made a son of the law, you remember Dr. Kligerman told about it, that is he was put under obedience to the law and called a son of the law.

Now it did not mean he was begotten by the law and he called his law father. It was an expression calling, well we have an expression like it when we talk about sons of freedom. We sing about Americans being sons of freedom.

That means the same thing. So we said that the people of the world are children of disobedience. It characterizes them. They breathe it. They exhale it. They inhale it. It colors them. It conditions them.

It shapes them. It molds them. It is a part of them and they are a part of it. They are sons of disobedience, as the Americans are supposed to be, sons of freedom. Now the whole question here is, and the whole question before human race is, who is boss?

Broken down into a series of questions. The questions are, to whom do I belong and to whom do I owe allegiance, and who has authority to require obedience of me? Now those are three questions. To whom do I belong and to whom do I, should I, or do I owe allegiance?

And who has authority to require obedience of me? And we Americans, I suppose, probably among all the peoples of the world, are the hardest people to get to obey anybody, because we are sons of freedom.

The American Spirit of Freedom and Resistance to Authority

We were the outcropping of a revolt. We revolted. We poured tea overboard in Boston Harbor. We made speeches and said that the sound of the clash of arms was carried on every wind that blows from the Boston Commons.

Patrick Henry, wasn't it, or somebody? And we said we would not lie so finely by and wear the chains of the British. And he ended that famous oration with a pure oration, give me liberty or give me death.

And that's in the American blood, give me liberty or give me death. And when anyone says, you owe obedience, we bristle immediately, at least we wanted to have explained to us, because we don't take kindly to being obedient to anybody.

Now, the children of the world have their answer to the question, who is boss? They have their answer. The answer to the question, to whom do I belong, is simply, I belong to myself. Even the Bible gives this rather silly, saying that I used to hear as a boy, when you told a child to keep still, he would say, my mouth's my own, I will speak when I please.

That was the equivalent of some of the, later it was skidoo, or 23. And you know, it's something new all the time, and I never tried to keep up with them. But that was very, that was very, they'd say, hey, and somebody'd say, straw's cheaper.

That was a big one in that day, too, you know. And keep still, my mouth's my own, I'll talk when I please. And the Bible even tells us that some grown-up people back there said, my mouth's my own, the Lord can't tell me when to talk.

Now, that's the answer that the world gives, to whom do I belong? I belong to myself. We make a great deal out of that, individualism, we call it, individuality, and the right of self-determination. And the question, to whom do I owe allegiance?

The answer is, I owe allegiance to nobody, but I give allegiance to whomsoever I please. That's the answer of the sinful heart, particularly that's the answer of the American heart. I owe allegiance to nobody, I give allegiance to whom I please.

And the answer to the question, who has authority to require obedience of me, is this, no one has such authority, even the laws of my country, I made them myself. That's why an American couldn't obey a law without loss of face.

He said, I made that law. I went to the polls, I elected my representative, I sent him to Springfield or Washington, and he made the law, and if I don't like it, I can recall him next election. I am not putting my neck under the heel of any man, I am obeying laws which I myself have made.

That's the wonderful liberty and freedom and beauty, and also snare of the American way of life. So the answer to, who has authority to command obedience, the answer of our hearts is, no one has that authority.

And so we say, I have the right of self-determination. Now I'd like to talk a little about that. You can't hear a politician talk for 20 minutes until he drags that in. The right of self-determination, and I'm glad we have it here in this country.

I'm glad, deeply grateful before God this Thanksgiving season, that I am not in Russia, that I am not in China, that I am not in East Germany, that I am not in any of the so-called satellites they should be called slave nations.

Glad that we have our flag to fly and tell us that we have the right of self-determination. That's good, and I wouldn't say in any wise anything that would reflect even remotely on this wonderful truth.

I think we all ought to get on our knees and spend a half an hour this next Thursday thanking God we live in America. But while God has given us the right of self, power of self-determination, he has not given us the right of self-determination.

Free Will Gives Power, Not Moral Permission

Now let me explain that. Free will means that God has given me the power of self-determination. He gave it to Adam and Eve. He said, now that tree with that fruit is there, and it's there. You have a free will, you can do as you please, roam at will, go to sleep, get up, eat what you please, do as you please, with one exception.

I have forbidden you to eat of that tree. They had their power of self-determination, but they did not have the right of self-determination. There is a difference there. If God had not given us the power of self-determination, then we would be automatons.

You have a car sitting out in front. It may be a little one or a big one, a DeSoto, Chrysler, Packard, whatever it may be. All right, it's sitting out there. It has no power of self-determination. Though it may have cost you three thousand dollars, it'll sit where it is until it rusts out.

It'll never move from there, unless you move it, or somebody else moves it. It'll never move from there. It has not the power of self-determination. That airplane, we're not hearing these foggy days, but that airplane up yonder in the blue, has not the power of self-determination.

A man sits nonchalantly behind a little half wheel and determines where that plane is going to go, and it has no power to determine its own destiny. Now, if God had made us automobiles or airplanes, simply shiny, beautiful machines, then we would not have had the power of self-determination.

But, since he gave us of his own sovereignty and made us to be moral creatures, he has given us the right, or rather the power, not the right, but the power of self-determination. I keep using the word right because I hear it so often in political speeches and read it so much in political literature.

But, actually, it's power and not right. Now, we do not have the right of self-determination because God has given us the power to choose good or evil, but he has not given us the right to choose evil.

Seeing that God is a holy God, and seeing that we are moral creatures, and we have the power but not the right to choose evil. No man has any right to lie. We have the power to lie, but no man has any right to lie.

We have the power to steal. I can go out and get myself a better coat than the one I wore here today, and slip it out of a side door and get away with it. I have that power, but I do not have that right.

I have the power to turn on my friend here with a little Swedish knife, sharp as a razor, or I could kill him. But I do not have the right to do it, but I do not have the right to do it. I have only the power to do it.

You only have a right to be good. You never have a right to be bad because God is good. You only have a right to be holy. You never have a right to be unholy, and if you're unholy, you usurp a right that is not yours.

Adam and Eve had no moral right to the tree of good and evil, but they took it, and they usurped a power that was not their right, that was not theirs, because they had the power. I remember, and looked it up to see if I was right, and I was.

In this particular instance, I often am not, that Tennyson said something in his memoriam that stuck in my mind from years back, and it reads like this, a strange little two-line affair. He says, Our wills are ours.

Even though Tennyson wrote that, it scanned badly. Our wills are ours. We know not how. Our wills are ours to make them thine. He acknowledged in this great religious poem in memoriam, he acknowledged that we have wills that belong to us.

Our wills are ours. And then says rather vaguely, we know not how. It's all beyond us, this deep mystery of man's free will. It's all too much for us. Our wills are ours, we know not how. Then he girds himself up and gets hold of himself and says, yes, our wills are ours to make them thine.

There is the only right we have is to make our wills the will of God. Or rather, to make the will of God our will. And then we do not violate our will, we purify our will. We do not destroy it, we sanctify it.

So that we have the power of self-determination, but we do not have the right of self-determination. Because we are what we are, and God is who and what he is. God is the sovereign, we are his creatures, he's the creator, and therefore he has a right to command, and we have the obligation to obey.

But it's a happy obligation, I might say. His yoke is easy and his burden is light. Now I want to point out here what I consider a notable heresy which has sprung out of a misunderstanding of this whole business of obedience.

Salvation Requires the Whole Lord Jesus Christ

And it's found in full gospel circles, and I have no question but what, before I began to pray and think and meditate and contemplate and see the effects of it, I preached it myself. Maybe even in this church.

But it certainly leads a lot of modifying, and a great many writers and qualifiers, in order to save us from being really in error about this. Here is what I consider a bad teaching. I'll put it in three lines for you.

First, that we are saved by accepting Christ as our Savior. Two, we are sanctified by accepting Christ as our Lord. Three, that we may do the first without doing the second. Now, I have been taught that, and I think that is woven into most full gospel literature.

Almost everybody that gets up and preaches to young people and exhorts them to consecrate themselves to God and yield and surrender and be filled with the Spirit, they all begin by saying, you are saved now, and that's good.

You are saved by taking Jesus Christ as your Savior. Now you will be filled with his Spirit when you will take him as your Lord. And the implication is, they can take him as their Savior without taking him as their Lord, and they do not even allow us to infer it.

They sometimes state it outright. I came across it the other day somewhere, either in a magazine article or book or radio sermon, I don't know which. But it was preached by a good man, and I suppose did a little bit of good.

But it is very far from being true, because we have here the doctrine that Christ may sustain toward us a divided relationship, that our Lord Jesus Christ can be our Savior without being our Lord, that we can be saved without obeying a sovereign Lord.

That, I say, is so commonly preached that to oppose it or object to it is to put your neck far out the window in the rain. Now, what the Bible says about it is this. God hath made this same Jesus, whom ye have crucified, both Lord and Christ.

Jesus means Savior, Lord means sovereign, Christ means anointed one. And he therefore preached to them not Jesus as Savior, he preached to them Jesus as Lord and Christ and Savior, and he never divided his offices.

In Romans 10, 8 -13, I want to read that because I don't want to get it wrong. Romans 10, 8, it says, What saith it? The word is nigh thee, even in thy mouth and in thy heart, that is, the word of faith which we preach, that if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.

He did not say that thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Savior, he said thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus. For with the heart man believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth confessions made unto salvation.

For there is no difference between Jew and Greek, for the same Lord over all is rich unto all that call upon him. For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. Three times he calls him Lord here in this passage, telling us how to be saved.

He says that faith in the Lord Jesus, plus confession of that faith to the world, brings salvation to us. So the Bible doesn't take the attitude that you can divide the offices of Jesus, receive him today as Savior, and ten years from now, maybe, get around to owning him as Lord.

That, I say, is no small heresy. But you hear it almost everywhere you go. 1 Peter 2 says that we are elected according to the four-holy of God the Father through sanctification of the Spirit unto obedience.

So salvation, apart from obedience, is unknown in the sacred scriptures. But we say, come to him, you don't have to obey, you don't have to change anything, do anything, order anything, give up anything, surrender anything, give back anything, do anything.

Just come to him and believe in him as Savior. So they come and believe as Savior. Then later on they attend a deeper life conference, and somebody says, now, you that have received him as Savior, how would you like to take him as Lord tonight?

How utterly horrible that is. And yet you hear it. Because it is a divided personality. It is urging men to believe on a divided price. And it is allowing them to exercise one office now, and exercise the next office maybe ten years from now.

I don't believe it. I believe that it is all wrong. Now, my brethren, no one can receive half a price, or a third of a price, or a quarter of a price. We are saved by believing not on an office, nor a work.

You hear people say, come and believe on the finished work. No, the Bible never says it. The Bible never tells us we are to believe on an office, nor that we are to believe on a work, but we are to believe on the Lord who did that work and holds those offices.

And a man, when he believes on Jesus Christ, must believe on the whole Lord Jesus Christ, and not make any reservations. Anybody that slips in, like I might slip in to Englewood Hospital and say I would like to have a blood transfusion, or I'd like to have an x-ray of my gallbladder.

And so I go in and get their service, and then wave goodbye, and I owe them nothing. I've paid it, and I owe them no allegiance. The next time I can go to Bernardus South Shore, I don't owe them anything.

I'm paid up. They've done for me what I wanted. They've exercised their office as a blood transfuser, or an x-ray technician, and I have what I wanted, and I go. I'm better now, and because of that, okay.

But I owe them nothing. So we say Jesus is a kind of a divine nurse, and we go to him when sin has made us sick, and say, Lord, you may help me, Lord, and he blessedly does it, and we say goodbye and go in leaving.

But the Bible never anywhere gives us any such a grotesque concept. There's none in the Bible, none in the Gospels, none in the Epistles, and none in the Psalms, which are often a commentary on Epistles and Gospels.

Nowhere is ever, if ever, given us to believe that we can use Jesus as a Savior, and not own him as a Lord. He is the Lord, and as the Lord, he saves us, because he has the other offices of Savior, and Christ, and high priest, and wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption.

He's all of these things, and all of these are embodied in him as Christ the Lord. And when I come to him, I don't come as a Jewish real estate man, carefully saying, I'll take this, but I won't take that.

I don't come to Christ as I might buy furniture and say, I'll take this chair, but I don't want that bed, dividing it up. No, sir, it's either all of Christ or none of Christ. And we need to preach again a whole Christ to the world, a Christ we don't have to apologize for, a Christ we can't divide and that won't be divided, a Christ who will either be Lord of all, or he will not be Lord at all.

Salvation restores the right, what a fellow called the creator-creature relationship, because it acknowledges God's right to communion. You see, in our time, friends, we have overemphasized the psychology of sinnership, or sinnerhood.

We've overemphasized it. We point out too much that the woe of the sinner, the grief of the sinner, the heavy load of the sinner, the burden, he's got all that. But we've overemphasized it. And we have overlooked the fact that a sinner is not only heavy laden, but he's a rebel against properly constituted authority.

And that's what makes sin, sin. We're a rebel, we're sons of disobedience. Sin is the breaking of the law, and we're in rebellion. And we're fugitives from the just laws of God while we're sinners. Certainly we're heartbroken, certainly.

That a man escaped from the bride well, that this man who kidnapped and killed the innocent child escaped from the Missouri Penitentiary, sure he'll have grief, sure he'll bark his shins on logs and fences as he flies, sure he'll be hungry, sure he'll have to sleep in caves and swamps and wherever he may be.

Certainly he'll get weary and he'll get a long beard and he'll be tired and have charley horses and perhaps get a cold, and certainly all that will happen. That is incidental to the fact that he is a fugitive from justice and a rebel against law.

So sinners, sure they're heartbroken, sure they carry a heavy load, certainly they labor and are heavy laden, most surely. The Bible takes full account of that. But that is only incidental to the fact that the reason they are what they are is they have rebelled against the laws of God and they're fugitives from divine justice.

It's that that constitutes sin, not the fact that I have a heavy heart and miserable and sad and all that. That's one of the outcroppings of sin, but the root of sin is rebellion against law. It's saying, I belong to myself.

I owe allegiance to nobody unless I choose to give it. That's the essence of sin. But salvation restores that, I mean reverses that, and restores the old relationship. And the first thing the returning sinner does is to say, Father, I have sinned against heaven and in thy sight, and I'm no more worthy to be called thy son.

Make me as one of thy hired servants. And thus in repentance we reverse that situation and meekly submit to the word of God and to the will of God, then we believe and are saved. The happiness of all the moral creatures lies right here, in obedience to God.

Heaven as the Realm of Obedient Creatures

Psalm 103, verse 20, Bless the Lord, ye his angels, that excel in strength, that do his commandments, heartening unto the voice of his word. The angels in heaven find their complete freedom and replete happiness in obeying the commandments of God.

Instead of finding it a tyranny, they find it a delight. And I've been looking over again at the whole first chapter of Ezekiel. It's mystery, mystery, mystery. I don't understand it. Creatures there with four faces and four wings, strange-looking creatures doing strange things, and they had wheels, and there were wheels in the middle of the wheels, and there was fire coming out of the north, and there were creatures that went straight ahead, and there were creatures that lowered their wings and waved them, and they were strange, beautiful creatures, and they were all having the time of their lives utterly, completely delighted with the presence of God and that they could serve God.

Heaven is a place of surrender to the whole will of God, and it is heaven because it is such a place. Now, conclusion. Some of the matter is this. Everything else that can be said about hell may be true, but this one thing is the essence, that hell is the world of disobedience.

Hell is the world of the rebel. Hell is the alcatraz for the unreconstructed rebels who would not surrender to the will of God. And heaven is the world of obedient children. Whatever else we may say of its pearly gates and its golden streets and its jasper walls and its city foursquare, heaven is heaven because it is the world of obedient children, having found their sphere, the sphere where they normally operate as moral creatures, children of the Most High God.

And heaven is heaven because of that. Hell is hell not because of worms and fire, though I believe certainly there is both there. Jesus said that they were there. You might endure worms and fire, but for a moral creature to know that he is where he is because he is a rebel, he has no face left, no self-respect left, no hope left, nobility left, nothing left.

So he is finding hell the world of the disobedient. And each person now is deciding which world he is going to inhabit. He has got to decide it now. So let us not come, as you might go up onto a stage to be interviewed over a radio, or to get your diploma out of school, let us not go spitefully and carefully to the Lord Jesus and say, I'm coming for some help, Lord Jesus.

I understand you're the Savior, I'm going to believe on thee and be saved. And then turn away and say, excuse me, I'll think about the other matter later. The matter of lordship and allegiance and obedience, I'll think of that later.

I warn you, you'll get no help from him. For the Lord will not save those whom he cannot command. He will not divide his offices. You cannot believe on a half Christ. We take him for what he is, the anointed Savior and Lord, who is King of kings and Lord of all lords, and who saves us with the understanding that he can also guide our lives for the rest of the time.

So while I believe in the deeper life, certainly you well know that, dear, I believe that we are mistaken when we tack the deeper life on to an imperfect salvation, gotten imperfectly by an imperfect concept of the whole thing.

Under Finney and Wesley and such men as that, no man ever would dare to rise in meeting and say, I'm a Christian, who had not surrendered his whole being to God, and had taken Jesus Christ as his Lord as well as his Savior, and repented to the roots of his being, and brought himself under obedience to the will of the Lord.

Then he could say, I'm saved. We let him say they're saved no matter how imperfect it all is, and then later on tack on the deeper life and say, all right, now let's consider the Lordship of Jesus. Don't you think you owe him obedience?

You owe him obedience from the second you came to him for help. And if we do not give him that obedience, I have a reason to wonder if we're really converted. I see people do things and hear them having done things and watch them operate, and I'm made to question whether they're converted or not, or ever were.

I believe it's because of faulty teaching to begin with. They thought the Lord was a hospital, and he was the chief of staff in a hospital to fix up poor sinners that got in trouble. They go to him and say, Dear Lord, I come to thee weeping, I'm a poor man, now help me.

And the Lord helps us, and then we go our way. Bad teaching, brethren, and it leads to self-deception. Let us look at him high there, wearing the crowns, being Lord of Lords and King of all Kings forever, having a perfect moral right to full obedience from all of his saved people.

Final Call to Submit to the Lordship of Christ

There's a deeper life, all right, but that's not where it comes in. May God bless these words, give us sober thoughts. I want you to take what I've said, swallow it down, without giving it thought. But if after careful searching of the scriptures and reading of the New Testament you think I'm wrong, then all right.

But if after reading and searching the Bible you see that I've given the germ of truth here, then I urge you, do something about it. Don't go blithely on your way believing that you're saved when perhaps you're not saved at all.

For you have believed imperfectly upon a divided Savior, which is no Savior at all. May God grant it's not true, but if it is, we still have time to do something about it.