January 26, 2023 Show with A. M. Brewster on “The Nature of Biblical Obedience”

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Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have an view in conversation to make one another wiser and better. It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

And now, here's your host, Chris Arnzen.

...Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth. We're listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Thursday on this 26th day of January, 2023.

I'm thrilled to have back as a returning guest for one of his monthly visits A .M. Brewster. He is president of Evermind Ministries, a biblical counselor, author, podcaster, and conference speaker, and today he is going to be addressing the nature of biblical obedience,.

Is doing the right thing good enough? Maybe Spike Lee is wrong after all, and do the right thing may be insufficient, but it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, A .M. Brewster.

Thank you so much for having me back on. I am very happy to be here, and I'm also happy to say, if any of your listeners listening today caught our last show, I mentioned that I had lost control of, I lost access to my websites, but by the grace of God, I have access to those again, so thank you for those who prayed, and I hope you can rejoice with me.

Amen.

Well, tell our listeners, for the sake of those especially who have not yet heard you on the program, tell them about Evermind Ministries.

Evermind Ministries is a family of ministries, I like to say it. It really, Evermind Ministries is all about keeping God's truth at the center of the human experience, so each ministry within Evermind Ministries is designed to do that, to keep God's truth at the center of a specific niche of our human experience.

One of the very first ministries was Truth Love Family, Truth Love Family clearly speaks to marriage and parenting, as well as general family matters. Then there is Faith Tree Biblical Counseling and Discipleship, where we deal specifically with discipleship, but also mostly crisis counseling, when individuals find themselves in difficult situations and don't know what God's Word says about it.

There is also the year-long Celebration of God, which deals with the broader concept of worship. What is worship and what does that look like in our daily lives? We'll actually be talking a lot about that today as part of our discussion.

And then my speaking ministry and my biblical counseling is also done through A .M. Brewster Ministries. I just had the opportunity to speak at a church and school in Vermont, which was super awesome, and have a parenting Q &A and all of that.

So I speak and I minister broadly. If God's Word talks about it, I pray that I have the opportunity to minister that truth to people. And then we find those different facets of our lives, family, work, worship, the church, and we look at what God's Word has to say in those particular instances.

One great way to find out more about these ministries, and me in particular, is to go to TruthLoveParent, all one word, truthloveparent .com, and then forward slash iron. And when you go there, not only will you see links to what I do, but you'll also be able to access additional information and resources concerning what Chris and I are going to talk about today, as well as access all of the, excuse me, all of the previous conversations Chris and I have had, and all of the resources for that as well, truthloveparent .com, forward slash iron.

Amen.

Well, I want to give our listeners right up front our email address if you have questions for A .M. Brewster. The email address is ChrisArnzen at gmail .com, C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N at gmail .com.

Give us your first name at least, your city and state, and your country of residence. Please only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter. Obviously, when we have a biblical counselor on the program, I could readily understand people who have personal, private, and very intimate questions that they want to ask and not identify themselves.

So that's completely acceptable. We will honor your request that you remain anonymous. But please, if you're just asking a general question, please give us your first name at least, city and state, and country of residence.

That's ChrisArnzen at gmail .com. Well, you know, something reminded me of the discussion that we are having today. The other day, I can't remember how long ago it was, but it was just two to three days, I believe, ago.

I sat with a churning stomach, getting a little bit nauseous, watching the very popular Fox News host, Jesse Waters, interviewing some woman who is either mentally ill, a liar, or demon-possessed, telling the story about how she went to heaven and saw heaven, giving a completely ridiculous description of it.

And Jesse Waters opened up this interview with her by declaring this as truth, that he was trying to give the impression that he knew full well about the subject of heaven. He opened up by saying, you know, good people go to heaven, and bad people go to hell.

That was basically his description. I am intending to write a brief note to Jesse saying, keep things that you don't know about off of your lips when you're hosting this show. You have no clue what Christianity teaches about this, which you've made obvious in making such an absurd comment.

It's actually the kind of comment and the belief that I would imagine the vast majority of people who are not born again, who actually believe in an afterlife, would say and believe something like that.

The Nature of Biblical Obedience and the Danger of Cheap Grace

But the nature of biblical obedience is doing the right thing good enough. Well, why don't you start off the program by addressing the roots of why you wanted to address this subject, and the fact that even though I know you're going to conclude that doing the right thing is not good enough, at the same time, there are Christians today, many Christians, who have adopted a false theology that says that being born again need not bear the evidence of being truly born of God by doing good things, and the right thing, and so on.

The easy belief is in cheap grace theology. You and I believe that we are justified by grace alone, through faith alone, and Christ alone, but we believe that doing the right thing is an evidence of our changed heart of receiving a new heart.

Good works must be given as an evidence, not as a cause, not as something meritorious, but as an evidence, as a fruit of true conversion. But tell us why you wanted to discuss this to begin with.

Well, everything that you just said, amen and amen, hopefully, obviously, your listeners know, or they will soon find out, that this is not me saying that, you know, obedience is not important, right?

We're really going to look at the fact that obedience is desperately important, absolutely important, but the fact of the matter is, so often, we're very superficial in our understanding of God's expectations for our lives, and so we say, okay, we've crossed from the darkness into the light, you know, before we thought that obedience wasn't important, now we recognize and we see how important it is all throughout Scripture, God has setting expectations for my life, and so, okay, I need to do those things.

Yes, that is accurate. You need to do those things, but if that's where we stop, we're actually going to find ourselves in a lot of trouble, and for me, as a biblical counselor, it's hard for me to pinpoint exactly where this passion for this topic started.

I'm a husband, I'm a father, obviously, I'm a son, I'm a brother, I am a biblical counselor, I've preached and taught people, I've been a teacher in a school, right, and so I, like you guys, have had lots of experiences where we've seen the way people relate to each other, we've seen people do right and people do wrong, and all that kind of stuff, but I think what really opened my eyes to this reality was when I read what I consider to be one of the most petrifying portions of Scripture.

It comes at the end of the Sermon on the Mount, it's very familiar, everyone will recognize it, but in Matthew chapter 7, starting at verse 21, Jesus says, "...not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord...".

Now these people are saying, Lord, they're calling Jesus their master, okay? You are my master, you are my owner, you are the one who gets to decide how I live, alright? That's a really powerful thing.

Do we see God as our master? Well not everyone who sees me that way, who calls me that way, will enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven will enter, okay? Well, there we see the importance of our doing.

We know that our doing doesn't earn us salvation, but we recognize that when we have been truly born again, we will desire to do the will of the Father, right? But then he goes on, "...many will say to me on that day, Lord, Lord, my master, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name cast out demons, and in your name perform many miracles?".

And again, we're familiar with this passage, but think about that. Those of us in the Baptist, the Protestant, the conservative denominations, or reformed denominations, so on and so forth, generally speaking, we're not the ones who are saying, yes, you need to be able to prophesy, you need to be able to cast out demons, you need to be able to perform miracles.

Most of us tend to be cessationists to one degree or another. That's not a part of our wheelhouse, part of our experience. And so those are three things that I, Aaron Brewster, cannot say that I have done.

I have not done those things. And those are three things, by the way, which are not inherently sinful. They are good things. We see Jesus himself doing these things. We see the disciples doing these things.

We see these things happening in the early church, okay? And so these people are standing before the Lord going, Master, this is what we have done. And then I will declare to them, says Jesus, I never knew you depart from me, you who practice lawlessness.

By the way, Aaron, you're going to be pleasantly surprised, perhaps, that minutes, just a handful of minutes before this broadcast began, I was addressing that very text with my friend Joe. I hope you're listening.

Joe said that he and his friend, who is a Pentecostal, were going to listen today. I hope they are.

Hey, Joe.

But Joe is one of the sons, the second oldest son, of the woman who led me to Christ in the 1980s, and Joe contacted me to do a video chat with me and his friend. They were on a break at work, and his friend is Pentecostal, and we were having a friendly disagreement over whether or not a true Christian, a genuinely born-again Christian, could lose his or her salvation.

And I, of course, being theologically reformed, was insisting that if you have received the gift of eternal life, it's just what the Word says. It's eternal. You can't make eternal terminal. And he brought up that passage in Matthew 7 that you just cited, and I said, yes, but keep reading.

Jesus said He never knew those people. He didn't say He knew them and they left Him. But anyway, I just thought you'd find that perhaps fascinating.

Oh, that's awesome. God's providence. That's awesome. And the point you make is really an important one, too. This is not somebody who truly was a follower of Christ, who truly was doing these wonderful things who lost their salvation.

No, no. These people were doing good things. I recognize that even this list of three things here, pretty phenomenal as they are, no doubt these people were decent individuals at times in their life. They were hospitable.

They were kind. They worked hard at their jobs, right? You say, well, Aaron, how do you know that? Because most people do. I've had the opportunity to meet people who are hardcore atheists, people who hate the idea of God.

But you know what? A lot of them are really decent people. They're people fun to work with, fun to play games with, fun to be on the same softball team with them.

Another evidence of that is that they were shocked that they were not being welcomed.

Into heaven.

If they were knowing charlatans, I don't think that in their final meeting with the very Son of God, they would think they could pull the wool over his eyes.

Exactly. These people believed with all of their heart that they would be ushered into heaven.

Exactly.

And yet, God says, depart from me, you who practice lawlessness. And so what's petrifying for me about this passage is that it reveals the fact that you can't just look at your good works and use that as the final justification for the fact that you have a relationship with God.

And that's because, again, works, there's a tension in the scriptures about works. We can't just live a life where we say, I don't ever have to do right, you know, I'm saved, I got my fire insurance, and so therefore I can just live how I want and I'll get out.

Of hell.

We can't do that on the one side. On the other side, we don't want to become like the Pharisees, so superficial, so legalistic, so focused on our performance that we're missing the deeper realities. And so couple those, this truth, all the truths that we're going to talk about today, couple that with my experience working with individuals and finding that people professing Christians have a very superficial understanding of what true obedience, Christ honoring obedience is.

And this has become a massively important and something I'm very passionate about, something that's massively important in every facet of my ministry. So of course, I believe that for the most part, I don't want to make too many assumptions, but I believe for the most part that your audience is going to recognize and agree with a lot of the comments.

In fact, I believe they're going to agree with 75 of what I'm going to say today. So I want to get that 75 kind of out of the way quickly so that we can really invest in that 25 where Christians tend to struggle.

All right. And so one of the easy things, I don't even really need to necessarily quote any scriptures on this particular point, but the first concept, the first facet of the nature of obedience is obviously that we do the right things.

All right. We have to do the right things. And as Bible-believing Christians, we recognize the fact that God gets to determine what is right. If there is an absolute authority, then there must be absolute truth.

God is the absolute authority. He gets to decide what is right and what is wrong. All right. That's period. That's all there is to it. And that scriptures are filled with God making proclamations about what is right and what is wrong.

So therefore, that's the first thing. Yes, obedience does include doing the right thing. It necessitates doing the right thing. In fact, we see people in the scriptures who thought they were obeying, but they were doing the wrong thing and God was not pleased with them and they received consequences for that.

So yes, first and foremost, everyone, please understand God gets to decide what is right. And he has communicated that to us in his word, both in clear commands as well as in principles. And it falls upon us.

We need to know what God says is right. In order to obey, it is contingent upon us to know God's word and to discover what's right. I mean, too many Christians just have this nebulous, superficial concept of the Christian life where, you know, at best they go to church, listen to what the pastor says, and then they think about that and they try to do some of that during the week.

But the idea of personal Bible study, getting into the word, knowing God, knowing his heartbeat, knowing his expectations for our lives, and trying to work on practically applying those truths to our lives is unfortunately far too foreign and uncommon in many professing believers' lives.

So that's the starting place. And I think, again, most people will agree, very few of your listeners will write in to you and say, you know, obedience, I don't have to do the right thing to obey, all right?

The second thing that I think we're going to agree on is the fact that obedience can't just be doing the right things. We also have to do them in the right way. The example that I go to quite often is the example of—and you know what?

His name is escaping me—the gentleman who in the Old Testament was transporting the Ark of the Covenant.

What's his name?

Uzzah.

Yes, Uzzah. Yes, correct, correct, right? So he wanted to do this good thing, right? He wanted to take the Ark of God back where it was supposed to go, all right? So what he did is he put the Ark of the Covenant onto a cart being pulled by oxen, and he was taking it back where it belonged.

Now, he had the right idea, get the Ark where it needed to go, very important. But he didn't do it the right way. In fact, not only did he not do it the right way by transporting it, but because he didn't transport it the right way, we're told that—I don't remember exactly what happened, but the cart hit something and the Ark of the Covenant started to slip off of the cart.

Yeah, an ox stumbled.

And Uzzah—yes, okay, the ox stumbled, yes. And so Uzzah wanted to protect the Ark, all right? And the Bible tells us they actually got a new cart, right? They wanted to make sure that they did this the best they could, so they have a new cart.

And the Ark stumbled, and Uzzah puts out his hand because he doesn't want the Ark of God to fall onto the ground. That's a wonderful desire. People will say, yes, that's good, we don't want that to happen.

But he didn't obey the right way, because God said, you're supposed to transport it for men, using the poles that slide through the rings, you carry it like that. And number one, you never touch the Ark.

You don't touch it. Well, it didn't matter that Uzzah was trying to, quote-unquote, do the right thing, that his intentions were good. The fact of the matter was he wasn't doing it in the right way. Because he didn't do it in the right way, the Ark slipped.

He was tempted to, again, do another good thing, but he didn't do it the right way, and he died because of it. And that is powerful, my friends, for you to recognize that fact. God killed him because he did the right thing in the wrong way.

That's right.

Another passage.

In fact, I just wanted to tell you that somebody sent me the video of my opening remarks to a debate in the 1990s that I arranged between James White and a Roman Catholic apologist, I think it was Father Mitch Pacwa.

And during my opening remarks, I brought up the story of Uzzah and the Ark. And I was comparing it to the ecumenical movement, where there are people who have very good motives when they see what is happening in the world around them.

Unborn babies are being murdered. Homosexuality is being celebrated. And on and on we could go. And people with good intentions think that we should link arms with Roman Catholics and anybody that shares our morality and unite as if we are all brothers and sisters to combat these evils.

Now, I'm not saying that we should never be co-belligerent or anything like that. Obviously, every time we vote for someone that's not a Christian, we're in some way involving a friendship or a connection or the linking of arms with an unbeliever for a good cause.

But I'm talking about full-blown ecumenism, where we worship together and that kind of a thing. And I was comparing that with Uzzah because it looks like the right thing to do. But it is something that God forbids.

He forbids having a light connected with darkness and being unevenly yoked. And I could go on and on. And worshiping with people who reject the gospel. But anyway, I don't know if you see that as an analogy, but I saw it when I said it.

And it's exceptionally important for us to recognize that we can't—and you are right, you have to be careful of our association, because if we're not obeying in the right way, we're not obeying at all.

I think about, let me see, in 1 Corinthians 11 .27, we hear of, "...whoever eats the bread and drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner shall be guilty of the body and of the blood of the Lord.".

And Paul in that passage lays out some very important ways, if you're going to participate in the bread and the cup, you need to do it the right way. 1 Corinthians 13, a very familiar passage. Do we recognize the fact that the first three verses explain people doing the right things, but in the wrong way?

They're speaking with the tongues of men and of angels. They have the gift of prophecy. They know all mysteries and have all knowledge and have all faith. They're giving their possessions to feed the poor.

They're surrendering their bodies to be burned. Listen to that last verse. If I give all my possessions to feed the poor and I surrender my body to be burned, but do not have love, it profits me nothing.

This needs to be done the right way. So hopefully God's people are saying, okay, well, what's the right way? And obviously there are specifics to each thing that might be a right way to do this and a right way to do that.

But generally speaking, there are three main concepts that need to be considered. And when I teach children, I find that these three words are very easy to remember. They may seem a little bit too immature, childish for perhaps your show, but I find that it works really well.

I got these three words from Patch the Pirate and from Rand Hummel, two men I greatly respect. But the three words are this, quickly, sweetly, and completely. And I think most of us have heard a version of these three things.

You can really say it any way you want, but let's go through them really quickly. The quickly one is this idea behind this concept is that you need to do what you're told within the time constraints given by the authority.

That could be like, do this right now. This paper needs to be turned in on Thursday, right? God often commanded his people to do something on a certain day or by a certain time. And if they didn't do it within the time constraints given to them, there are consequences.

They sinned, right? The Lord was not pleased by it. The second one is sweetly. And this one is interesting. Most authorities really don't have a problem attaching a timeframe to their instructions. Teachers, parents, bosses, they're like, get this done by Saturday, right?

However, they rarely express a desire for the individual's attitude while doing what they were told. Imagine your boss at work being like, all right, guys, we had all these pallets moved from over there to over there.

And I want to see some good attitudes on your faces, no grumbling, right? We don't really expect that from our bosses. And I'm not saying that parents never have an expectation for their kids, but I just find it that many authorities seem to be fine with just outward conformity in spite of the fact that the individual they're talking to clearly hates doing what they've been told to do.

This is true of children and adults. It's that old example of a child who, after being asked to take a seat, said, I'm sitting on the outside, but I'm standing on the inside. That's not obedience. However, biblically speaking, how do we define this idea of sweetness?

Well, I like to go to this. We are commanded all throughout scripture, and I will have verses, lots of passages referenced. If you go to truthloveparent .com forward slash iron, you know, I'll have a bunch of references there for each of these, but we're commanded to be peaceful, content, joyful, and thankful.

We are commanded to obey that way. If I am not at peace, if I'm not content, if I'm not joyful, if I'm not grateful in the situation, I am sinning because I'm commanded to do the right things in the right ways.

So we have to obey quickly, sweetly, and the last one is completely partial obedience is no obedience. You think about AI, right? They didn't. One person, one person out of the entire congregation of Israel didn't obey completely, and everyone bore the responsibility of that.

Men died in the battle with AI because of what Achan had done. We also see in 1 Samuel 15, Saul lost the kingship. It was stripped from his family.

Why?

Because he obeyed partially. He didn't kill all of the animals. He didn't kill the king of Amalek, right? He did most of what he was told to do, but he didn't do all of it. He disobeyed. Now, here's the thing.

Most authorities have no problem recognizing this when they're talking about somebody else, especially parents with their kids. Really, the kid has a bad attitude, or they're not doing the right thing, and man, oh, man, we see it.

But I tell you what, we are so hypocritical for ourselves. I have met adults who try to justify their bad attitude in their obedience. I'm just doing the right thing. It's like, wow, do you hear yourself?

Do you recognize that you would not accept such a statement from your children or from your employees? You have some cashier who's supposed to be really sweet and give good customer service, and yeah, they might be bringing everything up the right way, but if they're doing it with this really jerk attitude, unless they work at Debevix or something like that in Chicago, but if they're doing it with a terrible attitude, the employer's not okay with that.

We followers of Christ, we have to acknowledge that if we are not being peaceful, content, joyful, thankful, all the other things that God commands, we're not really obeying because we're not obeying the right way.

In fact, we'll pick up right where you left off because we have to go to our first break. Again, if anybody has a question for A .M. Brewster, our email address is ChrisArnzen at gmail .com, C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N at gmail .com.

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