Now, in the book of 1 Peter, the
14th verse, 14th verse, as
obedient children, not fashioning yourselves according to the
former lusts in your 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.
Now, we break in with those words, as
obedient children, we break into, rather unceremoniously, a
long apostolic exhortation filled with words, words of
action, where he says, for instance, "'Gird up,
and hope, and be holy, and love one
another.'" Those are commands, strong commands.
Now we have, sandwiched in here, the little
phrase, as obedient children, there is no verb
in it.
And 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.
I 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.
When 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, it 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.
And what we are said to do cannot
come within the scope of our examination today.
So we're 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.
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
a 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.
It 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 the human race is, who
is boss?
It is 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.
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 is 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 twenty-three.
And you know, it's something new all the
time, and I never tried to keep up
with them.
But that was very, they'd say, Hey, and
somebody would 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 faith.
He says, 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 snares 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 twenty
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'm not in Russia, that I'm
not in China, that I'm not in East
Germany, that I'm 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.
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 is, 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 the 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 Soda, 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 hat
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, seeing
that we are moral creatures, then 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, 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.
Tennyson said something in his in-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.
Theirs, the only right we have, is to
make our wills thine.
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 is 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.
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.
Second, we are sanctified by accepting Christ as
our Lord.
Third, 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 it 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 to 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 confession is 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.
It 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 1 and 2 says that we
are elected according to the foreknowledge 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 Christ.
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 Christ, or a third of a Christ,
or a quarter of a Christ.
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'd 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.
And the next time I can go to
Bernard or 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, heal me, help me, Lord, and he
blessedly does it, and we say goodbye and
go away and leave him.
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
the 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
we 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.
And certainly we're heartbroken, certainly.
Let a man escape from the bride well,
let this man who kidnapped and killed the
innocent child escape 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.
And so sinners, sure they're heartbroken, sure they
carry a heavy load, certainly they labor and
are heavy laden, most surely.
And the Bible takes full account of that.
But that is only incidental to the fact
that the reason 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 am
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.
Now, the happiness of all the moral creatures
lies right here, in obedience to God.
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.
Very angels in heaven find their complete freedom
and replete happiness in obeying the commandments of
God, instead of following the laws of the
world and 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, that 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 they're both there.
Jesus said that they were there, that you
might endure worms and fire, but for a
moral creature to know that he's where he
is because he is a rebel, he has
no face left, no self-respect left, no
hope left, no ability left, nothing left.
So he is finding hell the world of
the disobedient.
And each person now is deciding which world
he's going to inhabit.
He's 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 sprightly
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
me.
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, and we will be
saved by him, 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 of
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.
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 don't want you to take what I
have said and 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.