Motivating Obedience

By Mark Lauterbach @ http://mrlauterbach.typepad.com/gospeldrivenlife/2006/11/peter_and_gospe_1.html#more

How do you motivate people to obedience? Is it rooted in faith toward Christ or in moralistic, self-improvement? Do you give people hope or do they leave feeling heavy hearted? Peter has a great deal to teach us in his method and perspective.

God be merciful to me and the people to whom I have preached for years. I wish I could go back and erase so many sermons (and even so many exhortations to my children -- but I would do the same again in the same circumstances). My preaching and parenting and counseling were so often telling people to do something -- and to do the right thing. "Do this. Work on this. Stop it!" It has been a list of commands, rooted in Scripture. But my exhortations have not been blood stained, rooted in the Gospel.

God began to change me years ago -- that story is attached to one of my earliest blogs. And I keep wondering how I missed it, for the NT is anything but moralistic. A friend of mine used to say there is NOTHING distinctive about the ethics of the NT compared to the moral philosophers of the day -- what is distinctive is the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Peter is a lead example in this. After setting their suffering into the story of the Gospel in 1:1-12, he turns to a series of commands. But they are not the commands I would give nor the way I would give them. From 1:13-2:10 there are five commands.

That, in itself, makes me ask: How much time does it take to give five commands? Why so many sentences to tell people what to do?

Then I look at the commands and I am more baffled: here they are:

1. fix your hope
2. be holy
3. live in fear
4. love from the heart
5. be hungry

What????!!!!

They address the heart, not their hands. He is leading them to heart godliness, not just behavioral modification. He takes so much time doing so because the commands are rooted in Gospel realities and the Gospel story. They are applications of the Gospel (not just commands).

1. Fix your hope of the end of the story -- the revealing of Jesus at the end of the age. That is now your story.
2. You were ignorant and in bondage -- the holy God called you to himself -- live in light of his gracious calling.
3. You were rescued from everlasting ruin by the blood of Christ -- this is not a trivial matter, but glorious and infinitely significant -- its cost the blood of God's Son, it was determined to happen in eternity past -- live in wondrous fear and trembling that you came so close to hell.
4. You have been born of everlasting seed -- into the family of God which will last forever -- you have been made part of that family and by the Spirit you love each other -- do not let that love become hypocritical, love from the heart and intensely.
5. Your conversion is not some moralistic reform, it is tasting God himself by the new birth -- remove those things that corrupt that new life and be hungry for God.

Then he goes on with no further commands until 2:11. He tells them again of their part in God's great purposes in making his dwelling with man, his people as his temple through Christ; his people as priests before Him.

He wants them to live by faith in the finished work of Christ. He knows that mere commands do not give hope. He is not opposed to specific obedience. He is opposed to self-sufficient obedience.

This takes me back to this point in Gospel-centrality. The Gospel is not the entry to the Christian life -- it is all of the Christian life. It is not the ABC's but the A to Z (to quote Keller). I can find no other NT method or model for ministry. I find myself asking this -- do I lead my people and my family and myself FIRST in fresh faith toward the Savior and all that he has won; and only SECOND to the specifics of application?