What Does it Mean to Obey?...Continued from page 1

Nicole Mahaney Whitacre

Most teenagers simply don’t have a hunger for wisdom. In fact, most think they are much wiser than they actually are, and they mistakenly believe that their parents have little practical insight to offer. They tend to think that their parents “don’t really understand” or are “pretty much out of it.” Yet most teenagers sorely lack wisdom and desperately need loving, biblical, and faithfully dispensed correction.¹

Let’s face the facts. We young women are seriously lacking in the wisdom department. This should cause us to be humble. It should also transform our perspective of our mother’s authority. She probably knows a lot more than we think she does. In fact, she’s been endowed with wisdom from God to lead us in His ways. So we should get excited about obedience! Obedience is thrilling because through our mom we can get wisdom and guidance from God. Pretty radical stuff, this obedience, isn’t it?

And faith for Mom’s authority affects our response when we don’t agree with her decisions or even if she makes a mistake. Of course, we are never to obey her if she tells us to sin. (If you and your parents are not in agreement as to whether their counsel is biblical or wise, we encourage you to seek help from a pastor together.) However, most often it’s that we don’t want to do something she requires, or we want to do something she forbids. We tend to think Mom is ruining our life, or at least our chances for fun by withholding her permission. Or we worry that obeying her will result in an unfavorable outcome for us.

In Janelle’s case, she worried that in confronting Mike she would lose his friendship and approval. But faith for Mom’s wisdom and authority made all the difference for Janelle. And faith for your mom’s authority can make that difference for you too. Because you know that God has established your parents’ authority, you can have every confidence that He will honor your obedience and cause all things to work for your good.  “For those who love God all things work together for good”(Rom. 8:28).

In fact, obedience is all about good stuff. God didn’t establish our mom’s authority to make our lives miserable. He pu

t her in charge so we could receive the joy, peace, protection, and happiness that come from walking in God’s ways and doing His will. Obedience keeps us within what Tedd Tripp calls the “circle of great blessing.”2 There is security in obedience because we know that God’s ways are perfectly safe. There is joy and peace because we know that He Himself is guiding us, and we are happy because we are pleasing God.

These blessings are ours if we choose to live a life of obedience. In Deuteronomy 28, after giving many commands to the Israelites, God takes fourteen verses to lay out the immense blessings of obedience. Here is a sampling:

And if you faithfully obey the voice of the LORD your God, being careful to do all his commandments that I command you today . . . all these blessings shall come upon you and overtake you. . . . Blessed shall you be in the city, and blessed shall you be in the field. . . . Blessed shall you be when you come in, and blessed shall you be when you go out. . . . The LORD will command the blessing on you . . . in all that you undertake. . . . And the LORD will make you abound in prosperity. . . . The LORD will open to you his good treasury, the heavens, to give the rain to your land in its season and to bless all the work of your hands. . . . And the LORD will make you the head and not the tail, and you shall only go up and not down, if you obey the commandments of the LORD your God, which I command you today, being careful to do them. . . . (Deut. 28:1-14)

Wow! God’s blessings for obedience are nothing short of spectacular!

Yet each time we choose to disobey, we are essentially tossing these blessings in the trash can. “No thanks,” we say. “I would rather have my own way than experience the goodness of God.” By rejecting God’s blessings, we may be thinking that independence is more fun or that true freedom is doing what we want to do. But those ideas are only illusions. Pastor and author John Piper vividly illustrates this point when he writes: