The Liberty of Obedience

And I will walk at liberty: for I seek thy precepts. PSALM 119:45

Most people assume that freedom and obedience are opposites. To be free is to do as we please; to obey is to give that freedom up. Elisabeth Elliot spent much of her teaching life arguing that this assumption is exactly backwards. The title of one of her earliest books of teaching, The Liberty of Obedience, published in 1968, states the paradox in four words. True liberty, she believed, is found only in obedience to God, and the person who refuses to obey is not free at all but enslaved to his own will, his own appetites and the opinions of others.

A book written after the forest

The Liberty of Obedience is a short book, drawn in part, it appears, from articles she had written for the Sunday School Times, and it came out of a particular moment in her life. She had returned from Ecuador a few years before, after years among Quichua and Waorani people whose ways of life were utterly unlike those of the American evangelicalism she had grown up in. Living among them had shown her how much of what she had been taught to call Christian was really cultural — habits of dress, manners and recreation that had little to do with the commands of God and a great deal to do with the customs of a particular kind of American church. At the same time it had shown her, more sharply than ever, the commands of God that do not change from one culture to another.

The book is in large part an attempt to distinguish the two. On one side she set the rules invented by men, which may be useful but which bind no conscience. On the other she set the commands of God, which bind every conscience everywhere. Much of the trouble in the churches, she suggested, comes from confusing them: holding people to man-made rules as though they were divine, and treating divine commands as though they were optional.

But in vain they do worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men. MATTHEW 15:9

Against legalism

On the first point she was a sharp critic of legalism. She had seen missionaries try to impose on new believers the customs of their home churches, and she had seen at home how easily a list of forbidden activities could stand in for holiness. She believed that a Christian who measures godliness by what he avoids has missed the heart of the matter. The kingdom of God is not food and drink, Paul said, but righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Ghost.

For the kingdom of God is not meat and drink; but righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost. ROMANS 14:17

This put her somewhat at odds with parts of the world she came from. But her book was not a call to loosen up. It was a call to take God’s commands more seriously, not less, by refusing to let man-made rules crowd them out.

Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage. GALATIANS 5:1

On the second point she was just as firm. If legalism is the error of adding to God’s commands, licence is the error of subtracting from them. The book appeared at a time when many in the wider culture, and some in the churches, were arguing that love alone was the only rule, and that any fixed moral command was a kind of bondage. She disagreed. Christian liberty, she insisted, is not freedom from God’s law but freedom for it — the freedom of a creature who has been released from sin in order to do what she was made to do.

For, brethren, ye have been called unto liberty; only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love serve one another. GALATIANS 5:13

One way to put her point is to picture a creature fulfilling its design. A train is not freer when it leaves the rails. A fish is not freer when it leaves the water. A human being, made in the image of God and for fellowship with Him, is most free when she is doing His will, and least free when she is doing her own. Disobedience feels like freedom for a moment, and then it binds.

Obedience as love

What kept her teaching on obedience from becoming grim was her conviction that obedience is the language of love. Jesus Himself made the connection: if you love Me, keep My commandments. She did not see the commands of God as arbitrary hurdles set up to test us, but as the expressed wishes of One who loves us and knows what is good for us. To obey them is to trust Him.

If ye love me, keep my commandments. JOHN 14:15

She also held, as we saw in chapter four, that obedience is the way to knowledge. The person who waits to understand before obeying will wait for ever. The person who obeys what she already knows will be given more light. This was not an abstract principle for her. She had obeyed, step by step, through years when she understood very little of what God was doing, and she believed that the understanding had come, when it came, through the obedience.

Then said Jesus to those Jews which believed on him, If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed; And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. JOHN 8:31–32

Weighing it

Her teaching here stands squarely in the line of Paul’s letters to the Galatians and the Romans, and of the Lord’s own words in John’s Gospel. The distinction between the commands of God and the traditions of men is one every generation needs to relearn. Two cautions are worth carrying.

The first is that the line between God’s commands and men’s rules is not always easy to draw, and sincere Christians draw it in different places. What one believer regards as a cultural habit another regards as a matter of conscience. Paul’s counsel in Romans 14 — that each should be fully persuaded in his own mind, and should not despise or judge the other — is the necessary companion to her teaching. She would not have disagreed, though she was more confident than most about where the line fell.

The second is that the language of obedience can be used to cover a merely external conformity. She meant something deeper: the obedience of a heart that loves God and wants His will. A person who keeps every command out of fear, without love, has not found the liberty she was describing. He has found another kind of bondage.

But whoso looketh into the perfect law of liberty, and continueth therein, he being not a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the work, this man shall be blessed in his deed. JAMES 1:25

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Where in your life does freedom feel like the opposite of obedience? Ask God to show you whether your idea of freedom is His.

2. Make two short lists: rules you keep that come from your church culture, and commands you keep that come plainly from Scripture. Notice which list is longer.

3. Is there a man-made rule by which you have been judging another Christian? Confess it, and read Romans 14.

4. Is there a plain command of God that you have been treating as optional? Name it, and take one step of obedience today.

5. Read Galatians 5 slowly, noting every mention of liberty and every mention of the flesh.

A PRAYER

Lord, You have called me to liberty, and I have often mistaken my own will for freedom.

Deliver me from the bondage of rules You never gave, and from the bondage of desires You never blessed.

Teach me that Your commandments are not grievous, and that to obey You is to walk at liberty.

Let my obedience be the obedience of love, and lead me into the freedom of the children of God, through Jesus Christ my Lord. Amen.