The First Step Down the Path of Disobedience
As a Christian, I want to obey God. I want to live life the way He designed me to, and I want the closeness of relationship with God that comes when I am walking in obedience to God. My greatest desire is to do what He wants me to do, act how He wants me to act, and say what He wants me to say.
But desiring and doing are often two very different things. As Romans 7 puts it,
“I find then a law, that, when I would do good, evil is present with me. For I delight in the law of God after the inward man: But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members.” (v.21-23)
I am thankful that the book of Romans doesn’t end there. The truths of Romans 8 take us from the hopelessness of our own efforts to the victory Christ has already won for us. It tells us of walking in the Spirit, yielding to God and depending on Him to give us the ability to obey. Romans 7 presents the battle, Romans 8 points the way to victory.
Scripture clearly teaches that when I choose to walk in the Spirit, I will always have victory over sin, and power to obey. But when I try to do things myself, my own way, that’s when I fall into disobedience.
It really all comes down to our focus.
Take Peter, for example. In the middle of the night, in a storm-tossed boat, Peter saw Jesus walking on the water towards him. He asked Jesus to show if it was really Him by calling Peter to walk to Him on the water. Jesus told him to come, and he stepped out of the boat onto the stormy water.
I’ve often wondered if he was surprised when he didn’t sink.
Whatever his thoughts and feelings were at that first moment, we know that he kept his eyes on Jesus, and literally walked by faith towards Him.
But as he went, the wind and waves distracted him, and he took his eyes off Jesus. Immediately, he began to sink. He cried out to Jesus for help, and Jesus caught his hand, saying,
“O thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt?”(Matthew 14:31)
During a long-ago Pre-Covid Sunday School class, I jotted down this sentence the teacher used as one of his main points:
“A loss of focus is the start of disobedience.”
It really is true. The moment I shift my dependent gaze away from Christ and onto anything else, I begin to sink, just like Peter. But in His goodness, God is always there to pull me back out again!
Time and time again throughout the Bible, we see men who had been following God lose their focus and start down a road of disobedience:
Lot selfishly fixed his gaze on the well-watered plains of Jordan, and ended up an important citizen of the notoriously wicked city of Sodom. (Genesis 13-14)
Moses turned his focus onto himself and let his anger control him, leading to disobedience and blasphemous words at Meribah (Numbers 20)
Saul set his focus on prestige and disobeyed God’s command regarding the Amalekites. (1 Samuel 15)
David gazed on his neighbor’s wife and found himself committing adultery and murder. (2 Samuel 11)
But that first step isn’t the end: the reactions of each one of these people determined whether they chose to stay on the path of disobedience, or to cry out in repentance and be forgiven and restored to the path of obedience and fellowship once again. Some chose to repent, others to rebel.
We, too, are faced with that same choice. When we find ourselves wandering down a path of disobedience, we can be forgiven and restored to that place of close fellowship with God. And with God’s help, we can continue to walk in the Spirit, victoriously obedient to His will.
“For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh: That the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.” (Romans 8:3-4)