Obedience Isn't Enough: What Love For God Really Looks Like - Psalm 63:3 Series

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Introduction: The Prodigal Son’s Brother

Is there anybody here who has been kind of a Prodigal Son – your story is kind of like his? You strayed for a while then came back? In my lifetime I have heard quite a few people compare themselves to the Prodigal Son. Never once, that I can remember, have I heard someone say, “I’m more like the older brother in that parable.” The main purpose of that parable is to expose the sin of the people who are like that older brother. The sad thing is the people who are like the brother usually think they are doing it the right way, and they are proud of the fact that they are not like the Prodigal. But the whole point of the parable is to show that the Prodigal (at the end of the story) is the example of the right way to obey God, and the older brother is an example of the wrong way.

Review

Today is part 9 of our study on loving God. The goal of the whole study is that we might increase our love for God, which comes through delightful, satisfying experiences of His presence. So we are focusing on how to have those. How do you have actual, literal, personal interactions with God?

And we found last week that it is different for the different members of the Trinity. We have fellowship with the Father one way, and with Jesus in a different way, and with the Holy Spirit in another way. From the Father the main thing we receive is love, from the Son we receive mainly grace, and from the Spirit we receive mainly fellowship.

2 Corinthians 13:14 May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.

So when we get all this love from God the Father, how can we respond in a way that is an act of fellowship with Him? What is unique about the way we are to interact with the Father as opposed to the Son or the Spirit? Answer: We interact with the Father with a father-child kind of relationship. And there are four basic markers of the way a child love his dad. He loves being around his dad. He trusts his dad. He fears his dad. He obeys his dad. So we have fellowship with God the Father when He expresses His love toward us and we respond by delighting in His presence, trusting in His providence and wisdom and provision, fearing Him, and by obeying Him. And that is where we left off – obedience. Obedience is the most basic responsibility of a child toward his father.

Obedience is Fellowship when it is a Delight in God’s Will

That is not to say you are automatically having fellowship with God just because you are doing something He said to do. All those years that the Prodigal was off squandering the father’s money on wild partying – what was the older brother doing?

Luke 15:29 But he answered his father, 'Look! All these years I've been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders.

He did everything his father told him to do. And yet he is the example of the wrong kind of obedience. True obedience is more than just following orders. The only true obedience is obedience that flows out of a certain kind of relationship.

This is another area where people will often reduce their relationship with God down to being like an employer/employee kind of relationship. Why does an employer want his employees to submit to his authority and do what he tells them to do? Because he needs the work to get done. If his employees don’t do the work he tells them to do then he is out of business. That is not the reason we obey God. We don’t follow His commands because He needs them followed. God does not need us to stay in business. The purpose of God’s Law is to reveal His heart. Whenever God gives a law, He is revealing His will - a desire in His heart. And we want to conform to those laws not because God needs our help, but because we love Him, and we desire to conform to His will. The more you love God the more you care about what He cares about. So we conform to the will and desires of our Father so that our heart is close to His heart.

But what do you do when your heart is not close to His? What if He points to something and says, “That’s sin – I hate that” and it is something your heart loves? Then what? Just grit your teeth and keep slaving away like the older brother? No – that is not true obedience. The true obedience was when the Prodigal finally decided that he preferred even the lowest place in his father’s house over the world.