Adventists know how to talk about obedience. We are fluent in it. We have inherited a vocabulary shaped by commandment-keeping, faithfulness under pressure, and clarity in a confused world. Obedience, for us, is not an abstract ideal. It is a marker of identity. It tells us who we are and, just as importantly, who we are not.
From the beginning, we have believed that obedience matters most when it costs something. Cheap obedience has never impressed us. We admire sacrifice. We tell stories of those who stood firm when standing firm was dangerous. We teach our children that faithfulness is proven under strain, not comfort. In our imagination, obedience is almost always heroic—clean, decisive, unmistakable.
And yet, most obedience is lived far from those heroic moments.
Most obedience happens quietly, inside systems already in place, under assumptions we rarely question. It unfolds within economic realities, institutional expectations, immigration status, family obligation, and limited choice. It happens where faith meets survival. And it is here—long before crisis language or end-time rhetoric—that obedience begins to take shape.
We tend to assume obedience is evenly distributed, that its cost is shared equally, that clarity applies the same way to everyone. But lived faith has a way of exposing something else: obedience is not only about what is required, but about who is required to pay for it.
This is where discomfort enters.
Because as a church, we have become very good at identifying obedience in principle, and far less practiced at examining how obedience functions in real life. We speak confidently about where lines must be drawn, yet we rarely linger over who stands closest to those lines and who stands safely behind them. We assume obedience is neutral. Scripture suggests otherwise.
The language of faithfulness has a way of sounding clean when it remains theoretical. But once obedience steps into the lived world—into employment, immigration, poverty, health, and power—it stops behaving like an idea and starts behaving like a burden. And burdens are never carried equally.
This is not a denial of truth. It is a question about how truth travels.
Does obedience move downward, toward those with the least margin?
Or does it remain most demanding precisely where resistance is hardest and support is thinnest?
We rarely ask that question out loud. Perhaps because asking it forces us to confront an uncomfortable possibility: that our clarity may be consistent, our counsel sincere—and still uneven in its cost.
We are not strangers to counsel. We value it. We quote it. We preserve it. But counsel, once spoken, must still pass through real lives. And real lives are never symmetrical. Some have options. Some do not. Some can absorb consequence. Some cannot. When obedience is demanded without regard for that difference, faithfulness begins to feel less like discipleship and more like distance.
This is not yet an argument. It is an observation.
Before obedience becomes a test of loyalty, it is first a lived experience. And it is there—in that lived space—that the true weight of our convictions is revealed.
---000--- The Uneven Weight of Faithfulness
If obedience were merely a matter of conviction, it would be simple. Conviction can be asserted. It can be defended. It can be admired. But obedience is never lived in a vacuum. It is lived inside constraints—economic, social, legal, institutional—most of which we did not choose and cannot easily escape.
We often speak as though obedience presents itself equally to everyone, as though faithfulness stands before us as a single clear option, waiting only for courage. But lived experience tells a different story. Obedience arrives differently depending on where a person stands. It presses harder on some than on others. It costs more in places where alternatives are scarce and protections thin.
And yet, when we speak of obedience, we rarely acknowledge this unevenness. We talk as though the demand itself is the same, regardless of who receives it. We comfort ourselves with the idea that truth is impartial. That principle does not bend. That obedience must not be negotiated.
There is something admirable in that instinct. But there is also something incomplete.
Because while truth may be impartial, its consequences are not.
Some believers encounter obedience as a call to adjust priorities. Others encounter it as a demand that rearranges entire lives. Some can absorb loss. Others cannot. Some will be praised for their sacrifice. Others will disappear quietly, carrying the weight alone.
The language of obedience does not usually distinguish between these realities. It treats cost as incidental, as though faithfulness itself somehow equalizes the burden. But faithfulness does not erase disparity. It exposes it.
This is where many of us grow uneasy—not because truth is threatened, but because our moral confidence is. It is one thing to affirm obedience in the abstract. It is another to sit with what obedience requires of people who have no margin, no leverage, and no audience.
We do not lack examples of heroic faith. What we lack is patience with ordinary faith under unequal pressure. We admire sacrifice when it is dramatic, when it can be named and remembered. We are less comfortable with sacrifice that unfolds quietly, without recognition, without resolution.
And perhaps that is because lingering there forces a harder question—one we would rather not ask:
Not whether obedience matters,
but whether we have been honest about who obedience has been costing.
This is not an accusation. It is a reckoning.
Because once obedience steps out of theory and into lived reality, it begins to reveal something about us—not only what we believe, but what we have learned to tolerate. It shows us where we are willing to insist on clarity and where we have learned to live with ambiguity. It exposes the places where we demand consistency and the places where we quietly allow exception.
And it raises a question that will not stay theoretical for long.
---000--- When Obedience Finds a Body
Some years ago, while pastoring in the Gulf region, a man began attending a small home church in Ras al-Khaimah in the United Arab Emirates. He was not searching for an argument. He was not trying to resolve a theological puzzle. He was working.
His family had sacrificed for years to send him abroad. What he earned was not surplus income; it was survival. His job was modest and repetitive. Each night he stood at a security post at a large import–export dock, raising and lowering a barrier that controlled truck traffic into a restricted zone. Perhaps eight trucks passed through his post on a given night. He was a guard, not a decision-maker. A functionary in a vast system he did not control.
He heard the gospel.
He responded to it.
And in time, he asked to be baptized.
Only then did obedience acquire weight.
His employment required Sabbath work. There was no flexible scheduling. No alternative shift. No accommodation built into the system. In that part of the world, employment is not negotiated; it is accepted or lost. Losing the job would not merely affect him. It would reverberate backward—into his family, his village, the fragile network that depended on his income.
I wanted to baptize him.
I believed he was sincere. I believed his faith was genuine. And I believed that obedience mattered. So I did what I had been trained to do. I sought counsel. I asked leadership how faithfulness should be understood in this case.
The answer was not hesitant. It was clear.
He would need to take a stand.
He would need to give up his employment.
There was no malice in the counsel. No cruelty. It was offered sincerely, rooted in conviction, consistent with how obedience had been defined. And I accepted it. I did not argue. I did not appeal. I did not attempt to reinterpret.
I accepted the counsel.
And that is where the story becomes difficult—not because the principle was unclear, but because of where its weight landed.
In another context—one we all recognize—this same issue would not have carried the same consequence. In North America, if a security guard working for one of our Adventist institutions faced Sabbath employment, accommodation would have been sought. Policy would have flexed. Employment would likely have continued. Faithfulness would have been affirmed without dismantling a life.
But this was not that context.
Here, obedience meant resignation. It meant unemployment. It meant returning home without the income his family depended on. It meant consequences that no committee would share and no institution would absorb.
The clarity was the same.
The cost was not.
I do not recount this story to provoke sympathy or to resolve it. I recount it because it refuses to settle into abstraction. It forces obedience to take on a body, a location, an economic reality. It refuses to remain a clean principle.
And it raises a question that lingers far longer than the story itself:
Was obedience clarified—or was it transferred?
That question haunted me even more because of what surrounded it.
At the same time, I was pastoring a larger Adventist congregation in Kuwait. The majority of the church worked in medical and support fields. On Sabbaths, it was not unusual for nearly half the congregation to slip out around midday—nurses, technicians, attendants, janitors—heading to afternoon or evening shifts in hospitals that did not close.
Their work was understood. Their necessity was acknowledged. Their faithfulness was not questioned.
We did not ask them to resign.
We did not place their baptism in doubt.
We did not frame their obedience as incomplete.
This was not hypocrisy. It was normal life.
And that is precisely why it is unsettling.
In both cases, people sought to be faithful. In both cases, Sabbath stood at the center. In both cases, the church responded sincerely. But obedience, as it was interpreted, settled very differently depending on who carried it.
No one set out to create this disparity. It emerged naturally, quietly, through systems we already trusted. And perhaps that is why it is so difficult to name.
Because when obedience is defined far from the lives it will most affect, clarity feels righteous. When it is lived close up, clarity acquires weight. And weight, once felt, changes how truth is carried.
I am not arguing that obedience should be abandoned, diluted, or negotiated away. I am asking something more uncomfortable: whether we have been willing to remain close enough to the lives of those who bear its heaviest cost.
Obedience does not fail when it costs something.
It fails when its cost is invisible to those who insist upon it.
And once that realization enters the room, it does not leave easily.
---000--- The Comfort of Uneven Faithfulness
What made that experience so difficult was not only the story itself, but how easily it fit alongside everything else we already accepted as normal. Nothing about it required a dramatic rethinking of our systems. Nothing about it disrupted our sense of identity. Life went on. Ministry continued. The church functioned.
And that, perhaps, is the deeper unease.
Because the truth is that we have learned how to live quite comfortably with uneven faithfulness—as long as the unevenness works in our favor.
We know how to insist on obedience when it costs little of us. We know how to speak clearly when clarity does not threaten our institutions, our employment, our immigration status, or our social standing. We have developed a quiet skill for distinguishing between obedience that is essential and obedience that is aspirational—between what must be enforced and what can be absorbed.
We do this without malice. We do it pragmatically. Often, we do it without even noticing.
We take pride in being a peculiar people, and in many ways that pride is understandable. We eat differently. We live longer. We avoid certain excesses common in a broken world. These distinctions are measurable. They benefit us. They are easily defended. And we often treat them as evidence of faithfulness.
But I find myself struggling to understand the spiritual weight of distinctions that primarily improve our own outcomes.
Living seven years longer than the average population in a world of sin may be a public health success. I am not sure it is a compelling expression of the gospel. Longevity is not sanctification. Personal advantage is not mission. And peculiarity that leaves us healthier but leaves the world untouched begins to feel thin.
This is not a rejection of health. It is a question about emphasis.
Because while we celebrate distinctions that serve us well, we have also learned to tolerate the quiet erosion of those that require something of us. We have hospitals that no longer speak the Adventist health message in any meaningful way. We have schools that no longer teach—or equip—our young people in the distinctives we once insisted were essential. Counsel given to churches and pastors is often ignored, not loudly, not defiantly, but simply in practice.
And yet, our confidence remains intact.
We do not grieve these inconsistencies as threats to our identity. We rationalize them. We contextualize them. We explain them as necessary adaptations in a complex world. We tell ourselves that mission requires flexibility, that survival requires compromise, that relevance requires restraint.
All of that may be true.
But it makes the moments when obedience suddenly becomes non-negotiable stand out all the more starkly.
We have shown remarkable elasticity when institutional survival or expansion is at stake. We have learned how to accommodate contradictions when they protect systems we depend on. Entire sections of our administrative life have been devoted to managing government-funded programs whose aims sit in quiet tension with our stated identity. This was not done secretly or maliciously. It was done openly, pragmatically, efficiently—and without sustained theological unease.
And still, we remain certain about when obedience must be enforced, and on whom its cost should fall.
That certainty is what deserves examination.
Because when obedience is applied selectively—not by intent, but by outcome—it begins to reveal something about our formation. It suggests that we are more practiced at preserving identity than embodying it, more comfortable guarding boundaries than bearing burdens.
This is not apostasy. It is something subtler. It is the slow acclimation to a version of faithfulness that keeps us safe, clear, and largely untroubled.
And that is why the language of “peculiarity” can become so deceptive.
Strangeness is easy to maintain when it costs little. Holiness is not. Holiness draws near. Holiness absorbs cost. Holiness moves toward those who cannot afford clarity as easily as we can.
Which brings us, inevitably, back to Jesus.
Not yet as resolution. Not yet as comfort. But as disturbance.
Because Jesus does not seem particularly interested in preserving peculiarity for its own sake. He does not gather followers around shared habits that benefit them. He gathers them around Himself—and then sends them outward, into places where obedience cannot be abstracted from consequence.
The movement of the church, as the end draws near, will not be back toward the mountain—toward increasingly refined definitions of righteousness protected by distance. The movement of the saints will be outward, into the highways and byways, where faithfulness must be lived among people whose lives are already under strain.
That movement is not dramatic. It is costly. And it does not flatter those who have learned to live comfortably inside their distinctions.
The gospel does not ask whether we are peculiar.
It asks whether our peculiarity looks like the Lamb.
And that question does not accuse.
It waits.
---000--- The Invitation That Refuses to Be Managed
Jesus does not answer these tensions with a manifesto. He answers them with a story.
A king prepares a banquet. Everything is ready. Nothing is lacking. The invitation is sent first to those who expect it—those familiar with the language, the customs, the significance of the moment. But they decline. Not in outrage. Not in rebellion. They are simply occupied. Fields to inspect. Businesses to manage. Lives already arranged.
So the king does something unsettling.
He does not revise the menu.
He does not delay the feast.
He does not lecture the invited.
He widens the invitation.
He sends his servants into the streets and lanes, then farther still—to the highways and the byways. He tells them to bring in those who were never planning to attend, those without preparation, those whose lives are already complicated and unfinished.
The urgency is not about screening the guests.
It is about filling the hall.
And when the guests arrive, the king is not preoccupied with their clothing.
He provides the robes.
This detail matters more than we often allow. The host does not delay the invitation until the guests are properly dressed. He does not demand readiness before welcome. He invites them in and then supplies what is needed. Grace precedes qualification. Mercy walks alongside truth.
The servants are not asked to manage worthiness. They are asked to go.
This is where the story presses on those entrusted with the invitation. The warning is not aimed at the poor, the unprepared, or the unexpected guests. It is aimed at those closest to the banquet, those who assumed familiarity guaranteed participation.
Being entrusted with the invitation does not mean you will sit at the table.
This is not a threat. It is a sobering clarity.
Because the danger for a peculiar people is not that they will lose their distinctiveness. It is that they will protect it so carefully that they forget why it was given. Peculiarity was never meant to be enjoyed as insulation. It was meant to be spent as witness.
The movement of the church—the movement of the saints—will not be back to the mountain, where clarity can be preserved at a distance. It will be outward, onto the road, where obedience cannot be separated from human cost, where truth must travel with mercy or not travel at all.
Jesus does not appear in this story as an auditor of garments. He appears as a host determined that the house be full. His concern is not that everyone arrives ready, but that no one is left outside because readiness was demanded before welcome.
This does not lower the call to faithfulness. It raises it.
Because faithfulness, in the end, is not measured by how cleanly we define obedience, but by how closely we stay to the lives that obedience will most affect. It is not proven by distinctions that benefit us, but by proximity to those for whom obedience costs something real.
God never intended truth to be carried alone.
It was always meant to walk alongside mercy.
And so the question that remains is not whether we are peculiar enough, clear enough, or distinct enough. The question is quieter, and harder to escape:
When the invitation is given,
when the road grows crowded,
when the cost is uneven and the consequences real—
where are we standing?
The king is not waiting for an answer.
The banquet is prepared.
The robes are provided.
The door remains open.
