Mary's Extraordinary Obedience

A teenage girl. A virgin. A supernatural pregnancy. A scandal brewing.

The gospels tell us that Mary was greatly troubled at the news Gabriel brought. And how could she not be? Her whole life was about to be turned upside down!

But what follows those feelings are simple faith and simple obedience. She didn’t have all the details, and what details she did have probably didn’t make a lot of sense. But Mary showed extraordinary obedience in the craziest moment in her life.

Obedience feels passe in today’s culture. Maybe we expect little kids to obey—and dogs, of course. But we're hesitant to ask even older children to obey their parents. Forget about students to teachers, parishioners to pastors, or citizens to cops. Our culture is skeptical of authority figures, and we prize our autonomy. We equate autonomy with freedom. And no one better dare restrict our freedom!

This is not a message on the need for us to go back to the good old days of blindly and mindlessly following our authority figures. It’s important for us to know why we do things, and it's vital to evaluate the character and motives of those asking for our obedience. It’s also good to ask the Lord to refine our motivations. We can't (and shouldn’t) live only out of duty. Our affections need to be transformed, as well as our actions. Delight in Jesus should motivate our lives of faithfulness.

But God's call for us to obey him remains clear—and, if we're honest, that often rubs us the wrong way. We want to do what we want. We want to obey God when we feel like it. If obedience to God makes us feel uncomfortable, then we think perhaps God is not asking us to obey that particular commandment, or perhaps God is asking too much of us. It's almost like we are giving God a boundaries talk. “Here are my boundaries, God. I’m not comfortable with doing X or doing Y.”

Boundaries are good. God created boundaries when He created all things and when He gave the 10 commandments. Many of us need to learn to have boundaries. Some of us are doing too much and being responsible for things we aren’t called to be. But the goodness of boundaries has to be held in tension with God's call upon our lives to His purposes and to His commands. Chief among them is always the call to love, the call to be others-centered.

“I am the Lord’s servant,” Mary answered. “May your word to me be fulfilled.” Mary’s words show incredible simple faith and obedience. I don’t know if she felt up for what God was calling her to. I don’t know if she was delighting in God and His call. But her faith moved her to say, “I am the Lord’s servant.” Her faith, however small or incomplete, led to obedience. How many simple situations do we find ourselves in, on a daily basis, where God would be delighted in us saying, “I am the Lord's servant”?

Following Jesus is not as straightforward as just doing things out of duty or delight. Our lives are too complicated. We are always seesawing between mixed motivations when following Jesus and serving God. But we should be inspired and convicted by Mary’s counter-cultural example of simple faith in God and simple obedience to God. I think it is time for us to consider individually if we have prized too much our culture’s value of freedom as defined by autonomy. We need to allow God’s biblical culture to form us rather than the world’s culture. The world tells us we are free to do what we want. God tells us we are free to love God and neighbor. The world tells us we are free to be whatever we want to be. God tells us we are free to become more and more like Christ.

We like to think that if the angel Gabriel came to us with such a magnificent task, we would heartily say “yes!” to the Lord. We like to think we would rise to the occasion. And while that's certainly possible, it will most likely depend on our habits of small, daily faithfulness. We tend to act out of the the sum of our everyday rhythms and decisions. Our track record of faith decisions often predicts how we will respond next. Faith-driven decisions in the little moments add up to the possibility of a faith-filled decision in the big moment. Faith takes practice; it's a muscle we have to exercise and build up.

And if we believe the gospel, our obedience should be deeply connected to our relationship to God. We know our obedience doesn’t earn us God’s love or earn us a good life. We obey God, by faith, trusting that as we respond to his sacrificial love with obedience, what we receive in Him is far greater than anything else.

What are the little decisions where God is calling you to show faithful obedience to Him? Even when you don’t feel like it. Even when you’re not comfortable. Even when it restricts your freedom. Loving people well always involves restricting our freedom in some way because deeper love is always sacrificial. God is love. Jesus, the Son of God, restricted his freedom by putting on flesh to live among us. Jesus restricted his freedom by living in this sin-soaked world. Jesus restricted his freedom by dying on the cross for the sins of the world. Jesus wasn’t comfortable living in this world, and he surely wasn’t comfortable on the cross. But Christ showed simple faith in the plan He made with the Father, and he showed simple obedience to God’s laws again and again in every little decision, in every moment of his life. Jesus lived the life of a suffering servant. His sacrifice and His righteousness is reckoned as ours. That’s our freedom and our power.

May the Lord empower us in Christ for the daily decisions and actions of faith, so that we can say with Mary, “I am the Lord’s servant. May your word to me be fulfilled.”