Obedience

My thoughts on this are kinda forming as I type them, so don't expect anything terribly polished and coherent. It is, oddly, very emotional.  Very.

  I read Psalm 119 the other day.  The one we Sunday school children would joke about being asked to memorize.  Because it was way too long.  

  We had to memorize chunks of the bible.  Whole short chapters and such.  We had to do that, and we didn't mind.  But some memory tasks would have been too hard.  Like memorizing Psalm 119.  I'm sure someone somewhere did it.  But that would have been pretty impressive.  It's pages long.

  My problem with Psalm 119 the other day, though (and I did have a problem with it) wasn't that it was too long.  It was that I was reading it in the ESV translation, and it kept saying stuff about "rules."  The KJV tends more toward words like "statutes."  And "Rules" was a word that brought back my childhood all too vividly and made me unable to read it properly.  Rules.  Church rules.  No Star Wars figures.  No television or movies. No running, swimming, sports, games or novels on Sunday.  No sneakers or jeans, shirts with stripes, pictures or patterns on them, worn to Thursday night bible study.  Church five times a week no matter what.  No being alone anywhere with a girl.  Avoiding "every appearance of evil." (which should have been translated "every form/guise of evil", limiting it only to things that actually were evil, rather than anything the person in the church with the dirtiest mind could imagine being a tiny bit evil.)  Because we "generated" our own rules, as kids.  We knew what would be a rule, and we came up with it in advance.  If we didn't, we were still punished. It was pretty easy.  Rules were there to limit happiness.  To bridle and stamp out unbridled joy.

  So the other day I had to think about Psalm 119.  It was all "You've got the best rules.  I love your rules, so bless me.  The wicked people don't love them like I do, so kill 'em.  You've got the best rules.  Really."
  I saw some stuff on the Brethren Believers Uncensored Facebook forum about obedience.  Asked Mark and Dave stuff about Psalm 119.  And I'm still thinking about it a bit.

Rules

Unlike in my church, the rules, laws, statutes, commandments, instruction, teaching, decrees and "ways" of God weren't written to primarily deal merely with how things looked.  They weren't followed to make people fit in at church.  They weren't followed to "be a good testimony" to people looking on, for the benefit of grouchy, old folk at church with hearts two sizes too small, who'd be lucky to spell "love" correctly, as it was a four-letter word.  The rules God passed on were very different.

  The family rules, the church rules, were legion.  Limitless.  Any new freedom or technology or entertainment sensation spawned a whole new clutch of them.  And they were ones you had to "just know."  It wasn't like church people were willing to write them down, and certainly not discuss them.  I tried.  These rules added up to something.  They created an entire church lifestyle.  And it was a life "style."  Made you look and behave a certain identifiable way.  And the rules were accomplishing something no one was really willing to admit: they were to keep us from embarrassing our family and church by not looking as pious as other parents' and churches' kids.  

  I mean, one guy wasn't allowed to join our church because he was having trouble paying his alimony.  He was trying to pay it, but he warned us that he couldn't always pay it.  And we shut him out when he wanted to worship God, as this would be "unseemly."  Translation: it would make the church look bad.  We wanted no part of that.  So we shut the door on him.  He wasn't breaking a rule (she'd divorced him).  He was doing what he could.  But he was a threat to how we looked.  We were trying to look "seemly."  Not that we actually were, judging by how we treated others, and what our motives were. It was all about competitively looking good.  Like the Miss America Pageant, only more superficial and less spiritual.  With no talent portion.

  What the family rules and church rules were NOT, was designed for our health and learning and benefit.  I mean, the vast majority of them were entirely about us looking pious, as I have already said.  And embarrassingly often, we'd find ourselves in situations where how things looked and how things actually were no longer were the same thing.  We'd have to decide to choose between doing something good, or following a rule instead.  And we'd have to go with how things looked every time.  It looked bad to break rules.  Even if the rules were making you do bad stuff, or stopping you from doing something necessary.

  Because we lived almost entirely for how things looked.  We were raised to be actors, enacting little morality plays, rather than being God's beloved children growing and learning and loving and living actual lives.  Jesus called the Pharisees "hypokrites" for living like this.  He didn't mean they "said one thing and did another."  He meant they lived for how things looked to others.  To seem pious.  Like actors.  As if God is pleased by us impressing one another with how devout we seem.  The bible is very clear that God doesn't even listen to people who are playing that game. Not even when they pray prayers of pious thanks.

  Jesus didn't play that game when he lived down here.  He didn't care about "giving the wrong impression."  At all.  He didn't even care enough to avoid getting a reputation as someone who hung out with drunks and women of ill repute. He knew what he was doing.  If no one else did, that was their problem. He was living his life.  Oddly, obeying God the Father, and meeting the expectations of pious folks were often opposite things.  Meeting the expectations of pious folks probably would have resulted in him living a long, safe, careful, explicable life.

Obeying God

I'd always been taught that it was very important to obey God.  I'd also somehow been taught, without quite hearing it in a single sentence, that if any of us ever did anything that anyone at the church found at all unexpected or unusual, this was clear evidence of self-will, of disobedience to God, of waywardness and lawlessness. Rebellion. Worldliness.  You could be godly (a good church kid) or worldly (like anyone outside our church, including any other Christian group).

  I'd also been taught that every man shall give account of himself to God, one day, for his life.  Will actually stand before God and answer for it.  When I was twenty-five, I was driving in my car and I realized that if I gave my accounting for my life, I was mainly going to have to say "Well, I did that, and that, that and that, and I didn't do that, this, those or that, purely because of what church people expected of me. It wasn't exactly my own decision.  I just did what they expected." Jesus didn't live like that. Jesus wouldn't live like that.

  I realized that, although I was driving my own car, that I wasn't driving my own life.  And I had the chilling realization that this church, which unfairly "silenced" my dad, kicked out 60% of its own population in a "division" and was generally weird, unloving and out of touch with most of the fruit of the Spirit, while shamelessly, proudly manifesting many of the fruit of the flesh, was driving my life down a very dark road.  And that I increasingly saw God as Someone with different priorities, and that I'd have to answer to Him one day.

  So I realized that I couldn't obey God simply by meeting church expectations.  I realized that those  differed from God, sometimes, just like with any human system.  And I realized I needed to take control of and responsibility for my own life and my own decisions.
  And so I did.  For the first time in my life, I was able to follow God, unencumbered by the thoughts of human beings.  God is, to say the least, far more creative, unpredictable, funny and unexpected than the church folk had been.  It was awesome.

  They were already shunning me by that point, kicked me out less than three years later and soon thereafter stopped taking my calls or returning my written correspondence and emails.
  It really does seem that what and who they cannot control, they pretend simply does not exist.

Liberty

But I got liberty.  The liberty Christ died to get me.  I didn't do a whole lot of odd things with it, but it was a new and challenging feeling to realize that I was now making my decisions for God, and could screw them up, and if it didn't go well, I was no longer going to be able to say to God "the church which Thou gavest me, IT told me to do this stuff (and not do that other stuff)."

  A bunch of us got this liberty.  We weren't "supposed" to have it, and we weren't raised or instructed or prepared to know how to deal with it, either.  At all.  We had to fight through shame to get at our own lives.  And we ran with them like we'd stolen them.  Some got addicted to things.  Some lived extremely lawlessly.  A couple died.

  The missing piece is, I think upon reflection, that we were supposed to keep sight of a fact: we were getting free from the traditional church shame/control/fear culture of competitive piety, of How Things Look, and What People Might Think, purely to follow God.  Freedom for freedom's own sake was reason enough to get it, but there was more for us.  We'd feel free, but empty until we went after God for it.

Following God

I'm comfortable with the idea of following God.  I like the idea of Him having ways/paths/tao for me to walk in because they end up with me being someone useful, somewhere good. I like the idea of growing and exploring and getting more wisdom and experience, courage and discretion.  I like the idea of being taken along on an adventure.  On  a life.  But the word "rules" (and "laws" and similar) don't sound to me like that's in store.  So I've been following/walking with/hanging out with God.  And it's much, much better than the church shame culture.

  But when I look in the bible, I see the word "rules."  And I think of it all wrong. With what Dave calls "distortion."  There are rules if you go on a roller coaster.  There are rules for bars and rock concerts and even wars.  But I'm never thinking that way, usually, when I hear the word.  "Rules" just means "No. Not for you. Not in my house.  What would people think?"

  When I trip over the word "rules," I think of something arbitrary, and obstacle put in place so that anyone fool enough to follow it will lose important joy and freedom, while those who break it will scamper about, having fun with relative impunity. Like at my church.  It's possible to worship a lifestyle built of rules, and leave God pretty much out of that. I know, because we did that.

  I kept the rules.  Made me feel like a sap. The guys who broke them are all youth pastors and missionaries and other important church folk today, if they are into that.  All they had to do was say they were very, very wrong to have broken those unwritten, "understood to be binding" church rules, and are done with that, now that they've milked the experience for all its worth.
  And of course they have to avoid getting caught re-indulging.  But it they do, they just need to give talks about how dangerous whatever it was, is.  And warn how wrong it is, and tell how appealing it seemed to them, but how much better they feel now, standing up in front of people demanding their attention.  But I also know people who "lead" their rule-buttressed churches, yet are breaking every church rule there is. The kinds of rules I kept.  They just need to never question the rules, if they want to secretly break them.  Questioning them is to question some people's anti-pleasure god.  The one they sacrifice their kids to.

  I am not a youth pastor.  No one has ever asked me to speak at their church.  The difference is that I did the unthinkable: I kept the rules and learned that a heart full of rules and no love makes you want to die.  And is dead.  Because there is no God in it.
  Eventually I decided that I was going to break some of the rules everyone else seemed to be breaking.  Thing is, I didn't hide it or lie about it or deceive about it. If I thought a rule was dumb, limiting, pointless or bad, I was going to ignore it.  And I announced that I was doing it and thought it was perfectly okay.
  Well, they couldn't have that sort of thing going on.  That's not how it's done.  You can break the rules.  Just don't question them.

  But I was trying to follow God.  And I knew right well that "following" requires freedom to go around and do things.  To leave the playpen.  The greenhouse.  And church was always and only about not doing things.  We didn't even really do any evangelism in my church.

  From time to time I meet people who I can tell are following God, rather than jamming their head so far up their church they can't see the sun.  And I am overwhelmed by them. They are real, they are alive, and they know about liberty and love alike.

God's Authority

My church and my dad heavily limited my freedom and their only role in our lives, most months, was that they imposed rules that made them look powerful and in control of us.   The rules weren't for my benefit.  And they didn't make sense, often.  I could read piles of comics at people's houses who "let their kids have comics," so long as everyone knew that my parents didn't let us kids have them. It wasn't my reading them that was the concern. It was my parents possibly being seen to allow them that was the reason for the rule.  Why I couldn't have them.
  And obviously, the happier I seemed to be to follow more and more rules, and the more pious I seemed, the better they looked.  "Freedom is Slavery" George Orwell would have put it.  Smiling, singing slaves are the best slaves.

  But the rules in the bible are very different.  They are love.  Jesus summed up the "ten commandments" entirely in:

love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your mind

and

love your neighbour as yourself

  That's it.  Love.  Well, I was raised to hate myself, by people I could tell didn't like me much, and were desperate to control, crush, stunt and deform what potential God had built into me.  I wasn't raised to love.  I wasn't raised to look at my neighbour and approve and accept.  Instead, I was raised to continually contrast myself with my neighbours, who didn't go to our (the only right) church.  There was "us" and there was "them."  We were to be in all ways overtly, obviously, glaringly opposite to "them."  If there was a way we were the same, we felt uncomfortable about that, and looked to somehow contrast ourselves comfortably.  We didn't love ourselves, really.  And we didn't interact with our neighbour, really, except to step right over them to get to continue down that path of perceived superior piety.  Love wasn't a priority, any more than liberty.  We need to repent of these things.  Not just feel remorse, regret.  We need to rethink it and change inside.

  Because it's hard for a kid to love God when for him, God is church rules and Nothing Else.  No running, no laughing, no talking, no moving.  You're in church.  It's Sunday.  If you can't stop squirming or giggling, you will be spanked again, like last time.  And don't look out the window, either.  Or at Scott.  

  And so, we tried to love God, but He was rules and nothing else.  Hard to love.  We knew He had infinite authority, and we tried to obey Him/the church rules, but no amount of obedience makes you love someone.  And He wants that.  And He's worthy of it.  Because He's more than just rules designed to make Him/our parents/our church look good, no matter what it costs us.

Love

The bible says you can do any number of miraculous things, but if you don't have love (giving, accepting it), then you have nothing, and are as annoying as a cymbal someone's smashing a rock into repeatedly, beside your ear.  Just banging on and on for no good reason.

  What I'm learning, so late in my Christian life, is that God's redirections (When He does that at all.  He will let us screw things up to an absolutely terrifying degree) are to help us get somewhere good.  Because He cares.  What I'm having more trouble even believing in, is that God does anything besides limit things.  Besides blocking my path, shutting doors, locking up and generally saying "no" to everything.  A God who wants me to be wise?  Strong?  Interested? Happy?  Never.

  So long as I follow Him only because sticking with Him seems to keep me out of trouble (like Hell, and my church), it's kind of okay, a bit.  But the idea that He's going to bring about good things?  That He will bring good people, places, ideas and things into my life?  I'm grasping after that.  

  The structure (rules, laws, commandments) in the bible isn't there to make people (even God) look good.  It is to keep people from hurting themselves and each other.  And the rules in the bible aren't paranoid like the church ones were.  They are about actual danger.
  Not "Don't listen to rock music."  More "Don't kill people, lie, steal, commit adultery, swear at or about God, worship fake gods you've invented" kinds of stuff.
  The bible speaks out against stuff I really, really don't want to do anyway.  Against stuff that will hurt me and others.  (Unlike the rock music)
  And the main point of the rules in the bible is to keep us from making ourselves into someone we can't accept, nor reach out to other people, thereby torpedoing all of our relationships.  Relationships are important.  With other people. With God.  C.S. Lewis pointed out that there are very few virtues, and just as few vices that can be done "properly" when alone.  Relationship is the thing.  The "point" of salvation isn't the debt we owed or the punishment we deserved.  It was being alienated from God, who demands a relationship.  Because that's why He made Man, and that's why He made Woman.  Relationship.  Love.

  Someone who loves you "gets" you.  Knows what to get you.  Isn't about to jump out and "get" you.  That's where I'm at right now.  Learning to follow God and learn from Him because it will lead somewhere amazing, rather than somewhere quiet, safe and tidy.

    I guess it applies to all kinds of human relationships and connections.  Jobs.  Friends.  Are we trying to meet up with someone we can "be safe" with, and stay out of trouble? Or are we trying to build a relationship with someone we love because we know that with them, we will go awesome places, and grow and learn and explore and all that good stuff?Aslan's not a tame lion.  God's not boring like all of those rules were.  He doesn't lightly make rules, like we did.

  That's all I have to say about that.