The Liberty To Obey
How Dying To Our Agendas Frees Us to Joyfully Obey God
In recent weeks, through our sermon series on mission and Rosaria Butterfield’s book The Gospel Comes with a House Key, I’ve been struck by the clear, repeated call for Christians to die to self as we follow Christ. This “dying to self” involves an intentional, daily choice made only by the grace and aid of the Holy Spirit indwelling believers. It is not something that happens naturally. Dying to self is not something the world pursues. But as I reflect on my life, I regret that I’ve wasted many seasons either solely pursuing self, or half-heartedly relenting to God when His plans did not match my desires. My flesh avoids dying to self because I prefer comfort, ease, pleasure, and predictability. Alternatively, dying involves discomfort, struggle, pain, loss, and surrender.
Zack’s sermon on self-denial as a mark of the missional life made me consider specifically how I need to die to my own agendas. I have always held personal agendas, both for the present and the future. I schedule daily and weekly plans, expecting certain routine events, and enjoying the comfort of knowing when and where those events will occur. I fret when plans are changed last minute. My lifelong agenda has revolved around having a family. While God did bless me with a godly husband, God has not so far gifted us with biological children. Giving up this plan of having biological children has been a long, slow, and painful death over the last 5 years of our marriage. And when this childhood dream did not take place as I expected, I resisted, clenched my fists, and kicked and screamed against the plans of the Lord.
Yet the biblical call to Christians is a willful, intentional choice to die to self, including even our “good” plans. This call is made clear in Matthew 16:24-26:
“Then Jesus told his disciples, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul?”
Dying to self involves handing our plans over to God, knowing that whatever He wills to do with them is for His glory and our good. But knowing that truth still didn’t make it easy for me to give over my plans to God. My biggest problem was that I didn’t trust God to build our family. To be clear, it is not inherently wrong to make plans. In fact, there can be much wisdom in planning. However, the heart-revealing question to ask when we start to formulate an agenda is this: are my plans held with clenched fists, or open hands that are willing to submit to whatever God tells me to do? Graciously, Jesus only calls us to go where he has already been, as we see in His prayer at the Garden of Gethsemane in Matthew 26:36-46:
“Then Jesus went with his disciples to a place called Gethsemane, and he said to them, “Sit here while I go over there and pray.” He took Peter and the two sons of Zebedee along with him, and he began to be sorrowful and troubled. Then he said to them, “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me.” Going a little farther, he fell with his face to the ground and prayed, “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will. Then he returned to his disciples and found them sleeping. “Couldn’t you men keep watch with me for one hour?” he asked Peter. “Watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” He went away a second time and prayed, “My Father, if it is not possible for this cup to be taken away unless I drink it, may your will be done.” When he came back, he again found them sleeping, because their eyes were heavy. So he left them and went away once more and prayed the third time, saying the same thing. Then he returned to the disciples and said to them, “Are you still sleeping and resting? Look, the hour has come, and the Son of Man is delivered into the hands of sinners. Rise! Let us go! Here comes my betrayer!”
Jesus prayed three times to God the Father that the cross—His “cup of suffering”—would be taken from Him. Yet, as He prayed honestly of this desire, in the same breath He surrendered fully to the Father’s will: “yet not as I will, but as you will.” After the third prayer of this same request, the Father’s will was clear. Jesus’ very next action revealed His resolve to obey the Father to the point of agonizing death: “Rise! Let us go! Here comes my betrayer!” Fully surrendered, Jesus walked towards his betrayer, towards Judas and the Jewish leaders who would arrest Him and have Him killed. From the last prayer in the garden to His final breath, Jesus willingly obeyed the Father, enduring every last mocking word, agonizing blow and final, painful breaths.
Jesus intentionally obeyed the Father to His death. Our call as Christians is to follow His lead. We are called to lose our life for Christ’s sake in order to find it. What more could motivate us to die to our own agendas than to gaze upon the One who literally died so that we may be reconciled to God? We are not called to live a comfortable, predictable life on this earth, devoid of the need to trust in God. We are called to die to our natural affections and agendas, our pursuits of honor, possessions, comfort and pleasure—whatever it is that keeps us from full allegiance to Christ. This life is short. In comparison to the eternal joy we’ll experience in God’s presence, it is not worth seeking for all of our dreams to come true here and now at the expense of the promise of an eternity spent with God.
“We are not called to live a comfortable, predictable life on this earth, devoid of the need to trust in God. We are called to die to our natural affections and agendas.”
Yet, like Peter in the garden, the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. We often live in the “here and now” more easily than we focus on God’s plan for eternity. In my own life, as I focused on my temporal desires, I struggled to surrender my plan for a family to Him. Children are a blessing and a gift from God. Yet even good desires can become sinful when we refuse to surrender them to God. God has been so gracious and patient with me in this season. He has helped me die to my agenda even when I had no desire to do so. In the last 5 years, God has used the heart-wrenching circumstances of infertility and repeated miscarriage to unclench my fists and help me to die to my self and my agenda. And in that painful process, He has given me life and joy in Him. And, He has opened my eyes and my heart to see more clearly the needs of others.
As Tim and I have laid down our plans for biological children, God has opened our eyes and broken our hearts for the hurting children around us who need families. There are over 440,000 children in foster care across the US. And there are hundreds of vulnerable, abused and neglected children right in our own community that need to be loved and cared for right now. In just the last 4 years, the opioid crisis in Ohio has increased the intake calls to Children’s Services for children ages 0-5 from 1-3 calls a week, to 1-3 calls a day, and that is just in Franklin County. Teens continue to age out of the foster system with no permanent families to call their own. Special needs children are sent to institutional care for lack of willing and trained foster parents.
We recently began foster care classes. As we sat there listening to the instructor during orientation, I felt a joyful freedom and assurance that we were obeying the Lord in taking this step. Only dying to my own natural desires, by the grace of God, could have led me to this place. If you’ve known me along this journey from the beginning, you would both laugh and praise God for how He has turned my plans to dust and my “never” of becoming a foster parent into a nervous but joyful “yes!” In putting my own agenda for building my family to death, God has created something new and better in me: a joyful obedience to Him to do whatever He tells me to do. He has called me to love and care for the children He brings into my life, however many of them, for however long He wills.
My point is this: God cares more that His children look like Him than He does that we get spouses, babies, promotions, a big house, a ministry position, or whatever other earthly plans we make. Friends, it’s exhausting and fruitless to fight against the will of the Lord with our own agendas. What earthly agendas or plans have you made is God calling you to die to for His glory? Death to self is the key to joyful obedience and freedom. It is evidence that we love Jesus. Rosaria Butterfield explains how we can obey Jesus joyfully by dying to ourselves:
“It’s exhausting and fruitless to fight against the will of the Lord with our own agendas.”
“We cannot will ourselves into the deep obedience that God requires. We can’t obey until we ourselves have received this grace and picked up our cross. We can’t obey until we have laid down our life, with all our false and worldly identities and idols. We can’t obey until we face the facts: the gospel comes in exchange for the life we once loved. But when we die to ourselves, we find the liberty to obey […] Joyful obedience is the evidence of our love for Jesus.”
To learn more about the needs in our foster system, check out The Forgotten Initiative’s website.