29 March, 2024

Growing Like Jesus: Learning to Obey

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by | 1 September, 2010 | 0 comments

By Becky Ahlberg

(Becky Ahlberg was among eight Christian leaders asked to share what helps them mature just as Jesus did. Ahlberg is minister of worship and neighborhood engagement at First Christian Church, Anaheim, California. She serves as a CHRISTIAN STANDARD contributing editor.)

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The story of Jesus at the temple at age 12 has always fascinated me, but it”s the line just before our “grew in wisdom and stature” assignment that really hits home with me: “Then he went down to Nazareth with them and was obedient to them” (emphasis mine). Many things have led to my own growth over the years, but learning to obey is right up there at the top.

A Lost Art

Obedience, I”m afraid, is becoming a lost art. For too many that word means harsh, demanding, authoritarian subservience. But true obedience is about trusting those in authority as well as submitting to their authority. Actually, I think trust is the precursor to obedience.

I learned to trust that my parents had my best interests at heart, wanted me to grow and learn, and were willing to both follow through and reward my choices to obey. They helped me understand God wanted me to trust him, too, that he also had my best interests at heart and was worthy of my obedience.

However, there”s a lot of reluctance, bitter pill swallowing, and just plain I-don”t-want-to-ism in obedience””at least for me. It has been particularly so in my professional life. Being a woman called to ministry in the early 1970s was a lonely place. Not only did I not get the jobs I”d hoped to get, but more than once I heard, “Well, we”ve never had a woman in this role, and we don”t think the church is ready for that yet.”

As a young adult, I was frustrated and ready to give up. Why would I so profoundly feel God”s call on my life and at the same time feel so completely thwarted?

Then God brought Doug Dickey into my life. What a God-send! Besides being a warm, wonderful human being, he was one of the first men (besides my dad) to affirm my calling and challenge me to “look for where you can serve, not just where you can succeed.”

I”ll never forget that conversation by the pool at French Lick, Indiana”s annual college conference””even though it happened almost 40 years ago! He gave me a “line” that is woven through every part of my life, and I share it all the time: “Either you trust God or you don”t.” He urged me to trust God with my life and my sense of calling, and to believe he would put me where he wanted me to be and open the doors I needed to walk through””if I was faithful and obedient.

And so I looked to serve. Not very dramatic, really, but all these years later I can testify God has been faithful and trustworthy. Though I may have felt thwarted at times in what I wanted, he has certainly kept me busy and used me in ways I never imagined. I”ve still not gotten that 120-voice choir and enough resources to do those “big things for God” I”ve dreamed up. But I have been privileged to serve in a myriad of ways, with a myriad of people””watching them grow and often shaking my head at how deeply and fully my trust in God has grown.

My willingness to serve has been rewarded with fulfillment and satisfaction. I have taken a number of jobs and assignments, not because they were what I really wanted to do, but because I was trying to be an obedient servant. It has blessed my life.

Learned at Home

In our American world of free spirits and success obsession, expecting someone to trust authority and be obedient is not, I”m sorry to say, a valued part of character building. I am happy to say, however, it was a highly valued character trait in the home in which I was raised. I could write a whole separate article about the model of obedience and personal sacrifice that marked the life of my parents. I”m grateful their example is part of my heritage and I have endeavored to model it for my children. I believe it was also modeled by Christ himself.

Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death””even death on a cross! (Philippians 2:5-8).

Christ”s obedience was evidenced when he surrendered his equality with God and became a man, not because he had to, but because he trusted God and chose to serve. I”m grateful that in my own growth “in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and men,” I had that model in Christ and in my parents. And, thankfully, in mentors like Doug Dickey, Dorothy Keister Walker, Medford Jones, J.D. Smith, Roy and Roger Koerner, Eleanor Daniel, Gary Tiffin, and a host of others.

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