Weekly Devotion: Obligations
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I can clearly remember my first vote. It was in the very hot summer of 1988. I turned 18 the year before and was I was ready to vote in the Presidential election in the fall. That summer I was home from college and and registered to vote in my hometown of Flint, Michigan. There was a local school board election that summer, but I wasn’t so interested in voting in that election. The Presidential election? Of course. A school board election? Not so much.
My mother was getting ready to go the polling place and asked if I had vote. I said I had not in a way that I had no intent in going to vote.
That was the wrong answer.
Mom told me to get ready and go and vote. I was smart enough to know not to challenge my mother and went with her to vote. She believed it was important that we vote, especially as citizens in a democracy, but even more so because people fought and died to secure that African Americans could vote. I was obligated because I was a citizen in a democracy. I wasn’t just free to do anything I pleased, there were expectations that I needed to live up to.
In Romans Paul is back to talking about living under sin and living under grace and what does that means. In Christ, we no longer are captive to sin, but we are now under grace. But just because we are no longer in bondage to sin doesn’t mean that we are free, or at least not free in the way we like to think we are. In our day and age, we like to think freedom means we can do whatever we like. Paul tells the Romans and tells us we are all bound to someone or something. We can be bound to evil or bound to grace. Either way, you have expectations to live up to. Being bound to God means that we choose to be in bondage to God. We ask that God takes over our lives to mold us into the likeness of Christ.
The question we must face is how is God’s Spirit changing us? Are we living up to the expectations of faith? Do we see church as coming to meet our friends or a place where we come to gather as a community to praise God together and prepare ourselves to go into the mission fields of our daily lives? To follow Jesus means that something is demanded of us. We are free to not obey, but the expectation is still there: to be open to being formed as a follower of Jesus Christ.
Theologian Willie James Jennings notes that our freedom in Jesus leads us do things we might not have planned to do on our own.
The deepest reality of life in the Spirit depicted in the book of Acts is that the disciples of Jesus rarely, if ever, go where they want to go or to whom they would want to go. Indeed the Spirit seems to always be pressing the disciples to go to those to whom they would in fact strongly prefer never to share space, or a meal, and definitely not life together. Yet it is precisely this prodding to be boundary-crossing and border-transgressing that marks the presence of the Spirit of God.
Jennings, W. J. (2017). Acts. (A. P. Pauw & W. C. Placher, Eds.) (First edition, p. 11). Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press.
The grace of God is amazing. We are no longer bound by sin. We are free. But just like being in a democracy has expectations, so does the God. What does freedom in Christ look like your life?
-Dennis Sanders, Pastor