Partial obedience...

Last summer I was chatting with a friend about the things that shape our life values. Some of our values come from our family or our culture, and may even influence us subconsciously, while other values have been chosen more deliberately as a result of our life experiences or our reading of the scriptures.

Two of my own personal values relate to the area of obedience to God, and I know that these heartfelt values had their origin in my reading of the Bible as a teenager. They are:

• partial obedience is disobedience
• delayed obedience is disobedience

I can remember that these principles surfaced again and again during my Bible reading of the 1970s and 1980s, but they became so much a part of my life, that I no longer remember exactly all the different Bible passages and stories where those truths caught my attention.

This week, however, when reading the account of  Saul's failure in 1 Samuel chapter 15, I remembered clearly that this was one of the stories that illustrated and cemented my life value about the danger of partial obedience. If you remember the story, God has given King Saul and his army a great victory over their enemies, the Amalekites. God also gave them very clear instructions that they were not to keep any of the plunder for themselves, but were to destroy it completely. Sadly, Saul and his men were unwilling to carry out this clear directive from the Lord. They obeyed in part, but failed to be radically and completely obedient. Verse 9 tells us that they destroyed everything that was weak and despised, but they made a decision to keep the best sheep and fattest calves for themselves. Later, in vs 15, Saul rationalises his disobedience by finding "good reasons," even spiritual-sounding reasons for his actions. He says that they saved the best cattle "to sacrifice to the Lord."

Even as a teenager, I remember realising how easy it could be for us to live with this kind of partial obedience and rationalisation nowadays. Perhaps, as Christians, we give up smoking and getting drunk…. but we hold on to over-eating. We give up stealing and lying, but we tolerate gossip and criticism. Like Saul in vs 9, we "destroy what's despised and weak," but we're unwilling to get rid of the sins that seem more respectable or acceptable to us. We may make it sound righteous. ("I'm only telling you this, so that you can be praying for them.") Or we may be reluctant to destroy something because of its material value…. like not burning occult books or not getting rid of pagan jewellery. Either way, we tolerate disobedience. It's as if we think that we know better than God. When we do that, it's like putting ourself and our own opinion in the place of God. We read in verse 12 that Saul had built a monument in his own honour; perhaps he was taking the credit for the victory that had just been won over the Amalekites. 

There may even be an element of self deception in placing our own perspective and authority above God's. When Saul meets Samuel in vs 13, he greets him by saying, as in the picture above, "The Lord bless you. I have carried out the Lord's instructions." Is he deliberately lying in order to cover up his sin and disobedience? Or has he actually fooled himself into thinking that what he's doing is okay, and that he has obeyed what God asked him to do?

Father, I don't ever want to live with that kind of self deception in my life. Please will you draw my attention this year to any areas of life where I'm living with only partial obedience. Because, as I learned several decades ago, partial obedience is disobedience.