The essence of the Christian religion consists in the reality that the creation of the Father, ruined by sin, is restored in the death of the Son of God, and re-created by the grace of the Spirit into a kingdom of God (112).
That is one seriously loaded statement. But it lays down the sort of holistic understanding of Christianity that we so desperately need.
Of the things I have never understood, these are included – why church attendance rises so much at Christmas, and why so many recording artists produce Christmas albums during their career. The only conclusion I can draw is that they must not think about the words they are singing when they sing the traditional hymns of this season.
The church has many great hymns that proclaim the wonderful truths of the Christian faith, but I find that many of our Advent and Christmas hymns make those declarations in an especially poignant way. I was thinking about this yesterday evening during our carol service, looking at the many unfamiliar faces gathered in the church. Why were they there? And why did they so readily sing these songs, even with exuberance?
If people took a moment to think about the lyrics of the Advent and Christmas hymns, I wonder how they would react to something like the third verse of 'Hark! The Herald Angels Sing':
Hail the heav'n-born Prince of Peace! Hail the Sun of Righteousness! Light and life to all He brings, Ris'n with healing in His wings. Mild He lays His glory by, Born that man no more may die, Born to raise the sons of earth, Born to give them second birth.
Many of these songs are joyful expressions of the wonder of the incarnation. Other songs boldly present a challenge to those who have not confessed Christ as Lord, and demand a response. Consider this verse, from 'Joy to the World':
He rules the world with truth and grace, And makes the nations prove The glories of His righteousness, And wonders of His love.
Yea, Lord, we greet Thee, Born this happy morning, Jesus, to Thee be all glory giv'n!
In November of last year, Al Wolters wrote an excellent article for the online version of Comment magazine, making a similar point about the 'Hallelujah Chorus' in Handel'sMessiah. He notes that despite the overtly religious theme – that Jesus Christ is the Messiah and that his Kingdom rules over all the earth – people in our culture still stand up when the choir sings the majestic chorus. What makes this especially interesting is the juxtaposition of the confession of Christ as Lord, ruling over all the earth, with Psalm 2, which is sung prior to the chorus. Wolters observes,
The meaning is unmistakable. The nations at large conspire against the Lord and against his Anointed, and plan to cast off all restraints that he has imposed on them. But God will only laugh at their defiance, and he (now addressed in the second person) will crush their rebellion and smash them like a piece of pottery. Then the "Hallelujah," with its celebration of the universal triumph of God in Jesus Christ, is sung. And audiences across several continents get to their feet in symbolic endorsement.
What do we make of this? It may be surprising that people who don't consider themselves Christians continue to sing these songs (or even celebrate Christmas, for that matter), but old cultural mores die hard, and that these songs remain so widely known owes to the vestiges of a culture in which Christianity once had a more prominent place.
Still, how can so many people sing the words of these songs and not be taken aback by the startling claims they make? One reason, perhaps, is their familiarity. Repetition serves as an aid to remembering something and implanting it in our mind, but too much repetition can sometimes dull the effect of the thing to be remembered. We hear these songs played over and over again at this time of year, and it may just be that the oft-repeated choruses no longer hit us with the full force of their declarations. More, the power of the message of the church's Advent and Christmas hymns is diluted further when mixed in with the many trivial and meaningless seasonal songs that have been produced over the years, such as the patently ridiculous 'Here Comes Santa Claus.'
Unfortunately, many of those who sing these songs during this season will likely not be in a place where the songs are accompanied by a faithful proclamation of the gospel, underscoring and heralding the powerful truths the hymn-writers penned, challenging the listeners to surrender their lives to the newborn King they sing of. The sad reality is that many of the churches that see a swelling of attendance during the holidays are no longer known for their orthodoxy, and so the bold hymns of Christmas just become happy carols to sing by candlelight.
That being said, it really is quite significant that during this season, even in our day, people will repeatedly hear songs proclaiming that Jesus is Lord broadcast over the airwaves or in their neighbourhoods or in churches all across our towns and cities. Let us hope and pray that as they hear and sing these songs and find themselves confronted with the truth of the gospel, that they would be captivated by the wonder and the promise of the incarnation, and fall on their knees in worship before the Lord of heaven and earth.
A few weeks ago, I preached on the parable of the sower from Mark 4, and the week following one of our other ministers, Lee, preached on the parables of the growing seed and the mustard seed. Shortly afterward, I found the video below, which I thought really brought to light some of the things we had said in our sermons, especially emphasizing that when we sow the seed, we just never know where or how it is going to grow. But we have confidence in knowing that God, by the power of the Spirit, will cause it to grow when and in whom he pleases.
We showed it in our evening service last night as a way of encouraging our congregation to be eager to take up the task of proclaiming the Gospel. We wanted them to have that same confidence that when they tell of the good news of the Kingdom of God, it will produce fruit, often even beyond what they could imagine.
This is just so encouraging and uplifting. It is absolutely amazing the way that God works in people's lives.
In his book, Gospel and Kingdom, which is one of the volumes in the very helpful Goldsworthy Trilogy, the Australian biblical theologian, Graeme Goldsworthy, discusses how the understanding that the Old Testament forms an integral part of the history of redemption has been lost in our day. We have moved towards focusing on the individual and his or her personal appropriation of faith instead of first recognising the work of God in history as part of a much larger story and framework. He writes,
Failure to grasp this truth – largely because the proper study of the Old Testament has been neglected, has aided and abetted one of the most unfortunate reversals in evangelical theology. The core of the gospel, the historical facts of what God did in Christ, is often down-graded today in favour of a more mystical emphasis on the private spiritual experience of the individual. Whereas faith in the gospel is essentially acceptance of, and commitment to, the declaration that God acted in Christ some two thousand years ago on our behalf, saving faith is often portrayed nowadays more as trust in what God is doing in us now. Biblical ideas such as 'the forgiveness of sins' or 'salvation' are interpreted as primarily describing a Christian's personal experience. But when we allow the whole Bible – Old and New Testaments – to speak to us, we find that those subjective aspects of the Christian life which are undoubtedly important – the new birth, faith and sanctification – are fruits of the gospel. This gospel, while still relating to individual people at their point of need, is rooted and grounded in the history of redemption. It is the good news about Jesus, before it can become good news for sinful men and women. Indeed, it is only as the objective (redemptive-historical) facts are grasped that the subjective experience of the individual Christian can be understood (20-21).
Without the redemptive work of God in history through Jesus, we have no hope. This work of God is the starting point of faith.
Matthew Mason, one of the regular contributors to the blog of the The Society for the Advancement of Ecclesial Theology, wrote in a post some time ago of the growing trend in evangelical circles to speak of 'repenting of our righteousness'. Mason points out that proponents of this perspective argue 'that the gospel is the beginning and end of of the Christian life, that all our problems come from a lack of orientation to the gospel...[and] that Christians should speak like this of our present attempts to obey God.'
The basic point they wish to make is sound – your understanding of salvation must be rooted in the gospel, along with the recognition that you can do nothing of your own to earn or merit salvation. Agreed. But the argument then extends further to include the idea that you grow as a Christian by increasing your belief in the gospel, or trusting more in the gospel, and so on. Well, to a degree, that is also true. This is emphasized so strongly, however, that any discussion of good works leads to a warning to be careful you're not trusting in your works for salvation.
So what is the place of righteousness, then? And what of the Bible's call to pursue righteousness and holiness? C.S. Lewis, in the second chapter on faith in Mere Christianity, writes,
The sense in which a Christian leaves it to God is that he puts all his trust in Christ: trusts that Christ will somehow share with him the perfect human obedience which He carried out from His birth to His crucifixion: that Christ will make the man more like Himself and, in a sense, make good his deficiencies. In Christian language, He will share His 'sonship' with us, will make us, like Himself, 'Sons of God'... In a sense, the whole Christian life consists in accepting that very remarkable offer. But the difficulty is to reach the point of recognising that all we have done and can do is nothing... And, in yet another sense, handing everything over to Christ does not, of course, mean that you stop trying. To trust Him means, of course, trying to do all that He says... If you have really handed yourself over to Him, it must follow that you are trying to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way. Not doing these things in order to be saved, but because He has begun to save you already.
Any attempt to earn your righteousness in salvation is to be avoided, certainly. But it is hard to understand how you grow as a disciple of Christ if you are not pursuing righteousness in response to the good news of the gospel. Our homegroups at church have just begun a series on Romans 12-16. It is particularly noteworthy that after discussing the gospel message in the first eleven chapters, Paul then goes on to lay out some pretty in-depth applications of that gospel and how it should shape our lives as Christians. Those last chapters of Romans show us that you must indeed make the gospel the centre of your life as a Christian, but that you do so by actively pursuing righteousness. And it is not just here in Romans; the Bible speaks repeatedly of the call to live righteous lives. Think of the Psalms, or the book of James.
The Heidelberg Catechism says two important things about this. First, in Q&A 86, it asks why we must still do good when we have been delivered from our misery by God's grace. The response:
We do good because Christ by his Spirit is renewing us to be like himself, so that in all our living we may show that we are thankful to God for all he has done for us, and so that he may be praised through us. And we do good so that we may be assured of our faith by its fruits, and so that by our godly living our neighbours may be won over to Christ.
It is striking here to note that God is praised through our righteous living. Those who call us to 'repent of our righteousness' would likely find these words hard to stomach. But perhaps it is even more striking, then, that assurance of our faith is linked with the practice of righteousness. And secondly, the Catechism indicates that genuine repentence and conversion has two parts: the dying-away of the old self, and the coming-to-life of the new. In describing the coming-to-life of the new, the Catechism tells us that this is marked by 'wholehearted joy in God through Christ and a delight to do every kind of good as God wants us to' (Q&A 90).
Belief in the gospel motivates you to act in accordance with it. That action is not an attempt to justify yourself, but an expression of your gratitude for God's grace and your acknowledgement of his rule as Lord and King of heaven and earth. You don't repent of your righteousness, because God calls us to righteousness.
Belief in the gospel and the pursuit of righteousness are not contradictory. To be sure, the latter does not precede the former. But the latter must flow out of the former.
Acts 2:42-47 is a favourite passage of those who like to talk about an ideal of what the church should be like, and for good reason – we have in these few verses one of the clearest biblical pictures of a vibrant, living, and active church. Mike Goheen and Craig Bartholomew, in their book, The Drama of Scripture, discuss the marks of the early church in this passage:
As Luke describes the young church, it has three defining qualities. The first is devotion: this new community devotes itself to the apostles' teaching, fellowship, the breaking of bread, and prayer so that they might more and more experience the life of the kingdom (2:42). The church's second defining quality is that the life of Christ in manifested both in the lives of individual members and in the life of the community considered as a whole. The church is thus known by convincing signs of God's saving power within it (2:43), by justice and mercy in its communal relations (2:44-45), by joyful conviviality (2:46), and by worship (2:47). Third, as the liberating life of the kingdom becomes more and more evident in the church, we hear that the exalted Lord "[adds] to their number daily those who are being saved" (2:47). This too fulfills the Old Testament prophecies about God's kingdom. The prophets pictures the drawing power of a renewed Israel (Isaiah 60:2-3; Zechariah 8:20-23): "A decisive element of the prophetic conception of the pilgrimage of the nations to Zion is that the Gentiles, fascinated by the salvation visible in Israel, are driven of their own accord to the people of God. They do not become believers as a result of missionary activity; rather, the fascination emitted by the people of God draws them close." This newly formed community of the early church is attractive to outsiders. The life of the believing community radiates the light of the kingdom and thus draws people from darkness (cf. Ephesians 5:8; 1 Peter 2:9).
We have here a church which understands that the gospel is about more than just saving souls, and is more than just a belief one needs to hold in order to guarantee eternal life. The gospel is an announcement that in the person of Jesus Christ, the Kingdom of God has come. The gospel calls people to be members of this Kingdom, to serve King Jesus, and to have their whole beings transformed by the power of the risen Christ. The church, believing this message, begins to embody a new reality that testifies in word and bears witness in deed to the rule and lordship of Christ over all of creation. By its words and deeds the church then invites people to an encounter with the Kingdom of God and the true freedom, justice, and peace that comes through the rule of the sovereign Lord, in order that they too might confess that Jesus is Lord and be baptised into this new life.
Some weeks ago, I posted about the recent trend among evangelical Twitter users to tweet the gospel. A couple of days ago, Anthony Bradley, associate professor of theology and ethics at King's College, discussed the same thing at the WORLD magazine blog, garnering a lot of attention and prompting Jared Wilson, who pastors a church in Vermont, to issue a lengthy response defending the practice. By no means am I a big player in the blogosphere, but since both of them linked to my original post on the subject, I wanted to offer a few additional thoughts in response to Wilson's post in particular. You will need to read both for the background to this post.
First, both Bradley and I argued that one of the problem with the gospel tweets is their lack of context, a point Wilson takes issue with. He argues that all tweets, regardless of content, assume a context and that to understand what a person is tweeting about, you need to know this context. This is a logical point, of course, but there is a difference of degree in the contexts needed. For example, let's say that I tweet something like, "Heading to Sanford to have dinner with some folks from the church." You will need to understand a few things to make sense of this: clearly, I don't live in Sanford as I need to travel to get there, but obviously I live close enough that I can go there to have dinner with people. You will not know where Sanford is unless you know that I live in the Orlando area, and so it must be in that area as well. Also, you will need to know that I am a member of a church, and quite involved to the point that I'd share a meal with some of the people who belong to it. But these are all things that are easily deduced.
As another example, recently I tweeted a link to a blog post discussing the problems of consumerism and poverty in America. The tweet contained a brief quote from the post, "While iPad sales show no sign of slowing, one in five children in America are living in poverty," and was followed by the link. What context do you need to understand this tweet? You need to understand that what the iPad is and that it is being sold in large quantities, and you need to understand that there is a significant portion of the American population living in poverty. Further, you need to understand that a comparison is being made between the two statistics in order to demonstrate that our culture values consumerism more than it does justice. Again, though, this is not difficult to figure out.
Now, let's take one of the examples of a gospel tweet I originally cited, which both Bradley and Wilson reproduce in their posts: "Legalism says achievement leads to approval, the gospel says that approval leads to achievement" (and by the way, Mr. Wilson, if I recall correctly this one belongs to Tullian Tchividjian. I didn't see the need to cite the authors of these sample tweets originally because it wasn't important for the purpose of making a general observation). What context will you need to understand this? In the first place, you will need some of the terms defined, particularly legalism and gospel, because the extent of the definition of gospel at this point is, "not legalism," and vice versa. Then, what is the achievement spoken of? Approval by or from whom? Unless you have some sort of theological foundation, these questions are not so easily answered.
Interestingly, Wilson also points to John 3:16 as an example of a presentation of the gospel in tweet-sized form (he notes that the verse is 126 characters long). It is true that this is a concise expression of the gospel—and indeed, much clearer than many of the gospel tweets out there—but again, it is not understood by everyone without further explanation; Nicodemus himself needed the entire discussion with Jesus in John 3 to make sense of what he was talking about. The point is simply that there is a much greater context needed to understand a gospel tweet. Now, while this in and of itself is insufficient reason to abandon the practice altogether, it should raise some questions about the how and why of tweeting the gospel.
If you do the gospel-tweet thing with the purpose of trying to evangelize, hoping that it might plant seeds, I cannot imagine this practice bearing much fruit. I certainly would not deny that in some cases it might, but I do not think that something like, "Only the gospel glow of the New Jerusalem can make the city lights of Tarshish appear as bling bling," (this one belongs to Scotty Smith, by the way) is going to bring people to their knees. It surprises me, too, that many of these who engage in the gospel-tweeting practice are the same people who emphasize the need for building relationships in the process of proclaiming the gospel to the world. If, instead, you do it as a means of discipleship, what level of depth are you bringing to that relationship? These are just some of the questions this practice raises in my mind.
Second, Wilson makes a big deal over the discussion of the simplicity of the gospel. I am not sure what the problem is here. Bradley is right to say that there are times where gospel-tweeters attempt to say something profound or clever and in doing so, "frustrate the simplicity of the message." There is a sense in which the gospel is profoundly simple, and trying to dress it up with a slew of over-the-top adjectives only obscures that. But this does not, as Wilson insists, contradict the fact that the gospel is also far bigger than any tweet can encompass. I simply don't see the tension here.
Third—and this is the biggest issue I have with Wilson's post—at one point, he mentions that gospel-tweeters understand that the gospel is a "big deal" and later goes on to say that because he believes in the Lordship of Christ over all of life (the title of his blog is a reference to that oft-quoted statement of Abraham Kuyper), he can't help but use his Twitter stream for proclaiming the gospel. What comes across in these statements is an implication that those who don't use Twitter for this purpose—myself and Bradley included—don't get how big the gospel is and don't believe in the Lordship of Christ. Now, I am sure that Wilson would not want to say this (his words could have been more carefully chosen at this point), and indeed it is not true.
In fact, I think that if you really believe in the Lordship of Christ, you will tweet more than your clever comparisons of the gospel and legalism or the gospel and religion (the latter of which, by the way, are not antithetical to each other). Your tweets will talk about all spheres of life because Christ is Lord over all of life. The gospel is not just about individual salvation (which is what receives the most emphasis in the gospel-tweets). It is about the transformation of all of life, and God's act of redeeming his whole creation. It is about the Kingdom of God that has come and the sovereign rule of Christ over all. I would think that your tweets would reflect that by going beyond the implications of the gospel for individual salvation and piety. Perhaps you might link to articles discussing how to think about politics, education, and justice from a Christian perspective. Maybe you would share some quotes from books you are reading on creativity and the arts. Even something more mundane, like mentioning that you are going to spend a quiet night at home with your family is not outside of this because it demonstrates that you understand the value of the family. What's more, it seems to me that this sort of thing would be a lot more effective if you want to reach non-Christians, because it gets them thinking about things they deal with on a regular basis. A good article on how to deal with the problem of poverty prompts your followers to ask questions: "Why does he think about poverty from this perspective?" That point of contact lays a greater foundation for a relationship instead of blasting them with the ills of legalism.
In the end, I think Bradley is right to say that this practice, in some ways, keeps believers on "spiritual milk." If the gospel doesn't go beyond the usual fare of the Twitter-gospel, it is not helping to transform all of life.
Do I think the gospel-tweeting should stop altogether? No. I've seen some genuinely good tweets out there. Do you need to only tweet stuff that everyone will understand? Of course not. My main objection, and I think Bradley would concur, is when it totally consumes a user. As Bradley says, there are times when it is hard to imagine that this is all nothing more than a popularity contest, just like those who only tweet things like "how to grow your business" or "how to get more hits for your website." Perhaps Wilson is right that part of our dislike for the practice is because we find it annoying, but that is the least concern here. It is the glut of overblown adjectives, often-bizarre comparisons, and in many cases, banality, that makes us wonder what the point of it all is.
Those of you who know me or have read this blog for some time will know of my disdain for the "gospel versus religion" distinction that has featured so prominently in evangelical Christianity in recent years. It is the flesh and blood, for example, of the gospel tweeting phenomenon. Pastors use it often in their sermons. Well-intentioned believers have made it a staple of their discussions with sceptics who claim that Christianity is just another religion. It has become the mantra of Christian culture.
But I have never liked the distinction. And I am in good company, because neither would Herman Bavinck. In the opening essay of his collection, Essays on Religion, Science and Society, in which he discusses the philosophy of religion, he states very clearly that religion is at the core of who we are as human beings, and is a fundamental and inescapable part of life. This idea would most certainly not sit well with fans of the gospel/religion distinction, but Bavinck is exactly right.
One of the major problems with this gospel/religion distinction is that it is premised on a narrow definition of religion. The understanding is that religion is merely a voluntary action on the part of individuals, who engage in certain practices or rituals in an effort to make themselves better people or to earn their own salvation. Insofar as people use this to indicate a distinction between Christianity and the other religions of the world, there is an element of truth to it—only in Christianity does God grant salvation to his people purely by his grace, requiring nothing on their part.
However, the problem that arises with such a narrow definition of religion is that it implicitly denies something fundamental about every human being, as I noted above: at the core, all of us are religious. To be human is to be religious. All of us have a natural impulse to worship and serve something. The issue at hand, then, is not that humans engage in the performance of different practices and rituals with a view to salvation or moral uprightness. The problem goes deeper than that. It is a question of the orientation of their whole being. Are they living in service to the Creator, or to a creature?
Henry R. Van Til once wrote, "For man, in the deepest reaches of his being, is religious; he is determined by his relationship to God. Religion, to paraphrase the poet's expressive phrase, is not of life a thing apart, it is man's whole existence." Every human being has the sense of something ultimate and absolute, and their lives bear recognition of that fact. While Christianity differs from other religions in very major ways—and I am in no way trying to minimize those differences—it also has similarities to all other religions. Each is made up of people who want to worship something or someone with the belief that in doing so, salvation can be found. From there, the divergences of belief and practice vary significantly, of course, but this basic thing is common to all religions.
Western society has long tried to downplay the significance of religion, but the central place of religion in human life throughout history clearly demonstrates that we cannot underestimate its power. This was a reality that many of the Enlightenment-era philosophers were not willing to concede. While they would grant a place to religion as one aspect of the human person, none would assert that mankind is fundamentally religious. Bavinck thus notes,
By limiting religion to one human faculty, they diminish man's universal character. They divide man in two and separate what belongs together. They create a gulf between religion and culture, and they run the danger of reducing religion to moral duty or aesthetic emotion or a philosophic view. But according to the Christian confession religion is other than and higher than all those views; religion must not just be something in one's life, but everything, Jesus demands that we love God with all our heart, all our soul, and all our strength. In our thinking and living, there can be no division between God and the world, between religion and culture; no one can serve two masters.
Therefore if we want to do full justice to religion, we must return to the central unity in man that is the basis for differentiating his faculties and which in Holy Scripture is often designated the heart, from which proceed all expressions of life in mind, feeling, and will. Reformed theologians sought that central point for religion in (as Calvin called it) the seed of religion [semen religionis] or sense of divinity [sensus divinitatis], and in the Christian religion theologians went behind faith and conversion to regeneration, which in principle is a renewal of the whole man. When they took a position in this center of man, they saw opportunity to avoid all one-sidedness of rationalism, mysticism, and ethicism, and to maintain that religion is the animating principle of all of life (29-30).
Proponents of the gospel/religion distinction might protest that they are simply using the definition of religion accepted by their culture for the purpose of interacting with them. I would agree that we must be aware of how our culture defines different words and ideas, but would we so quick to accept our culture's definitions if we are talking about things like sin, faith, or the gospel? As Bavinck notes, the idea of religion being only one part of man is an idea that finds expression particularly in the philosophy of the Enlightenment era, and one that has been readily adopted by our culture. However, this is certainly not the case in the Christian tradition. Many theologians and Christian philosophers have spoken readily about the religious nature of man. So the question we need to ask is, to what heritage do we belong?
Owing to its belief that religion can be confined to one part of the human being, our culture further strives to relegate religion to a private sphere. The gospel just becomes another alternative to their idea of religion, and they will continue to view this faith as something private and just one of many parts of life. Because of this, you can't just replace our culture's idea of religion with the gospel. First you must redefine misconceptions of religion and the nature of humanity.
If you truly believe that the gospel transforms the entirety of a man's life, then you need to begin with a proper understanding who man fundamentally is. It is not without significance that the Bible speaks so frequently about the heart, because it is the heart that is the core of the human being. It is the heart that loves and desires. Now, this is the important part—we are fundamentally desiring beings. The basic impulse of our nature is to attach worth to something and to adore it. Our basic impulse is to worship. So, if the core of man's being naturally worships, what does this say about humanity? The conclusion is obvious: we are religious beings.
The gospel, then, is not about replacing or abandoning religion. The gospel takes the religious man and transforms his heart so that he begins to worship the true God, the Lord of heaven and earth. The gospel does not stand as the antithesis to religion because it addresses man as a religious being. To quote Van Til again, "No man can escape this religious determination of his life, since God is the inescapable, ever-present Fact of man's existence. God may be loved or hated, adored or debased, but he cannot be ignored." The gospel confronts religious man with the Creator, demanding that, as a worshipping being, he worship God alone.
I do not like the gospel versus religion distinction. It is an oversimplification, and it is a false dichotomy. Further, it tends toward a deficient view of the nature of humanity. Many Christians, I know, think it is a helpful tool for highlighting the differences between Christianity and other world religions (salvation by grace versus salvation by works, and so on), but we simply cannot let pragmatism rule the day when it comes to something so fundamental to who we are as human beings.
Some will think that I make too much of this, but I am reminded of what Eugene Peterson once said, "We cannot be too careful about the words we use; we start out using them and then they end up using us." There is much wisdom in this. Religion is not a word to be used lightly and then discarded, because humanity is ulimately religious. As Christians, we need to uphold a biblical anthropology that recognizes the fundamental religious character of human beings if we are to present a gospel that transforms their whole being.
[and] that Christians should speak like this of our present attempts to obey God.'
