Obedience Isn’t Just For Our Kids | Obedience .01 Transcript
This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Emily Jensen: Hey, friends, Emily here! You are tuned into the first episode in our new mini-series all about obedience. In just a minute, you're going to hear Laura and I chatting and we are so grateful that you've joined us. There's going to be six episodes and we can't wait to look at this topic from a lot of different angles.
Before we get started, we wanted to let you know about a really exciting free download you can get to go along with this series when you sign up for our newsletter. We had a team member, Courtney Reissig, write a really rich and wonderful companion Bible study going through John 13-17. Of course, it’s taking the Abide Method of observing, interpreting, and applying different passages from those chapters and then helping you apply them, especially to motherhood. It's really good! She offers two options: if you want to do it in more of a bite-size version or you can go deeper. We have it designed to be a five-day Bible study, but you can take five weeks if you want to! We know it's going to be a great companion piece, again, to this obedience series if you want to study along in the word with us.
All right, let's get to the show with Laura and myself.
Laura Wifler: Today, we are starting our brand-new series. We're excited to be back and we're talking about obedience. I think obedience is one of those words that we all cringe at, or we feel like is old fogey and it just means there's going to be some either boring or painful things ahead.
[laughter]
Emily: When I was thinking about this word, the other word that came to my mind was, "frustrating" because I can still remember when I came to Christ at the age of 20, I had life before Christ and life after Christ. Life before Christ was frustrating because I couldn’t get my act together. I remember actively looking around at people in my church and thinking, "I have no idea how to be like them. I have no idea how to follow God." I didn't understand grace, but then after I became a Christian and I understood grace, I now just feel frustrated because what is it? Like Paul says, "I know what I'm supposed to do, but I can't do it." Essentially.
Laura: Amen. That feels like the story of my life for sure. I do think obedience can feel really vague. Even how you were talking about before becoming a Christian, how do you even do what they're doing? But, I think even as a Christian, you can feel like, "Well, what am I supposed to obey? This Christian does it this way and that Christian does it the other way. Who am I supposed to follow?”
I just think there are so many questions around it that most of us want to just put our head in a hole when we start to talk about it. [laughter]
Emily: Or we think it's just reserved for our kids.
Laura: Yes. Oh, I say “obey” all the time to my kids. That's like my favorite word with my kids, but not with me.
Emily: It's like a topic that you harp on all the time. So, why are we talking about it then, Laura?
Laura: Yes. Why are we going to dedicate a handful of episodes to this? For us, this comes down to, this is truly deeply why we have Risen Motherhood. This, really the essence of our ministry, is to help moms, starting with ourselves, to understand what it looks like to follow Christ. This is why Emily and I started it originally. What some of our conversations were around, saying, "If I'm a Christian, if I love Jesus, and I know that it matters to my daily life—it's supposed to—at least that's what God's Word says. How does that play out?” Those are some of the questions that Em and I were having.
That's why we want to have a conversation about obedience. Every time we talk about school choice, or handling naptime, or dishes, or what kind of activities we're putting our kids in, we're asking, “How do I obey Christ in this?”
Emily: It's interesting because it's more than just a word we find in the New Testament occasionally, or in the Old Testament occasionally, it’s a whole theme throughout all of Scripture. It's essentially God creating mankind in his image to do what he says, to live how he lays out for us to live. Of course, we know after the fall, that we’re not capable of doing that.
Even throughout the Old Testament, we see him laying out the law, giving specific systems that the people were to live in, and then we get to the New Testament, and even though Jesus has come and died—and we're going to talk about all of that and how he has given us power over sin in the spirit—there are still commands for us to follow. There's still a way for us to live and obey Christ. That's really the heart of the Great Commission. This is essential to all of the Christian life.
Laura: Yes, that is exactly right. Our obedience shows the evidence of a life that's been redeemed by Christ. The other day, my kiddo was asking me, "Mom, I know I believe in God, but how do I know, know? Like, how do I really know?" What he was asking was, “What are the evidences of my faith?” He and I sat down and we just talked through, “What do you have to believe to be saved?” He articulated that, and then after that, we talked about, “What are some of those fruits? What are some of the evidences that the scripture shows us of a life transformed by the gospel?”
There are so many different things in God's Word. You can even start with the fruit of the spirit, seeing those developed and shown in your life, or moments where you have conquered sin and you know, "That wasn't by my own power, that had to be somebody else." Those are evidences of when we behave differently. That's a huge piece of the puzzle of why obedience is so important. I think we can lean back on that and say, "Oh yes, this is real. I have seen evidence in my life."
Emily: Conversely, we can all think of somebody, maybe that we've known throughout our life, or we follow on social media who's got the Jesus follower tag in their bio, or they go to church. But, from an observer's point of view, you might think there's really nothing, though, about their life that shows that they love God or follow Him and that's dangerous territory. The other thing that's cool about obedience is that our good works are actually part of God's purpose for us today. It's not just that we were redeemed so we can be with him forever in eternity, which is so, so important and wonderful, but that he actually has a mission here for us today. In our homes, whoever it is that we're coming across, he wants us to love them, to love God and love our neighbor in whatever it is we're doing.
Laura: Yes. I think that obedience really, at least having some practice within it or understanding what it is, this is what comes out when we are in trials. This is what comes out when we are trying to hold fast or to stand firm in the midst of really, really hard circumstances. You guys know I love my missionary biographies, but I think about that often, even just different missionaries that have been tortured or sentenced in prisons and just horrific things happening to them, and then later, they will talk about God presenting an opportunity for them to forgive their torturer. You see that, and you're like, "That’s unbelievable."
I think there’s a really beautiful thing about obedience that showcases Christ's love to the entire watching world.
Emily: Even the moment that we're living in right now, that we all talk about is so hard. We are going to have more and more choices I think to say, “Are we going to obey the world? Are we going to do what's comfortable, what we're feeling pressured to do, or are we going to obey the Lord?” We feel like this is a critical time for this conversation as well because some of those decisions may feel very subtle and yet, there’s going to be great eternal power in taking the step forward in faithfulness and obedience, even when right at that moment, it's going to make life really hard.
Laura: Yes. I like that you said “Sometimes, it's subtle,” because I do think so often, it's just a slight difference in, perhaps, the way a believer behaves in-person or online. It takes some thought process. I think very easily, you can just conform to the world and realize you're doing it like them. There was maybe nothing technically wrong with it. But, if we dug a little bit deeper into it, you might find, “Oh, maybe there's a better way to do this, a way for me to be set apart from the world that pushes me towards holiness.” Okay. What does all of this have to do with motherhood specifically?
Emily: Yes, moms. Well, as we were talking about this—Here's my question, I think you'll relate to this, “What am I supposed to obey?”
Laura: I know, right?
Emily: That's the first one. We feel like a lot of moms ask that. Even if you don't know you're asking it. Another thing I think we wonder is, "How do I obey God? Because I have a lot of stuff going on. I didn't sleep well last night. We've got these pressures at work and whatnot," like, "How do I do it? What do I do if I keep stumbling in this and I'm trying, but I'm a struggler."
Laura: We're all strugglers. I think we all identify with that.
Emily: There you go. Those are all my questions.
Laura: Those are legit questions. I know for me, when Em and I first started talking about this, I thought, "Oh, I wouldn't really phrase it that way. There's nobody that's going to tell me how to do my motherhood or what I obey in my motherhood.” That's what my natural personality is. “I'm going to pave my own path," you know, that whole idea.
But, as we got into this conversation, I started thinking, "Yes, absolutely, all of us are obeying something." Whether that's in our entertainment activities, our friendships, the medical care, screen time, all of the decisions that we have as moms, we are asking these three questions. The other day I found myself telling you, Em, as we were going through a big decision, or what felt like a huge decision, and these words literally came out of my mouth, it was something along the lines of, "I just don't want to look back someday and feel like I failed my kids. I don't want to feel like I didn't put them first, I didn't sacrifice, I didn't do enough."
Those words were so real and true to me. I don't want to look back someday and feel like I failed my kids, and I think most of us would all say that, that we want to do our very, very best in raising these precious little kids that God has entrusted to us, and obedience has a lot to do with that. Really understanding obedience, I think will give us actually a lot of freedom when we start to think like I was the other day as I was losing my mind.
Emily: [laughter] Oh, I'm losing my mind like that all the time. Those are all my questions and thoughts these days. We're getting to that turning point in our motherhood where our kids are getting just a little bit older and we're starting to see a bit of the fruit from what we've put in when they're younger and we're now realizing like, "This person is really going to turn into an adult.”
[laughter]
Laura: They're going to be a real person someday.
Emily: They're entering conversations and—
Laura: They are making their own decisions. That's what's crazy like you said, seeing some of the fruit of what we've invested in.
Emily: I think though what’s hard is we don't really know how it's going to turn out yet. We can't see the end and we're still at the point in our parenting where we know that they're going to get to the end, but we’re not seeing it yet and we've got this big wavy path in between. I just know, we are going to have lots of ups and downs.
In the meantime, the only thing that I can hold onto is that I just keep doing what God wants me to do next, because I see myself riding on the rollercoaster of how my kids are responding that day or what fruit I'm seeing or, "Oops, are they going the way of the Lord? Are they not going the way of the Lord? Do I need to pivot? Do I need to change?"
And maybe I do, but I keep having to recalibrate back to, "Okay, I just have to obey the Lord in whatever He's asking me and our family to do today. I don't have control over it, and I don't know how it's going to turn out yet.” There is some freedom I think in saying, “That's my job right now.”
Laura: Well, it was so helpful to me when Emily, in response to some of this stuff, she was like, "Laura, all you can do is give your kids the gospel over and over again. Just be faithful in that, and then leave it up to the Lord.” She said it way better than that, though. It was so good for me to hear because I realized that is what I need to be faithful in, is just trusting the Lord, that He's going to take care of all of these other things. If I can live that out faithfully every day, then I've done my job.
Again, obedience brings freedom. We're going to harp on this a lot. You guys are going to hear us say this a lot. Em, talk us through for a sec, maybe give them that one analogy you gave me that was helpful about, “Why on earth, is this word that we're afraid of or feels very constraining, is actually freedom?”
Emily: Well, I think one thing I want to point out before I jump into my analogy, is that sometimes the commands and the obedience feels very arbitrary to us. We can't really understand well, "Why is that there and not there?"
The thing that it makes me think of is the idea of a fence. Our house sits on some land, and we're mostly surrounded by cornfields, but then we have this really big, busy road on one side, and we have railroad tracks on another. The cornfields, while beautiful to look at, are actually very, very dangerous.
Laura: Y'all ever done a corn maze? You could die in one.
Emily: [laughter] Have you ever sent a two-year-old into a cornfield? Very scary.
Laura: [laughter] You will never find them again, Think of Signs.i I don't know, just think of all the scary things.
Emily: When we moved in, I would have these nightmares once a week that a toddler escaped from our house, and they're headed towards the railroad tracks, or they're headed towards the street, or they're headed towards the cornfield. I remember telling my husband, "We have to get a fence because I can't let them outside until we have a fence. They cannot play freely, they cannot play safely. They cannot enjoy our yard until we have some boundaries on this thing.”
That was one of our priorities in the first year. So now, we have this big black chain link fence. Our oldest kids have now gotten to where they can run around and enjoy, but I think the imagery is there that the fence is not arbitrary. From our kids' perspective, they would look out over and see something. They would throw a ball over the fence and go, "Why can't I just walk around and go get that?" I'm like, "Because that's three feet in the cornfield, I'll never find you again."
[laughter]
To them, they didn't understand. But, mom and dad, from our perspective, knew there are actually dangers on all sides, you could die, you could get really hurt. This fence while confusing to you, arbitrary to you, is actually a very safe thing. This is helping you play and enjoy what we have in our home. I think God's commands are that way. I'm going to give a caveat. Then I was like, "I'm going to stop myself because I give too many caveats..."
...It's not a perfect analogy there.
Laura: She did it. She couldn't help herself. Somebody needs to go through all of our shows and count the amount of times Emily has said that.
Emily: [laughs].
Laura: It reminds me of Leviticus. A book that we might say, "Hey, this is kind of boring, or this is kind of painful." Actually, shocker of all shockers, when I finally took time to truly study Leviticus, it actually became one of my favorite books in the Bible. I kid you not, I am not just saying that to sound cool or something, but it did because what I realized is that instead of showing this harsh side of God, that I think a lot of us think about, it actually shows his compassion and care for his people. Just to give you a small taste of what that is, in essence, a lot of those laws that God gave to the people about clean and unclean, they were for hygienic purposes.
In fact, they kept the Israelites significantly healthier than anybody around them. Think about things like when a woman had her time of the month or she had a baby and she was deemed unclean, guess what that did? In a culture that normally would just say, "Get up and make some food." Instead, it gave her rest. It gave her time to recuperate. That to me is so amazing. It's such a beautiful side of the Lord that he gives these commands and these laws that we think, like Em has said, are arbitrary or they're harsh or they're mean, but instead, actually in his way, they are kind and compassionate and they’re for our good.
Emily: Yes, absolutely. They're from a loving Father who knows more than we do, and sees more than we do, and he doesn't want us to die. But also, if we listen to our loving Father, in general, things are going to go a lot better for us. We're going to be a lot more peaceful and a lot more joyful. Of course, it's not this perfect 1:1 ratio of, “I did what was right, therefore all my relationships are great,” but this idea that when we give in to that thing that we know we're not supposed to do, that felt good right there in the moment, what often happens afterwards? We feel guilty, there's consequences even if we don't reap them immediately, there's something that gets complicated, we dull our conscience. There's all these negative side effects of that. The Lord knows that. He doesn't want that for us.
Laura: Yes, the short-term fun for long-term pain is what it ends up being. We want to go back a little bit to Emily's good questions about, “What on earth do I obey as a mom, or what determines what I'm supposed to be doing as a mom?” As we talked about, we actually are all obeying something. We're not paving our own path. Like “Laura Wifler” likes to pretend I'm doing, but instead, I mean, there are so many things, as I thought about this question that I was informing my own motherhood, everything from social media and the people that I'm following and what baby gear they tell me to get. If they're all homeschooling, then I'm like, "That looks cool. Maybe I should do that too." We’re following culture, or the general trends of America or where you might live. Then, we have all these micro-cultures too that inform our motherhood.
It really is dependent upon maybe where you live. We talked to other R|M team members and they're like, "We're from the south." They've got all these things that they do. They put their kids in–What were those things?
Emily: Smocking? No.
Laura: They had the weirdest word. Y'all in the south. I just used y'all.
Emily: They keep monograms on everything.
Laura: They had pinstripes on them—Seersucker! But what was—Y'all are going to know exactly what we're talking about.
Emily: It wasn't smocks. No?
Laura: Jockeys? It was like a J.
Emily: [laughter] We're going to get a bunch of emails.
Laura: Anyways, they would put their kids in these outfits.
Emily: That was their norm.
Laura: That was the norm for them. We were like, "Us in Iowa—"[laughter]
Emily: We don't even remember what that is. [laughter]
Laura: We wear leggings and jeans, that's it for our kids. That was very normal. I think that it's interesting because they were even just talking about how that's—
Emily: The pressure to have the cute baby outfits, the toddler outfits.
Laura: Exactly. We have our own version of that, everybody does, but there are definitely things that are informing our motherhood and the choices that we make and the way that we want to raise our kids.
Emily: [laughter]
Laura: [laughter] What?
Emily: I was laughing because in Iowa, I felt pressure to have a membership to the agritourist location near us to go watch the pig races because that's what everyone is doing.
Laura: It is kind of true.
Emily: Sorry, guys.
Laura: We are very cool in Iowa. If you would like to come move here, we would welcome you with open arms.
Emily: We have a corn pool, too.
Laura: We have a corn pool, we have tractors that you can ride and all sorts of things.
Emily: I digress. You were saying something really good there.
Laura: Well, let's move to talk about instead of obeying or feeling pressure to follow culture, what instead should we obey?
Emily: We're going to do a whole show on this, but—
Laura: Guys, we're going to talk about God's will. Just know. We’re going to talk about it.
Emily: What we obey is laid out in the Word of God. This is not just for the people who lived during the time when the Bible was written, it's for all people, for all of time. It talks about all the things that he wants for us, Psalm 119:160 says, "The sum of your Word is truth and every one of your righteous ordinances is everlasting." Of course, we all know the one, "All scripture is God-breathed and useful for teaching, rebuking," all of those things. That's just a short way of saying, "God's Word is what we follow and it lays out his will."
Laura: We're going to dig more into that in a dedicated episode. I know anytime someone talks about God's will, I perk up hardcore. We’ll address it as best we can. Don't expect too much, but with that, then it comes into this, "If I know I'm supposed to love God, love my neighbor, I'm supposed to follow God's commands laid out in scripture, well how on earth do I do that?" because if you guys are anything like us, constantly, Emily and I are asking, "Well, I don't really think that that's how I was made, or this is not really what I'm naturally drawn to, or this is not what my personality test says that I'm supposed to be."
Oftentimes, it can feel like, "Well, even if I know what I'm supposed to do, I can't actually do that, or I don't know how to get there."
Emily: Right. This is where the gospel comes in, right? Where we need grace. We need what Jesus did on the cross. We need to know that he really was raised from the dead and that he has sent his Holy Spirit to come live inside of us, to transform us, to make us alive. I really liked that reminder that he gives us, he removes the penalty of our sin and he also gives us power over sin so that we can actually make progress. We're going to talk about that more, but we can't obey.
Laura: Well, I've always loved this idea that Jesus had to learn obedience. He learned it through suffering and he knew, of course, obedience as God, but he fully experienced it as a human. It's like, "If Christ was subjected to that, how can we not also follow the lead of our Savior?" I just think that's a very beautiful picture for us to walk in light of, but then, of course, we're like, "Okay, by the power of the Spirit, I can grow, and I can change, and I can obey."
Of course, there are so many things in the Christian life that I think, even as we might get a little bit better, it still feels like, "Oh my goodness, there's this huge graveyard of things I still need to deal with. I'm nowhere near holiness. I'm nowhere near where I should be.” I think there's some things that need to undergird our thinking as we process that.
Emily: It reminds me of last summer. I decided that I was going to try to do a better job with weeds at our house. I started pulling, the big, ugly, nasty ones. Then, I would get a little bit closer. After all the big ones were gone, I saw a ton of medium-sized ones. I'm like, "I can still get these. These are the medium-sized ones.” Then, as soon as all the medium-sized ones were gone, I would realize there were all of these little tiny ones that were just a little bit, like a centimeter above the surface. I was like, "No, that's going to take me 10 hours to pull all of those."
I think this obedience question in motherhood, for me, has been a lot of, pulling up the big weeds in the first year or two, and then there's been some medium ones. Maybe, I'm not even to the small ones yet, but it feels like I'm in the small ones. Just one at a time. Now, it's down to the minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day. “What am I going to do today? Am I going to follow my own desires? Am I going to follow what I want to do, or am I going to obey the Lord? Am I going to repent here, or am I going to dig in my heels? Am I going to turn towards God, or am I going to cross my arms and turn the other direction and be like my toddler, who's like, ‘No.’” Those are the questions.
Laura: I like to think of change as a spiral, just this idea that the more we realize and make changes—we have sanctification occurring—then it spirals down and you realize the depth of your sin more and more and more. As you progress up towards holiness, you start to feel like you're a worse person and that's normal. That, for me, was something that I really had to learn to understand, is that, "No, it's not actually like that I'm a worse person than I was before," Because that can get really depressing really fast, right?
Emily: Oh, yes.
Laura: Instead, it's just actually the fact that my lens or my view of holiness, and my understanding of who I am versus who God is, has widened. That lens has grown significantly to where I actually probably have a more proper understanding of how depraved I am. As I get better at obeying God, I actually am unearthing all these other, like Emily said, these tiny little weeds. Or, sometimes, maybe that big giant weed that you pulled is coming back as a seedling again.
You're realizing, "Oh, I still have to deal with this,” and it's going to be significantly easier because you've already done some of that hard work of unearthing it. Instead, we're just saying, "Okay, I'm in maintenance mode or I'm—" You don't want to be in maintenance. That's not the right word.
Emily: I know what you mean. I think too, you can get to where you're like, "I'm going to pull things faster right when I see them come up versus waiting until they become a big weed." Because—we're getting deep into the weed analogy—the big weeds, they displace a lot of ground and they are hard to rip up. When you rip them up, they leave a hole. Baby weeds, they come up a little faster. I think I'm learning, pull it out right away, don't wait until it's gotten its root system underneath your good plants.
Laura: Yes, exactly. That's one of the things we want to encourage you in right at the start. I think that as you work on obedience, and as you begin to understand God's holiness, which we're going to—that’s what this whole series is going to be about—I think that you'll find that maybe sometimes obedience is discouraging in the way that we talked about at the very beginning.
Emily: Looping back to frustration.
Laura: The same circle, here we go. But, there is hope in all of this. There is evidence of fruit like we talked about at the beginning as well, where we start to see, "Wow, there's real change occurring, and I'm having victory. I'm seeing these moments where that was not of me.” You guys, I've had a few really acute moments where I felt like, "Oh, my goodness, this response, like four years ago, I would've never responded like that."
I tell you what, if you don't hit your knees and worship after that moment, I don't know what’ll make you go there because it has been such a sweet moment for me where it's not even like a choosing my attitude, it's like, "Wow, my heart really is at peace in this moment," or like, "Wow, I really am not fighting what would normally have set me off and made me angry or afraid." Instead, I really feel contentment and peace in my heart. You know that is only of God.
Emily: You're just a kid enjoying the beauty of the yard, Laura.
Laura: That's right. I like it.
Emily: I think that's exactly where we're going. Just exploring the idea that we actually do experience freedom and joy, and get to walk in the life that God has given us when we obey his commands. Stay tuned. We've got several more weeks of this. We're going to dig in more and we're excited for you to join us. See you next time.