When Obedience Feels Like Death | Obedience .04 Transcript

This transcript has been edited for clarity. 

Laura Wifler: Hey, friends, welcome back to another episode of Risen Motherhood. I'm Laura and Emily is going to join me in just a couple of minutes. First, I want to tell you guys about a couple of cool, free things that we have for you to access. The first thing is a bible study. If you have not heard about it yet, we have an awesome five-day bible study written by our very own Courtney Reissig that is super helpful, super digestible, and super easy for a mom.

You can do it in an afternoon. You can do it in a few days. You can do it in five weeks, whatever works for you. We're hopeful that it’ll be a great companion piece for you as you go through this Obedience series with Emily and I. As you listen to the shows, this is a piece where you can cross-check, learn and study God's word first hand for yourself. Check that out if you haven't, it can be found at risenmotherhood.com/obedience. There you're going to find all sorts of resources about the topic of obedience, so head there to get the download.

The second thing I want to tell you about are book clubs. You probably heard Emily talk about these last week on the show. There are tons of great resources that are going to equip you guys if you want to host a book club this summer. We have a Book Club 101, where we're just walking you through questions like, "Where do I meet? Do I serve food? What kind of music do I play," or whatever. Whatever your questions are, we're going to be answering those in a document that you're going to get for free when you sign up to host a book club.

You're also going to get a leader's guide where we're teaching—I mean, this thing is robust and big. We’re helping you learn how to think in the same way that we think throughout the book so you can begin to take topics and subjects that we perhaps don't even talk about in the book, but you can take your own unique situation and then apply the gospel to that. That’s really a hefty, meaty piece of content that I think is so helpful. I want all of you guys to have it, so if you sign up to be a leader, you're going to get that.

Then, in addition, this is so fun. As we partner with our publishing house Harvest House, in order to make this a reality for you guys, they are giving away 1,000 mugs. The first 1,000 book groups to sign up, each of the leaders, you're going to get this beautiful, unique mug that coincides with some of the art that's in the book. Your participants will also have some freebies, too.

Head over to risenmotherhood.com/book to learn all about the book clubs, what you're going to get, why you should sign-up to host one. We can't wait to see all of you who signed up. June 6th is the last day that you can get your name in, you’ve got a couple of weeks here, so go forth and head over to that web page. Okay, let's get to the show.

Emily Jensen: Hey, friends, welcome back to our series on obedience. We’ve been talking all about, “What does it look like to obey God in motherhood? How do we do that?” All of those different details, and today we're getting down to the nitty-gritty of what to do when obedience gets really, really hard. Not just because it's hard for us with our sin, but because our circumstances are really hard. So, we're going to be diving into suffering and obedience today.

Laura: Yes, when we talk about suffering, I think giving it a little bit of definition could be helpful. There are obviously varying degrees of what suffering is or even how people would define it. For us, we're just talking about any time that you’re going through pain, or distress, or hardship. That could be anything from perhaps having a child with special needs, or having a husband that works long hours, or going through a difficult friendship breakup.

There's all sorts of different hard things that occur in our lives where the Lord is asking us for obedience, but it feels particularly hard in that moment, or there are maybe some bigger questions going on where we're asking, "Lord, what are you doing? Why are you doing this? Have you forgotten me? Have you overlooked me?" A lot of times, it's causing more acute questions and feelings about our relationship with the Lord.

Emily: I think suffering is interesting because we're promised that we're going to suffer in the Bible if we are Christians. Scripture tells us we shouldn't be surprised when trials come our way. This is going to be part of life in a broken world. It's going to be part of the life of sinners living with sinners. It's going to be part of being a Christian and potentially even being persecuted or having different things happen as a result of your faith in Christ.

This isn't a new thing or a shocking thing, but scripture also tells us that suffering can produce a lot of blessing in our life. It can sanctify us and it can bring us closer to God. It can be something that prepares us for heaven. It's this thing that we don't love that we know is going to happen but at the same time, it can end up being an amazing gift.

Laura: As I was thinking about the Bible, just in general, I kept thinking about how pretty much every story in the Bible has some form of suffering in it. It's somehow highlighting some difficulty. I was thinking about Eve, she's banished from her home and then her son murders her other son, how horrific. Naomi and Ruth, you think about them, they lose their husbands. They're both completely destitute as widows and they're in a lower class, they’re in total poverty. We have Sarah and Hannah, those are both women who struggle with infertility for a super long time.

Then, I think about Hannah whenever she was given the gift of a son, she actually had to give that son up. She chose to give that son up into a life of service to the Lord. Just imagine, we're all moms listening to that and I just think about giving up my babe at two or three and how that would be so hard, or Mary having to watch her own son, Jesus Christ be crucified on the cross.

I think we read these stories so often, and we hear about them and they become so familiar that we forget that these women suffered very, very real things. If they were our friends or our family, we would be absolutely devastated for them. We would cry alongside them, we would bring them meals, we would bring them gift cards, we would send them flowers, we would be attending funerals. We'd be doing all these things to support them. I think it's good to sit and realize that suffering is not a new thing. It's not a unique special thing. We're not totally alone in these hard things. It's definitely something that's happened since right after the beginning of time, after the fall.

Emily: It's definitely not new and yet, it's something that the Lord uses and he's still—I think this is hard for us to get our minds around but that he still expects us and wants and has good things for us if we follow him and obey him in the midst of that because he's going to produce fruit. I know one of the interesting examples of that is the idea of a vine. I have never grown a grapevine. Laura, I know you guys had a lot of wild stuff growing in your home when you lived in Minnesota. Tell us. What do you do to a vine? 

Laura: We totally inherited this actually beautiful garden and prairie grasses and all sorts of different things. My husband and I did not have a green thumb. I do feel a little badly for the previous owners because we were certainly not prepared to inherit the yard of that house. There was a grapevine. The first year, it grew so burly. It was maybe 30 feet long. It was so long, and it just grew into a gigantic bush.

We were so excited when we first bought the house. We thought: We're going to have these luscious, beautiful grapes that we're going to eat from. They’re going to just drape over the pergola. It's going to be amazing.  We had no grapes. No fruit ever occurred. It just got bigger and bigger and bigger. It was huge, but there wasn’t one grape on the whole vine. What we realized, after doing a bit of research, was that vines only produce fruit when they're dying. They literally have to think they're going to die in order to produce fruit.

They have to think their life is in total danger or they won't live. You have to viciously prune these things back. You have to cut them back to where you think you’re killing it. The first time I did it I was like, "Oh, my word, I have definitely killed this. It's tiny, it's small, it’s bare. It's just these twigs." And that is such a great analogy for what obedience looks like, especially in suffering. It feels like a death. It feels incredibly hard, and I think that's because what we're doing is we’re killing our own natural desires, our fleshly wants. We’re killing our natural self.

We're replacing our old desires with these renewed, redeemed, sanctified, gospel-driven desires. God says, "I am making all things new." He is doing that in ourselves, in our hearts as we walk through difficult paths. I think about Matthew 7:21 "Not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven." Not the one who does their own will, it's the one who does the will of his Father, the one who does the will of God. It's the person who says “yes” when what they really want to do is say “no.”

Emily: Yes, well, I think what you're saying is really true because sometimes, at least I know, I can use easier circumstances as a crutch to make me feel like I'm not doing that bad. I'm pretty good at obeying the Lord, but really, it's like, "Well sure, when I've gotten enough sleep, and people are saying thank you to me a lot, and I have all of the things that I need, and life is pretty smooth and easy, and I've got tons of support—then I can obey." It does look like obedience to God isn't that hard in whatever my situation is. I am able perhaps to be a little bit more patient, or self-controlled, or prayerful, or joyful in this or that situation. If you want to really see what's under there, cut my plant back, take away the things that help scaffold that.

Certainly, we’re humans, we need real things, we need food, we need sleep, all of those things. I'm not trying to diminish the real needs we have. Certainly, it reveals what's really going on in our heart when we can't have those supports, or those comforts, or things are more distressing or painful.

I know, in the past couple of years, I've dealt with some back pain. I've noticed that if I have that pain in my back all day, I'm on edge. It takes a lot more dependence on the Lord for me to have patience or kindness in a situation because that pain is revealing my natural desire to snap back at somebody. I think you're really right that this suffering or pruning can be a really important opportunity to produce authentic fruit.

Laura: I've shared before, I've thought, "Oh, suffering is the sign of a super Christian," or you read these great Christian biographies, or you hear about these great stories at church. It's usually someone who has gone through deep and very painful suffering.

Emily: It can make suffering seem romantic.

Laura: Yes. Then when you are in it, you're like, "This is not a chick flick. This is not romantic. This is not something I ever want," but the end goal, because God sees that big plan, the end goal is always worth it. I'm always reminding myself that every day I have a chance to practice obedience, and I have a chance to strengthen my gospel muscles in obedience, whether it's a small thing or a big thing. I have a chance to choose a happy heart when I don't want to have one about whatever's going on in the evening when I'm ready to be done.

I also have a chance to have a happy heart or choose joy in Christ whenever something really devastating happens that's big and implodes my world. All of those are opportunities to die small, little deaths to self, in order that we might be made new in Christ. That, for me, has been helpful as I think: This is just practice. I am running the race. I am going forward. Each and every one of these little or big moments in my life are moments for me to continue to pursue holiness and grow more and more into the likeness of Christ.

Emily: Totally. I think for me, even that suffering, whether it's a longer season or a short moment, or just a hard thing that happens, is a gift because it exposes how weak I really am. I think that's what you're saying. When you're in the midst of it, it just feels like, "Oh, goodness, I never wanted this. This is so uncomfortable. This is so hard." It, at least for me, lowers my knees to the ground.

It makes me really, really aware in a new way of how I absolutely have to pray, I absolutely have to ask for wisdom. It is not optional, or I truly have no influence over this other person's heart, the only thing I can do is bring my concerns and my desires for them before the Lord. Or you realize, "I'm so tired and I really need support, and the only person who can do that for me right now is the Lord," by his practical, amazing means that He provides for us, either through grace for the moment, or he sends a friend to our door with a meal that we weren't expecting. Whatever that looks like, I think suffering can really reveal weakness, and it's a gift because it makes us cling that much more to Christ.

Laura: Well, on the flip side, I think what's interesting is that you can also catch moments where you've improved. I know for me, I think about my attitude with my husband working long hours and that circumstance hasn't entirely changed even 10 years later. But, it’s amazing because every once in a while, I have caught myself, where I've been like, "It's been a hard week, he's worked a lot, and the kids haven't seen dad a lot."

And, honestly, I can say with 100% truth, that I have peace about it. Do I like the situation? No, but have I somewhat accepted it, and have I trusted God with it, really? Ultimately, have I trusted the Lord with it? The Lord has grown in me a patience and just a steadfastness that my identity isn't in when my husband gets home. My identity isn't in whatever suffering I'm facing. My identity is solid. It's just a rock in Christ. It's been really neat to see these moments where I think to myself –that was not Laura Wifler. There was no way that was Laura Wifler. No, that was Christ in me, that was the Holy Spirit, who has renewed my heart and transformed me.

I would just encourage anyone who's listening, as you go about your day, and you see these little wins, these little moments where you're like, "Wow, that couldn't happen to me."

Emily: That wasn't me.

Laura: "It wasn't me. That was Christ in me." What a gift, what a chance to worship and celebrate. I tell you what, it’s so encouraging when you do find those moments, and you recognize them and you take a moment to stop and say, "Oh, I actually see that." That's what the Lord is trying to do in you. He's growing you towards holiness, which means he's transforming your responses. He's transforming your emotions. He's transforming the way that you view the world around you.

It's really encouraging when you do that, but there's also this discouraging side, where you still will fall into a huge amount of sin. A moment where, for example, for me, I feel like I've made a lot of progress in my anger over the years. Yet, there was a moment where one of my kiddos broke a nail polish bottle, all over my laundry room floor, that is white tile with white grout. (I know, bad idea.) It's just red, like a murder scene in there.

I just remember feeling frustrated and angry, and I gave into it for that moment. I remember afterwards, apologizing to my kids, asking the Lord for forgiveness, repenting. I was really, really broken over it, more than even normal, because I felt like, "Lord, I thought that I had mastered this." I realized I'm just leaning on myself. I thought I had mastered this.

Emily: For me, I think what you were saying about renewal and seeing some growth over time, I think the main thing that's helped me with practical obedience has been seeing the word of God get rooted in my heart, and in my mind in such a way that in those moments, I have to make this choice, by the power of the spirit, Christ in me not Emily, to say, "I'm going to act on what that scripture says, I’m not going to act on what I feel right now," because I think we don’t want to diminish feelings. Feelings give us great information. They tell us what's going on in our hearts and what's going on in our body. So, it's not to diminish that but to know that that feeling I have right now isn't the last word.

The word of God is what is going to have the last word on what I do in this situation because I've noticed that more and more as I've gotten older, that I can tell familiar feeling patterns that are going to come up at different times. Even in the midst of relationships and being obedient to be like, "Okay, I'm going to look out for this other person's interest, or I'm going to try to communicate with them in a way that I know is loving." Whereas 5, 10 years ago, I maybe would have just spit out my thoughts.

It's like, "No, I'm going to remember what the word of God says about how I love my neighbor, or how I love my husband or, being long-suffering, being somebody who's going to be slow to speak and I want to act on that more than the impulse.” I think for me, suffering has really helped me realize how much I have to cling to that, because if I rely on my own internal idea of what's right and wrong in a moment when things are hard, I'm probably going to choose the wrong thing.

Laura: Absolutely. Well, it's the whole, “We become what we behold.” The more we spend time with Jesus, the more into his likeness we'll become. I agree. That's where I have found the most growth is spending time in the word of God. Then, reading about the things of God and then talking with my friends and family about the word of God, and the local church. Sorry, I should have mentioned that one for sure at the beginning, but that's where you do a lot of those things.

For me, that’s how I feel like I've grown. Em and I have never gone to seminary, we've not taken any classes, but because we spend time with the Lord, we've gotten to know him—and we have so much more to grow in this. This is the idea that the more you can spend time with Christ, the more you will know how Christ would respond, or how Christ would act or what he would say, and just what he is asking of you in order to be obedient.

Emily: I want to circle back to that idea of suffering exposing who we really are, making us weak, and helping us understand. We talked about the fear of the Lord in our “Fear” series, and who we are in relation to God. And I think this also softens us to the acceptance of his will for our life that, "Wait a second, I'm actually not God." He knows our frame. “We are but dust,” is what it says. We actually can't plan our own lives very well or establish our own steps in a wise way.

That requires us to totally give ourselves over to the Lord and to trust him that he actually knows all of the different ins and outs of our lives, and he knows everybody that's in our lives, and he can see everything and make wise judgments and make great plans for our good and his glory. I think suffering helps us trust him more in that we see him produce blessings through suffering that we never ever would have chosen for ourselves, but those are actually the good means that God ordains to get us where we're going.

Laura: Suffering forces us to choose, right? It says, "The rubber is meeting the road. Now, you must choose. Will you choose Christ, or will you choose your own path, your own way?" I think so much of it goes back to the fear of the Lord of what we talked about in the last mini-series versus regular, human, or worldly fear. So much of being able to obey in suffering when life gets hard is having a proper reverential fear of God.

I think until we're fully given over to that, until our whole hearts fully believe that, and we say, "Okay, I'm going to give up my rights. I'm going to give up my body. I'm going to give up my talents, my mind, my self-image, my importance, all of the ways that I think that I am equipped and important," then we won't be able to serve God fully. We won't be able to suffer well. We won't be able to do as well until we're able to say, "Okay, I give you my all, God."

When that comes in place, I shared this on Instagram, but I thought it was so, I don't know, cute, like this huge moment with my kids, where I realized that they had been asking, anytime I gave them instruction or asked them to obey me, they would come back and they would say, "Why? Why? Why?" Actually, they would yell it across the yard. They wouldn't even obey. Eventually, I pulled them aside and just said, "Hey, kiddos, instead of saying ‘why’ right away to mom's instruction, can you just say, 'Yes, mom,' just obey first and then later on, after you've obeyed, you can ask me why. I will gladly tell you why but it's not okay for you to first act like I need to convince you why you need to come inside for dinner.'"

I think that's so often what we do with God whenever we're not fully given over to him, our response is, "Well, why God? Why this? Convince me all the ways that I should suffer well through this, or I should obey you in this, or I should say, 'It's okay.'" When really our first response should be, "Lord, I accept. I will do your will, Father, let it be as you say." Of course, we can ask why, but we are always mixing up the order of those two things. I think it was Amy Carmichael who said, "In acceptance lieth peace." That's her famous quote, and it’s such a powerful quote.

That comes to mind—My husband and I joke about it a lot, like, "What are we getting for dinner tonight?" "Chinese." "I don't want Chinese." "No, in acceptance lieth peace, honey." But, really, that quote is so helpful when you think about, "Okay, if I accept, if I trust God fully, if I believe that he is good—and I do—then I can accept this, and I can have peace here in this." There is a time to ask for justice, there is a time to ask for the why. There is a time to say, "Can you change this Lord?” But as Christians, our posture if Christ is reigning supreme in our lives, is for us to just say, "Yes, Lord."

Emily: I think our “whys” really reveal what we expect about how things should be. The reason why we're asking why is because it doesn't line up with what our idea of life is, or somebody's response to us, or the way things should have gone. I think that's another real gift of suffering and trusting God in the midst of it is aligning our will to his. It's essentially saying: "Take my heart and let it be consecrated, Lord, to Thee." What is that line? “Take my will and make it Thine.” I really love this hymn, and we were listening to it the other day in the car and it goes through all the different parts of your body. "Take my hands, take my heart, take my feet, take my voice," and all the different parts of our body, and it’s talking about how we want to give all of those over to the Lord so that he can use every part of who we are for his glory.

I think for me, whenever I start asking, “why” it's because I thought I had a right to something that perhaps I didn't have a right to because I'm not the Lord over my own life. Maybe it’s the right to feeling healthy, and well, and great all the time, or the right to conflict-free things. I think there is a redemptive piece of that that's really good. It's like that longing for heaven because deep down, we know it shouldn't be like this. It shouldn't be broken like this, it shouldn't hurt like this, we shouldn't cry, we shouldn't have to struggle and suffer.

Then there's this other piece where we’re not accepting that that's not yet. We’re not there yet. We're not to the end yet. As long as we’re here on earth, we’re still going to be crying, there’s still going to be brokenness, and we’re going to have to follow the Lord so that he can be our refuge and our protection all the way to the end.

Laura: If we align our expectations properly with what we should be having here on earth, a couple of different things will happen. One will be, I think this world will become a little bit sweeter, even in the suffering, because we're not expecting it to fully fulfill us. We're not expecting it to be our all, or for all of our dreams, and desires, and wants to become a reality. There's this idea of letting heaven be the real heaven. Stop trying to make earth into heaven. I think it was Tim Keller, we heard him talking about this one time where he said, "Don't ask this world to be something that it's not meant to be."

That’s been really helpful as I keep an eternal perspective in mind for my suffering. This life isn’t just for me to have a lot of fun and for it to be super easy, but it's actually for me to be sanctified, to grow in holiness, to become more and more like Christ, to learn obedience the same way that my Lord did. When I have that cap on or those lenses on, that helps me to know, when I'm faced with choices where I feel like obedience is really hard, that I can say, "No, this is what it's all about right now. It's for my good, for God's glory. It's for my own growth."

That, I think, helps me settle in my soul, this idea of being able to accept what the Lord's hand has for me, and to walk in all obedience and saying, "Yes, Lord. This is from your hand, and I will accept."

Emily: Just as a final encouragement with obedience and suffering, remember that as we choose to follow the Lord and do his will in whatever hard circumstances we're facing, we also have a chance to encourage our brothers and sisters in Christ in the church. I think sometimes we have a very individual focus in our suffering like, "The lens is on me. What am I learning? How am I being sanctified?" Yes, that's true. That's absolutely happening, but some of the most encouraging things that I've seen in my own journey of obedience with the Lord is watching other saints endure really tough things and stay faithful to the Lord in the midst of it.

Their obedience and suffering is a gift. It’s something that God uses to spur the church up to love and good works. It's like a ripple effect in the family of God as we see them and say, "Oh, this person endured in the midst of their hard thing. That's what that looks like, I can do that too." Just remember that it's not just about us. It's about how we are contributing to the family of God, to the kingdom of God, and encouraging our sisters and our friends in that journey along with us.