"Elect according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through sanctification of the Spirit, unto obedience and sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ" (1 Peter 1:2).
It is essential for the true character of our path as Christians that we should lay hold of what this obedience of the Lord Jesus Christ was. The character of Christ’s obedience was different from legal obedience. If my child wants to do something, and I forbid it, and the child promptly obeys, I speak of its ready obedience. Christ never obeyed in this way; He never had a desire checked by an imposed law. It was never needed to say to Him, "Thou shalt not," when He willed to do something. He acted because the Father willed it. That was His motive, the only cause of His acting. He lived by every word that proceeded out of the mouth of God. When there was none, He had nothing to do. Hence the will of God, whatever it was, was His rule.
This is the true character of the obedience of Jesus Christ and of our obedience as Christians_that the will of God is the reason, the motive, for doing a thing. We are sanctified to the obedience of Jesus Christ, to obey as He obeyed. When Satan came and said to Him, "Command that these stones be made bread" (Matt. 4:3), He answered, "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word … of God" (verse 4). His actual life, as carried out in conduct, flowed from the Word of God, which was His motive for doing it; if He had not that, He had no motive. If I have no motive but my Father’s will, how astonishingly it simplifies everything! If you never thought of doing a thing unless it was God’s positive will that you should do it, surely three-quarters of your questions and perplexities would at once disappear! This is the practical truth as to ourselves; yet we clearly see that such was the obedience of Christ.
This, too, is the principle of real godliness, because it keeps us in constant dependence upon God, and constant reference to God. It is an amazing comfort for my soul to think that there is not a single thing all through my life in which God as my Father has not a positive will about me to direct me; that there is not a step from the moment I am born (though while we are unconverted we understand nothing about it) in which there is not a positive path or will of God to direct me here. I may forget it and fail, but we have in the Word and will of God that which keeps the soul, not in a constant struggle against one thing and another, but in the quiet consciousness that the grace of God has provided for everything_that I do not take a step that His love has not provided for. It keeps the soul in the sweet sense of divine favor and in dependence upon God, so that like David we can say, "Thy right hand upholdeth me" (Psalm 63:8). Moses does not say, "Show me a way through the wilderness," but "Show me now Thy way" (Exod. 33:13). A man’s ways reveal what he is; God’s way shows what He is.
In its path the heart gets separated more and more intelligently to God, and gets to understand what God is. If I know that God likes this and likes that along my path, it is because I know what He is; and besides its being the right path and causing us thus to grow in intelligent holiness of life, there is godliness in it too. The constant referring of the heart affectionately to God is real godliness and we have to look for that. We have it perfectly in our Lord:"I knew," He said, "that Thou hearest Me always" (John 11:42). There is the confidence of power and reference to God with confiding affection. If I know that it is His path of goodness, His will that is the source of everything to me, there is then the cultivation of a life consistent in its ways with God; communion is uninterrupted because the Spirit is not grieved. This is the obedience of Jesus Christ to which we are set apart.
(From "The Path and Character of the Christian," in Collected Writings, Vol. 16.)