“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 Pet.
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 upholds me” (Psa. 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. He
said, “I knew 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.)