#49. Belong and Obey
Our children are welcomed into our family long before there is any talk of obedience, before they have the capacity to express anything other than hungry dependence. Their two year old disobedience doesn’t disqualify them from being in the family and their four year old obedience doesn’t graduate them into it. The belonging—them in our care, and our privileged duty to nurture them—the mutual orientation of us toward them and them toward us, precedes obedience. Obedience doesn’t bring about belonging, the belonging comes first. When we belong, we express our connectedness through obedience.
Belonging in a family is a metaphor for the more permanent and absolute belonging. The greater belonging—belonging to God—leads to an obedience that outlasts and transcends the obedience of children to parents. Belonging and obeying in a family helps our children learn the rhythms of belonging to, and obeying God. Our family doesn’t bring about the belonging, any more than our own obedience brings us to belong to God. God initiates belonging.
We belong doubly to God: he made us, so he owns us; Christ paid to bring us back to God, so we belong to our triune God twice over. We learn to obey as Christians when we grow in our understanding of what it means to belong to the Lord. We teach our children to obey to help them recognise, and enter into, that double belonging.
God’s Spirit causes us to be born again to belong to him. God takes hold of us and adopts us as his own children, through Jesus’ death. He takes hold of us and we belong to him, not by any work of wit or strength of our own. He moved toward us and scooped us up when we were limp and lifeless, powerless to do anything other than be held. Unlike being born into our human families, God took hold of those who were once his enemies. We’re not born biologically into his family. We have to be born again, resurrected from the spiritual deadness that had earned us the opposite of God’s welcome. The fact that we can belong to our Heavenly Father is the most startling, unnatural thing. As unnatural to us as the obedience that follows and proves it.
Obedience Reveals Belonging
Having established our belonging, God’s Spirit trains us into obedience. He changes what we trust and treasure, what we will and act for, so that we grow into new obedience. God brings us to belong and he provides all the materials for obedience to follow. That is always God’s pattern: he redeems people to be his own treasured possession, then shows them how to obey (Exodus 19:3-6 and 1 Peter). When people don’t want to belong, they disobey. Persistent disobedience ultimately proves when people don’t belong to the Lord. Abiding in Jesus—continuing to express our belonging to him—is shown in obeying him (John 15). Because God’s people belong to him, they express their belonging by doing what he says.
What we obey shows who we are slaves to, who we feel we belong to. Paul says:
“What then? Shall we sin because we are not under the law but under grace? By no means! Don’t you know that when you offer yourselves to someone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one you obey—whether you are slaves to sin, which leads to death, or to obedience, which leads to righteousness? But thanks be to God that, though you used to be slaves to sin, you have come to obey from your heart the pattern of teaching that has now claimed your allegiance. You have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness.” Romans 6:15-18
Obedience Orients our Belonging
God designed families to be the place where the children of believers grow into their own sense of belonging to himself. Family is a training ground for the deeper belonging. Paul’s words help us avoid a trap. Yes, our children are naturally born into sin’s slavery. But as they encounter a “pattern of teaching” (responding to all of God’s word as it is centred on Christ), there is a process through which—as far as the human eye can see—that teaching comes to claim their allegiance. As it does, they come to obey from the heart, knowing whom they belong to. While the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit happens in an instant, out of our sight, the process we observe in our children is longer and incremental. Families immerse children in a pattern of teaching and obeying Jesus. Patterns take time to form. That pattern, over time, claims allegiances. Our mothering passes on a pattern of teaching and obeying that reflects our belonging. The norms we set and the obedience we require will shape our children’s sense either that they belong to themselves or belong to Jesus. Obedience from the heart starts with a pattern of teaching.
Concrete before the Abstract
Some of Charlotte Mason’s educational philosophy helps us here. Children need hundreds of hours out of doors, playing with water, experiencing its effervescence before they study the properties of H2O in the abstract. Children need to become familiar friends with the trees in their neighbourhood, noticing the effect of the seasons, before they learn to label the parts of a plant. Mucking around in a sandpit, seeing how water wears down the miniature mountain becomes their first experience of physical geography before they open a book about it. Children experience the joy of rhythmic language in song and nursery rhyme long before they learn to label the metre of a poem. They learn to have conversations and then read and write before they can parse a sentence in a grammar lesson. Children need to see the meaning and value of number as they handle objects before they start manipulating abstract numerical symbols. The whole-bodied experience of reality precedes abstract descriptions about it. Children need to form a relationship with a thing before they learn the abstract ideas about that thing.
The concrete-then-abstract experience holds for children coming to know that they belong to Jesus. For children growing up in Christian homes, the whole-bodied experience of belonging and obeying trains them to live as Jesus’ people before they can understand the abstractions. They’re meant to know it from the inside out. Children belong to our own family so they can be immersed in the experience of obeying Jesus because we belong to Jesus. They need to know the taste of sweet obedience, what living as Jesus’ people means from dawn to day’s end. This is exciting, because it means that obedience training is more than following rules, it’s about using all of life to experience the goodness of being ordered a certain way, the goodness of belonging to God. When children learn to obey parents who are seen, they are immersed in a concrete lesson in belonging to the unseen Father. How we order our days with our children, the culture we nourish, the standard that prevails, are the means we have to teach our children what it means to belong to Jesus in the minutiae of life.
Obedience is More than Rules
Obedience isn’t about keeping ten thousand rules. In our own obedience as mums, and in helping our children learn to obey, rules cover only a fraction of the surface area. Rules aren’t the entirety of obedience, they only define the edges. Rules are fences and gates; obedience is the space between. Good rules protect and direct and give definition to obedience, but they are signposts, not the substance. Rules are a step in describing the features of godliness, what it looks like to actively belong.
For their season of dependent childhood, belonging to a family, and learning to obey within that family, is the most common, enduring, complex, deepest form of evangelism and discipleship. It is a temporary season though, a season of higher dependence to prepare them to live for Jesus away from us.
Obedience Beyond Mum’s Rules
When my teenagers head out the door, my departing words are, “Remember who you belong to”*. I need to remind my grown children that I’m not talking about them belonging to myself and our family. Honestly, I need to remind myself too, because that shift towards independence makes me ache, even while it delights. But, the reminders of belonging are not the words of a desperate mother trying to keep the reins tight on her children. I am receding, and I am meant to be. The bonds of dependence and that deep, immersive family-belonging was never ultimately so they would belong to me. The sense of belonging between parents and children is the first embodied experience of belonging our children have to prepare them for seeing the One to whom they truly belong.
As they grow into their independence, and I see all the choices they are quite capable of making, it’s tempting to rattle off a list of prohibitions. But in the face of independence, rules are feeble. These children don’t belong to me, but they don’t belong to themselves either. The only restraint on their disobedience will be knowing they belong to the Lord. As they take on independence, they need to have, not a legal code of what they may and may not do, a list of prohibitions, but some bigger framework to practice discernment. Because so many of the situations we face aren’t addressed in a rule. The rules are only contextual boundary markers. Obeying Jesus isn’t always a matter of answering, “what specific command relates to this situation?” (although if there is one, then that’s a clear answer). The legalist supposes that, because the Bible doesn’t say anything specific about a particular issue, they are free to come to their own conclusion. Not true.
When our grown children are walking into life without an ever-present mother to obey, what they need is an instinct and appetites that have been oriented in God’s way. That’s what the years of obeying in a family are for: preparing their instincts to obey Jesus apart from Mum and Dad. To make them less dependent on us to regulate their obedience. They need a strong sense that they belong to Jesus, that all the free open spaces they are venturing into are from Jesus and for him. Those spaces need to be entered and enjoyed on God’s terms.
If we face the world as people who belong to Jesus, there will be a new ethical instinct that emerges: how do I express the fact that I belong to Jesus in this situation? Instead of a list of prohibitions will be a desire to please the Lord (note Paul’s example in 2 Cor 5). Belonging is a better basis for obedience than rules, because knowing who we belong to leads to an obedience that isn’t preoccupied with how close to sin we’re permitted to go. It actively pursues what God delights in. It’s a bubbling over, bursting the bounds kind of obedience. It fills spaces rather than getting cut on the wiry fences.
*I think I gleaned that habit several years ago from Rachel Jankovic or Bekah Merkle via their What Have You podcast. It has grown a life of its own in our own family since.
