Four Stages of Learning to Obey

We define a “disciple” this way:
A disciple is a Christ-follower who is, by the sanctifying power of God’s Spirit and His Word, constantly learning how to bring every aspect of his or her life into obedience to Christ.

I was talking with a friend recently. We were discussing the “every aspect of life” part of that definition. We thought about the whole range of private, personal, and public aspects of life that we need to bring into alignment with the authority of our Master:
 

• ambitions
• priorities
• fantasies
• anxieties
• family life
• finances
• use of time
• work-life balance
• work ethic
• social media presence

 
If I am a Christ-follower, I have adopted a settled life posture of a learner. I am constantly learning how to bring each aspect under the authority and rule of my Master – not just my public persona but also my most intimate inward thoughts.

As I talked with my friend, we realized that the Spirit often takes us through four stages of learning how to obey:

1. Blind Spot

Sometimes I cannot see my sin until the Spirit reveals it because my sin is a blind spot. It’s a “blind spot” precisely because I cannot see the sin.

Why is my sin invisible to me? It’s often a combination of inability and unwillingness: I can’t see how I am being disobedient, and also I don’t want to see how I’m being disobedient. As a result, what is glaringly obvious to the Spirit – and often to others around me – is opaque to me. I can go on for years, even decades, oblivious to the sin that is in my life. This is especially easy when my sin aligns with the idolatry of my culture or my tribe: I cannot see the problem with something that everyone around me embraces without thought or debate.

2. Awareness

God’s Spirit sometimes uses His Word to awaken me to my disobedience. James describes that compares that process to looking into a mirror (James 1:22-25). But the Spirit often uses the people of God who can see what I cannot/will not, people who love me enough to make me aware of aspects of my life that are out of alignment.

This stage is disorienting. I experience a cognitive dissonance as I begin to see the tension between how things are and how they ought to be in one specific area of my life, and I churn inwardly with that growing awareness of my disobedience.

(This is one of the big advantages of being married to a godly spouse. My wife knows me better than any other human, and she – this woman who is not only my wife but also my sister in Christ – loves me enough to sometimes tell me things I don’t want to hear.)

This phase of uneasy awareness can go on for days or even weeks. I will stay in this uncomfortable state until I reach a point of surrender, where I acknowledge my sin before God and decisively submit to His Lordship in the matter.

But surrender isn’t the final step, not by a long shot.

3. The Struggle of Sanctification

This stage usually takes a while. Why? Because God’s Spirit works to transform me from the inside, so it can take Him a long time to recalibrate my inner workings. His goal is to create a new set of instincts, to “write His Law on [my] heart,” as the prophet put it (Jer 31:33).

That heart-writing is usually a painstaking and tedious process, as He must dismantle old ways of thinking and demolish cherished priorities to build up a new mindset and new values.

But that long struggle of sanctification is always worth it when He brings us to the final stage:

4. New Instincts

Because the Spirit’s work is inward and slow, we will often not know we have arrived at this fourth stage until we encounter some provocation and find ourselves – to our delight – reacting differently than we did before.

There is great joy in such a moment, realizing what the Spirit has been doing in my life, realizing that in one particular aspect of my life, God’s Spirit has been writing His Law on my heart. It is a great joy to understand that God’s Spirit has taken me from blind spot to new inward orientation. He has recalibrated my instincts so that in an aspect of my life where I was once steadfastly disobedient, now I am ready and able to obey.

And this is how God’s Spirit patiently sanctifies me.
 
He is at work in every sphere of my life – the public, the personal, and the private – patiently bringing my blind spots to my attention and meticulously reorienting my inner life. And He will be about that sanctifying task so long as I am in this body.
 
I asked my friend if he’d seen this four-stage process in his own life.

He said he had. He used to swear. A lot. He said his foul mouth didn’t bother him when he was young, and he even took some perverse pride in his ability to tear someone down verbally.

It was a blind spot. And now it is in his past. He has seen God’s Spirit move him from blind spot to new instincts.

This is the glorious promise that we can cling to in the uneven progress of our spiritual formation. He will be faithful to continue to bend the trajectory of our lives toward a holiness that springs from inside, where He does His patient work: “I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ” (Phil 1:6).

Amen and amen!

Persevere,
Paul Pyle
Pastor of Discipleship