I believe that one of the implications of the message Pastor Chris used this past Sunday to begin the new Power and Authority of a Submissive Heart series is that Human beings were originally created to experience submission to God as pure joy. How great was our fall that today so many of us tend to hate the very thought of submission, not only to our God but also to those our God has truly put over us? How far have we departed from what we were intended to be that “obedience” has become such a dirty word, even in the Church?

As Chris said, the stubborn drive for personal autonomy is nothing new to our race as a whole. It is, in fact, the essence of the fall of humankind. What is new over the past several decades is the tendency for American believers to embrace the idea that it is possible to adopt many of the trappings of our culture’s love affair with radical individualism while at the same time presuming to conform ourselves to the image of Christ. To imagine that we can be good Christ-followers and also abhor being in submission to anyone is to indulge in a particularly dangerous form of self-deception. How can we expect to be like Jesus, coming to have the heart of a servant when many of us consciously or unconsciously despise the very term “servant”?

It is only through sincere desire and actual action to become obedient to God and, to a much lesser extent, to those people He has seen fit to put over us in various capacities that we progress in the Christian life. This is a tough nut for many of us to swallow in 2018.

There are, of course, sometimes reasons for this that go beyond sinful willfulness on our part. If we grew up with parents or other authority figures, including religious ones, who demanded unquestioning loyalty from us while being lovelessly abusive at the same time, we will find it that much more difficult to trust God enough to submit to both Him and his human proxies. It is not helpful to assume that the wounds of our past have no bearing on answering the call to obedience we are faced with today. Neither is it helpful, as Chris also pointed out, to ignore the increasingly obvious lack of character in so many of our leaders on every level of contemporary society.

The sad thing is that authentic freedom and real joy only come through trusting in God enough to forsake the false freedom promised by radical personal autonomy. Becoming obedient to the One who loves us perfectly (and thus perfectly has our best interests at heart) is the only thing that will give us the abundant life that the world promises to those who are “Captains of their own souls.”

If we persist in the kind of pride that informs us that no one should ever be in any kind of authority over us, even divinely-assigned authority, then we ultimately condemn ourselves to relational desolation. Unrepentant willful independence from God and those who He has appointed to guide and love us is in the end self-defeating in the worst sense of the term. It leaves us isolated and unable to dwell in the love we need to truly live. Such “freedom” is not freedom at all, but bondage.