A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society

by Eugene H. Peterson

It turns out that there are some things that don’t change. God doesn’t change: he seeks and he saves. And our response to God as he reveals himself in Jesus doesn’t change: we listen and we follow. Or we don’t.

If you’re worn out in this footrace with men, what makes you think you can race against horses? JEREMIAH 12:5

The essential thing “in heaven and earth” is . . . that there should be long obedience in the same direction; there thereby results, and has always resulted in the long run, something which has made life worth living. FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL

One aspect of world that I have been able to identify as harmful to Christians is the assumption that anything worthwhile can be acquired at once. We assume that if something can be done at all, it can be done quickly and efficiently. Our attention spans have been conditioned by thirty-second commercials. Our sense of reality has been flattened by thirty-page abridgments.

It is not difficult in such a world to get a person interested in the message of the gospel; it is terrifically difficult to sustain the interest.

There is a great market for religious experience in our world; there is little enthusiasm for the patient acquisition of virtue, little inclination to sign up for a long apprenticeship in what earlier generations of Christians called holiness.

Gore Vidal has analyzed as “today’s passion for the immediate and the casual.”

“The essential thing ‘in heaven and earth’ is . . . that there should be long obedience in the same direction; there thereby results, and has always resulted in the long run, something which has made life worth living.”

Disciple (mathētēs) says we are people who spend our lives apprenticed to our master, Jesus Christ. We are in a growing-learning relationship, always. A disciple is a learner, but not in the academic setting of a schoolroom, rather at the work site of a craftsman. We do not acquire information about God but skills in faith.

Pilgrim (parepidēmos) tells us we are people who spend our lives going someplace, going to God, and whose path for getting there is the way, Jesus Christ.

Keep your eyes on Jesus, who both began and finished this race we’re in” (Heb 12:1-2).

Thomas Szasz, in his therapy and writing, has attempted to revive respect for what he calls the “simplest and most ancient of human truths: namely, that life is an arduous and tragic struggle; that what we call ‘sanity,’ what we mean by ‘not being schizophrenic,’ has a great deal to do with competence, earned by struggling for excellence; with compassion, hard won by confronting conflict; and with modesty and patience, acquired through silence and suffering.”

“They are not monuments, but footprints. A monument only says, ‘At least I got this far,’ while a footprint says, ‘This is where I was when I moved again.’

I’m in trouble. I cry to GOD , desperate for an answer: “Deliver me from the liars, GOD! They smile so sweetly but lie through their teeth.” Do you know what’s next, can you see what’s coming, all you barefaced liars? Pointed arrows and burning coals will be your reward. I’m doomed to live in Meshech, cursed with a home in Kedar. My whole life lived camping among quarreling neighbors. I’m all for peace, but the minute I tell them so, they go to war! PSALM 120

Before a man can do things there must be things he will not do. MENCIUS

People submerged in a culture swarming with lies and malice feel as if they are drowning in it: they can trust nothing they hear, depend on no one they meet. Such dissatisfaction with the world as it is is preparation for traveling in the way of Christian discipleship. The dissatisfaction, coupled with a longing for peace and truth, can set us on a pilgrim path of wholeness in God.

A person has to be thoroughly disgusted with the way things are to find the motivation to set out on the Christian way. As long as we think the next election might eliminate crime and establish justice or another scientific breakthrough might save the environment or another pay raise might push us over the edge of anxiety into a life of tranquillity, we are not likely to risk the arduous uncertainties of the life of faith.

A person has to get fed up with the ways of the world before he, before she, acquires an appe...

I’m in trouble is the opening phrase. The last word is war. Not a happy song but an honest and necessary one. Men are set against each other. Women are at each other’s throats. We are taught rivalry from the womb. The world is restless, always spoiling for a fight. No one seems to know how to live in healthy relationships. We persist in turning every community into a sect, every enterprise into a war. We realize, in fugitive moments, that we were made for something different and better—“I’m all for peace”—but there is no confirmation of that realization in our environment, no encouragement of it in our experience. “I’m all for peace; but the minute I tell them so, they go to war!”

We have been told the lie ever since we can remember: human beings are basically nice and good. Everyone is born equal and innocent and self-sufficient. The world is a pleasant, harmless place. We are born free. If we are in chains now, it is someone’s fault, and we can correct it with just a little more intelligence or effort or time. How we can keep on believing this after so many centuries of evidence to the contrary is difficult to comprehend, but nothing we do and nothing anyone else does to us seems to disenchant us from the spell of the lie. We keep expecting things to get better somehow. And when they don’t, we whine like spoiled children who don’t get their way. We accumulate resentment that stores up in anger and erupts in violence.

Convinced by the lie that what we are experiencing is unnatural, an exception, we devise ways to escape the influence of what other people do to us by getting away on a vacation as often as we can. When the vacation is over, we get back into the flow of things again, our naiveté renewed that everything is going to work out all right—only to once more be surprised, hurt, bewildered when it doesn’t. The lie (“everything is OK”) covers up and perpetuates the deep wrong, disguises the violence, the war, the rapacity. Christian consciousness begins in the painful realization that what we had assumed was the truth is in fact a lie.

“Deliver me from the liars, God! They smile so sweetly but lie through their teeth.” Rescue me from the lies of advertisers who claim to know what I need and what I desire, from the lies of entertainers who promise a cheap way to joy, from the lies of politicians who pretend to instruct me in power and morality, from the lies of psychologists who offer to shape my behavior and my morals so that I will live long, happily and successfully, from the lies of religionists who “heal the wounds of this people lightly,” from the lies of moralists who pretend to promote me to the off...

The truth about me is that God made and loves me. The truth about those sitting beside me is that God made them and loves them, and each one is therefore my neighbor. The truth about the world is that God rules and provides for it. The truth about what is wrong with the world is that I and the neighbor sitting beside me have sinned in refusing to let God be for us, over us and in us. The truth about what is at the center of our lives and of our history is that Jesus Christ was crucified on the cross for our sins and raised from the tomb for our salvation and that we can participate in new life as we believe in him, accept his mercy, respond to his love, attend to his commands.

“I am sure that the bit of the road that most requires to be illuminated is the point where it forks.”

The usual biblical word describing the no we say to the world’s lies and the yes we say to God’s truth is repentance.

Repentance is not an emotion. It is not feeling sorry for your sins. It is a decision. It is deciding that you have been wrong in supposing that you could manage your own life and be your own god; it is deciding that you were wrong in thinking that you had, or could get, the strength, education and training to make it on your own; it is deciding that you have been told a pack of lies about yourself and your neighbors and your world. And it is deciding that God in Jesus Christ is telling you the truth. Repentance is a realization that what God wants from you and what you want from God are not going to be achieved by doing the same old things, thinking the same old thoughts.

Repentance is a decision to follow Jesus Christ and become his pilgrim in the path of peace.

Elie Wiesel, referring to the stories of the Hasidim, says that in the tales by Israel of Rizhim one motif recurs again and again: A traveler loses his way in the forest; it is dark and he is afraid. Danger lurks behind every tree. A storm shatters the silence. The fool looks at the lightning, the wise man at the road that lies—illuminated—before him.2

I look to you, heaven-dwelling God, look up to you for help. Like servants, alert to their master’s commands, like a maiden attending her lady, We’re watching and waiting, holding our breath, awaiting your word of mercy. Mercy, GOD, mercy! We’ve been kicked around long enough, Kicked in the teeth by complacent rich men, kicked when we’re down by arrogant brutes. PSALM 123

In general terms, service is a willing, working, and doing in which a person acts not according to his own purposes or plans but with a view to the purpose of another person and according to the need, disposition, and direction of others. It is an act whose freedom is limited and determined by the other’s freedom, an act whose glory becomes increasingly greater to the extent that the doer is not concerned about his own glory but about the glory of the other. . . . It is ministerium Verbi divini, which means, literally, “a servant’s attendance on the divine Word.” The expression “attendance” may call to mind the fact that the New Testament concept of Diakonos originally meant “a waiter.” [We] must wait upon the high majesty of the divine Word, which is God himself as he speaks in his action. KARL BARTH

“So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering” (12:1).

latreia

If GOD hadn’t been for us —all together now, Israel, sing out!— If GOD hadn’t been for us when everyone went against us, We would have been swallowed alive by their violent anger, Swept away by the flood of rage, drowned in the torrent; We would have lost our lives in the wild, raging water. Oh, blessed be GOD! He didn’t go off and leave us. He didn’t abandon us defenseless, helpless as a rabbit in a pack of snarling dogs. We’ve flown free from their fangs, free of their traps, free as a bird. Their grip is broken; we’re free as a bird in flight. GOD’s strong name is our help, the same GOD who made heaven and earth. PSALM 124

The only cure for that kind of cynicism is to bring it out in the open and deal with it. If it is left to work behind the scenes in our hearts, it is a parasite on faith, enervates hope and leaves us anemic in love.

Subjected to our most relentless and searching criticism, Psalm 124 will, I think, finally convince us of its honesty. There is no literature in all the world that is more true to life and more honest than Psalms, for here we have warts-and-all religion. Every skeptical thought, every disappointing venture, every pain, every despair that we can face is lived through and integrated into a personal, saving relationship with God—a relationship that also has in it acts of praise, blessing, peace, security, trust and love.

Those who trust in GOD are like Zion Mountain: Nothing can move it, a rock-solid mountain you can always depend on. Mountains encircle Jerusalem, and GOD encircles his people— always has and always will. The fist of the wicked will never violate What is due the righteous, provoking wrongful violence. Be good to your good people, GOD, to those whose hearts are right! GOD will round up the backsliders, corral them with the incorrigibles. Peace over Israel! PSALM 125

But I am moved. I am full of faith one day and empty with doubt the next. I wake up one morning full of vitality, rejoicing in the sun; the next day I am gray and dismal, faltering and moody.

The opening phrase of the psalm is “those who trust in GOD”—not those who trust in their performance, in their morals, in their righteousness, in their health, in their pastor, in their doctor, in their president, in their economy, in their nation—“those who trust in GOD.” Those who decide that God is for us and will make us whole eternally.

It seemed like a dream, too good to be true, when GOD returned Zion’s exiles. We laughed, we sang, we couldn’t believe our good fortune. We were the talk of the nations— “GOD was wonderful to them!” GOD was wonderful to us; we are one happy people. And now, GOD, do it again— bring rains to our drought-stricken lives So those who planted their crops in despair will shout hurrahs at the harvest, So those who went off with heavy hearts will come home laughing, with armloads of blessing. PSALM 126

“If I want to travel north and all the roads are cut to the east, of course I shall complain of the roads. I shall find nothing but obstacles; I shall have to surmount walls, and cross rivers, and go round about, and after all fail of my end.”

“They’ve kicked me around ever since I was young” —this is how Israel tells it— “They’ve kicked me around ever since I was young, but they never could keep me down. Their plowmen plowed long furrows up and down my back; But GOD wouldn’t put up with it, he sticks with us; Then GOD ripped the harnesses of the evil plowmen to shreds.” Oh, let all those who hate Zion grovel in humiliation; Let them be like grass in shallow ground that withers before the harvest, Before the farmhands can gather it in, the harvesters get in the crop, Before the neighbors have a chance to call out,“ Congratulations on your wonderful crop! We bless you in GOD’s name!” PSALM 129

Patience is drawing on underlying forces; it is powerfully positive, though to a natural view it looks like just sitting it out. How would I persist against positive eroding forces if I were not drawing on invisible forces? And patience has a positive tonic effect on others; because of the presence of the patient person, they revive and go on, as if he were the gyroscope of the ship providing a stable ground. But the patient person himself does not enjoy it. PAUL GOODMAN

I have been beaten times without number. I have faced death again and again. I have been beaten the regulation thirty-nine stripes by the Jews five times. I have been beaten with rods three times. I have been stoned once. I have been shipwrecked three times. I have been twenty-four hours in the open sea. In my travels I have been in constant danger from rivers, from bandits, from my own countrymen, and from pagans. I have faced danger in city streets, danger in the desert, danger on the high seas, danger among false Christians. I have known drudgery, exhaustion, many sleepless nights, hunger and thirst, fasting, cold and exposure. Apart from all external trials I have the daily burden of responsibility for all the churches. Do you think anyone is weak without my feeling his weakness? Does anyone have his faith upset without my burning with indignation? (2 Cor 11:23-29 Phillips)

Stick-to-itiveness. Perseverance. Patience. The way of faith is not a fad that is taken up in one century only to be discarded in the next. It lasts. It is a way that works. It has been tested thoroughly.

Perseverance does not mean “perfection.” It means that we keep going. We do not quit when we find that we are not yet mature and there is a long journey still before

For perseverance is not resignation, putting up with things the way they are, staying in the same old rut year after year after year, or being a doormat for people to wipe their feet on. Endurance is not a desperate hanging on but a traveling from strength to strength. There is nothing fatigued or humdrum in Isaiah, nothing flatfooted in Jesus, nothing jejune in Paul. Perseverance is triumphant and alive.

God Sticks with Us

When the Bible says that God sticks with us, the emphasis is on his dependable personal relationship, that he is always there for us.

Perseverance is not the result of our determination, it is the result of God’s faithfulness. We survive in the way of faith not because we have extraordinary stamina but because God is righteous, because God sticks with us.

Christian discipleship is a process of paying more and more attention to God’s righteousness and less and less attention to our own; finding the meaning of our lives not by probing our moods and motives and morals but by believing in God’s will and purposes; making a map of the faithfulness of God, not charting the rise and fall of our enthusiasms. It is out of such a reality that we acquire perseverance.