A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society (The IVP Signature Collection)

by Eugene H. Peterson

God loves you. He’s on your side. He’s coming after you. He’s relentless.

It is reassuring to realize once again that we don’t have to anxiously study the world around us in order to keep up with God and his ways with us.

Songs of Ascents (Psalms 120—134)

I knew that following Jesus could never develop into a “long obedience” without a deepening life of prayer and that the Psalms had always been the primary means by which Christians learned to pray everything they lived, and live everything they prayed over the long haul.

I wanted people to start praying them again, not just admiring them from a distance, and thereby learn to pray everything they experienced and felt and thought as they followed Jesus, not just what they thought was proper to pray in church.

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,

There is a sense, a feeling, that things aren’t right, that the environment is not whole, but just what it is eludes analysis. We know that the spiritual atmosphere in which we live erodes faith, dissipates hope and corrupts love, but it is hard to put our finger on what is wrong.

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.

Friedrich Nietzsche, who saw this area of spiritual truth at least with great clarity, wrote, “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.”4 It is this “long obedience in the same direction” which the mood of the world does so much to discourage.

disciple

pilgrim.

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 school-room, rather at the work site of a cr...

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. We realize that “this world is...

Topographically Jerusalem was the highest city in Palestine, and so all who traveled there spent much of their time ascending.5 But the ascent was not only literal, it was also a metaphor: the trip to Jerusalem acted out a life lived upward toward God, an existence that advanced from one level to another in developing maturity—what Paul described as “the goal, where God is beckoning us onward—to Jesus” (Phil 3:14).

Three times a year faithful Hebrews made that trip (Ex 23:14-17; 34:22-24). The Hebrews were a people whose salvation had been accomplished in the exodus, whose identity had been defined at Sinai and whose preservation had been assured in the forty years of wilderness wandering.

Singing the fifteen psalms is a way both to express the amazing grace and to quiet the anxious fears.

Since many (not all) essential items in Christian discipleship are incorporated in these songs, they provide a way to remember who we are and where we are going.

Their unpretentious brevity is excellently described by William Faulkner. “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.’”9

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 appetite for the world of grace.

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.

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.

The truth of God explained their lives, the grace of God fulfilled their lives, the forgiveness of God renewed their lives, the love of God blessed their lives.

Repentance, the first word in Christian immigration, sets us on the way to traveling in the light. It is a rejection that is also an acceptance, a leaving that develops into an arriving, a no to the world that is a yes to God.

I look up to the mountains; does my strength come from mountains? No, my strength comes from GOD, who made heaven, and earth, and mountains. He won’t let you stumble, your Guardian God won’t fall asleep. Not on your life! Israel’s Guardian will never doze or sleep. GOD’s your Guardian, right at your side to protect you— Shielding you from sunstroke, sheltering you from moonstroke. GOD guards you from every evil, he guards your very life. He guards you when you leave and when you return, he guards you now, he guards you always. PSALM 121

The God of Genesis 1 who brought light out of darkness is also the God of this day who guards you from every evil.

And shalvah, “prosperity.” It has nothing to do with insurance policies or large bank accounts or stockpiles of weapons. The root meaning is leisure—the relaxed stance of one who knows that everything is all right because God is over us, with us and for us in Jesus Christ.

We speak our words of praise in a world that is hellish; we sing our songs of victory in a world where things get messy; we live our joy among people who neither understand nor encourage us. But the content of our lives is God, not humanity. We are not scavenging in the dark alleys of the world, poking in its garbage cans for a bare subsistence. We are traveling in the light, toward God who is rich in mercy and strong to save. It is Christ, not culture, that defines our lives. It is the help we experience, not the hazards we risk, that shapes our days.

We can decide to live in response to the abundance of God and not under the dictatorship of our own poor needs.

We turn over a few pages and find the story of David. There were years of wilderness guerrilla warfare against the Philistines, a perilous existence with moody, manic King Saul, and all that painful groping and praying through the guilt of murder and adultery; then in his old age he was chased from his throne by his own son and forced to set up a government in exile. And, at the end, his song. It begins with gratitude: “GOD is bedrock under my feet, the castle in which I live, my rescuing knight”; it ends in confidence, “Live GOD! Blessing from my rock!” In the center there is a rocket burst of joy: “I’m ablaze with your light. . . . I vault the high fences” (2 Sam 22:2, 47, 29-30).

And then the swelling reassurances of help: “When you’re in over your head, I’ll be there with you . . . . Don’t be afraid, I’m with you” (Is 43:2-5).

There is no reason to suppose that God will arbitrarily change his way of working with us. What we have known of him, we will know of him. Just as joy builds on the past, it borrows from the future. It expects certain things to happen.

The joy that develops in the Christian way of discipleship is an overflow of spirits that comes from feeling good not about yourself but about God. We find that his ways are dependable, his promises sure.

People are at the center of Christian work.

We travel light.

The character of our work is shaped not by accomplishments or possessions but in the birth of relationships: “Children are GOD’s best gift.” We invest our energy in people. Among those around us we develop sons and daughters, sisters and brothers even as our Lord did with us: “Oh, how blessed are you parents with your quivers full of children!”

For our work creates neither life nor righteousness.

As Christians do the jobs and tasks assigned to them in what the world calls work, we learn to pay attention to and practice what God is doing in love and justice, in helping and healing, in liberating and cheering.

The pilgrimage is not at the center; the Lord is at the center.

Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian. G. K. CHESTERTON

In the course of Christian discipleship we discover that without Christ we were doing it the hard way and that with Christ we are doing it the easy way. It is not Christians who have it hard, but non-Christians.

As we read this story of blessing and familiarize ourselves with the men and women who are experiencing God’s blessing, we realize that it is not something external or ephemeral. Not a matter of having a good day, not an occasional run of luck. It is an inner strength of the soul—and the happiness it creates, . . . the vital power, without which no living being can exist. Happiness cannot be given to a person as something lying outside him . . . . The action of God does not fall outside but at the very center of the soul; that which it gives us is not something external, but the energy, the power of creating it . . . . The blessing thus comprises the power to live in its deepest and most comprehensive sense. Nothing which belongs to action and to making life real can fall outside the blessing . . . . Blessing is the vital power, without which no living being can exist.

Blessing has inherent in it the power to increase.

“Life consists in the constant meeting of souls, which must share their contents with each other. The blessed gives to the others, because the strength instinctively pours from him and up around him . . . . The characteristic of blessing is to multiply.”4

John Calvin, preaching to his congregation in Geneva, Switzerland, pointed out that we must develop better and deeper concepts of happiness than those held by the world, which makes a happy l...

The road we travel is the well-traveled road of discipleship.

We acknowledge God as our maker and lover and accept Christ as the means by which we can be in living relationship with God.

To guard against all such blasphemous chumminess with the Almighty, the Bible talks of the fear of the Lord—not to scare us but to bring us to awesome attention before the overwhelming grandeur of God, to shut up our whining and chattering and stop our running and fidgeting so that we can really see him as he is and listen to him as he speaks his merciful, life-changing words of forgiveness.