Obedience

Obedience is about as unpopular a word as one can find. How politically correct it is these days to emphasise that children should be taught to question everything and how far are they from being simply taught obedience instead.

We can seek an explanation for this in all the tyrannies there ever have been depending on mindless obedience (often only of a few). How easy to excuse brutality by saying that one was only carrying out orders, an excuse that will not be accepted by the victors in any conflict.

So obedience is understandably suspected, and shunned.

And this is to be regretted if it leads us away from a great good. At the heart of the Ten Commandments is the command that we honour our parents, and when young this means obeying them, and those who stand in their place. Paul is quite explicit in his letter to the Ephesians: "Wives, submit to your husbands ... Children, obey your parents .. Slaves, obey your earthly masters." But he says this by way of giving examples of the general principle (Eph. 5:21) "Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ."

Dare we examine these thoughts, and not dismiss them as wholly out of date?

Suppose instead of 'submit' or 'obey' we had the word 'trust'. Then it would sound all right (wouldn't it?) for wives to trust their husbands, children to trust their parents, and employees to trust their employers. For the corollary would also be in place: that husbands, parents, and employers should be trustworthy.

I have been an employer (a hirer and firer), and still am a husband and a father. I have felt all along that part of my being a Christian husband, father, and employer has been to be trustworthy - to be everything a good, kind, generous, reliable, responsive, understanding, husband, father, and employer should be.

Once trust is in place, obedience follows naturally. Imagine you are lost in a strange city; you ask a perfect stranger for directions to the station; he says "walk along in that direction, take the second left, then the first right." You trust the stranger, so you obey his directions.

We need to live in a community where trust comes naturally. Yes, it will make us vulnerable from time to time, and we must not be naive. We must warn our children of situations where trust of strangers is too dangerous.

But deep down we all want to live in such a society where trust is the cornerstone of all important relationships. If we invite obedience from any one we must be committing ourselves to be totally trustworthy. Trust is the key. It is no small thing to be trustworthy, but it is vital to others, and ultimately to ourselves too.