Obedience as Gratitude
The Sweetness and Freedom of God's Love
For Thanksgiving each of us in the family has to make a pie—because you can never have too many pies—and a few years ago I tried for the second year in a row to make a banana cream pie. My pie the year before had been too runny. I was determined to follow the recipe exactly this time. My custard was creamy, not too runny, just perfect, but when I taste tested it before pouring it into the crust, I gagged. It tasted like sea water. As I examined the recipe more carefully, I realized I had added a half cup of salt instead of sugar. My wife kept laughing and saying over and over, “A half cup of salt! Really? What were you thinking?!” I wish I could say that this was an isolated incident. I seem constitutionally incapable of following simple instructions properly.
Sometimes we think of God’s commandments like a recipe. The problem with this metaphor is that it implies that if the commandments are followed correctly, they will produce more or less the same result for each person. But in his intimate regard for us as unique individuals, God cannot churn us out like identical cookies cut from the same pattern. The fold of God is not a mold. As the body of Christ, we are all inherently valuable members with our own unique stories, gifts, and experiences. If the gospel is a cookbook, we all turn out differently, uniquely his.
As a teenager growing up in Connecticut, I wasn’t so much a rebel as just the kind of kid who needed the space and freedom to figure things out on my own. Obedience, I convinced myself, didn’t make sense until I decided the question of God’s existence, and God’s existence, I had ironically decided, was simply unresolvable and unknowable. This allowed me what I thought I really wanted: the convenience of exploring different ways to violate the Word of Wisdom with imagined impunity. I kept this up for a number of years. I thought I was protecting my freedom, but I was blind to just how reactionary and self-gratifying and therefore inauthentic my choices were, let alone the damage they were doing to my capacity to think clearly and act intentionally. The truth is, I was afraid, confused, and dangerously losing self-control. Somehow, I confused commandments—and even the very idea of God—with coercion, conformity, and utter disregard for my individuality. But because I loved my parents and respected people at church and didn’t want to disappoint them, I thought I could keep it a secret.
That worked until one fateful Saturday morning of my senior year when my father entered my bedroom, closed the door behind him, and pulled a chair right up next to my bed. He rubbed my back and spoke gently and said something like this: “Your mom and I have been worried that you don’t feel comfortable sharing your life with us. You are old enough to be making your own decisions, and it pains us to think that a son of ours could live under our roof and not feel comfortable being honest about who he is or what he is doing. So I want to ask you some questions about what you are doing with your friends, and I want you to feel comfortable and safe being completely honest with me. Before I ask you these questions, I want to reassure you that I have no intention of punishing you. I only want to know the truth so I can know you better.” He asked me some questions, and without hesitation and with unspeakable relief, I unburdened myself of my story. When I was done, he told me he loved me. And then he said, “I am not going to make any demands on what you do from now on. All I want to ask of you is that you trust us to tell us from now on where you are going with your friends and what you plan to do. We want you to be honest and to be safe. Can you do that?” I was taken by surprise by his trust, but I told him I could. That night I went into his bedroom and announced where I was going that night and I told him, “Dad, I won’t be drinking or doing anything else tonight. I won’t do those things anymore.” “Are you sure about that?” he asked. “Absolutely sure, Dad. I am done. I will be telling my friends tonight.” And I did.
My father wouldn’t want you to believe he was a perfect father. He is always the first to acknowledge his own weaknesses and mistakes, but on that day, I think he had the perfect words and the perfect tone for me. When I think of the words “by persuasion, by long-suffering, by gentleness and meekness, and by love unfeigned; By kindness” (D&C 121:41–42), I can say that I know exactly what that feels like. My father’s love and acceptance did not leave me content with my sins but instead unleashed my freedom to choose what deep down I really wanted. Of course, this was freedom that I’d always had, freedom that had been safeguarded since the foundation of the world by God’s plan and its cornerstone, Christ’s atonement. But this freedom is the ability to embrace responsibility, not to live with impunity. I needed not so much to decide to obey a loving and divine father but to decide that I wanted to be the kind of person who could resemble such a father. I needed to decide what I loved. My father’s generosity filled me with gratitude, and in that state of fullness I loved him, and I loved my life. I wanted to be as courageous and faithful and loving as he had been with me, and every desire for sin departed. And so my conversion to the gospel began.
I believe there is an innate and even sacred desire within each of us to discover our own deep wells of passion, creativity, and self-determination. When we see obedience as the path toward conformity, it remains a perpetual struggle for self-mastery. If we see it instead as the freedom to truly love him as we are loved, it becomes the path toward fuller self-realization. Obedience does not gain us more love from God, but rather more power from his love to free us to do the good in the world we were born to do. In a state of disobedience, we perceive ourselves as limitlessly free, and God seems dully constant, always asking nothing of us and yet always oddly ready to approve of our every whim. This God stands at a cool remove from the world, a dead and mute God created after our own image, guaranteed to prevent our development. But the God of our belief—although always the same in his love and principles—is so involved in our lives that he manifests himself perpetually in new and surprising and adventurous ways. Both he and we are never the same. This is what the scriptures describe as the living God; he is a God of relationship, of dialogue, a God who continually reveals himself as he facilitates our growth and change.
The willingness to put ourselves in the hands of such a God is born from the experience of his love. King Benjamin knew full well that there were more ways to sin than he could reasonably name in the time he had to speak, but his focus was not on elaborating on that list. Instead, he gave them a witness of Christ and of his mercies. His listeners became “children of Christ”; they were “born of him” (Mosiah 5:7). They said they felt “a mighty change . . . in our hearts, that we have no more disposition to do evil, but to do good continually” (Mosiah 5:2). Just as Adam and Eve had done when they departed the Garden of Eden with a new appreciation for the trust and mercy of God despite their transgression, King Benjamin’s listeners wanted to start over and make that first and vital promise to obey: “We are willing to enter into a covenant with our God to do his will, and to be obedient to his commandments in all things that he shall command us” (Mosiah 5:5). To covenant to obey is the necessary and fundamental decision we make to accept and honor God’s love. And it is not made once but every day.
Benjamin’s example also tells us that our preaching shouldn’t browbeat people into obedience. We should never assume it is enough to just teach the truth. We need to facilitate experiences that inspire gratitude for God. As John said, “We love him, because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). As a community of believers, we bear a special responsibility to make that love palpable for everyone within the walls of our churches, our homes, and in our communities. Commandments learned in an unloving or unjust or judgmental environment where our agency is not respected and we are not unconditionally loved can be a form of spiritual abuse. How many of God’s children have been lost because of the pride, arrogance, or controlling manipulations of unrighteous dominion? If any church community fails to demonstrate God’s unconditional love unambiguously, people will go elsewhere, to a place where they find love and acceptance. We simply cannot afford to obscure God’s mercy or his quickness to forgive by suggesting that God might love the strictly obedient just a little bit more than the rest of us. Perhaps for this reason, Nephi emphasized that in all of our talk of Jesus—which should be our daily talk—if we focus too much on expectations and fail to emphasize to our children the “deadness of the law” and “that life which is in Christ,” they will fail to understand why the law was given in the first place and harden their hearts against it (2 Ne. 25:27).
Fortunately, while disobedience temporarily compromises our access to experiences of God’s love or his inspiration, we can never put ourselves entirely beyond their reach. I know in my disobedience I still felt God’s love. Maybe I didn’t call it that, but it was still there in the joy of laughter with friends, in the sounds of seagulls and the smell and sights of a low tide on the Long Island Sound where I lived, the pleasure of music, or in the warmth of a family dinner or a wrestle with my dad. My personal experience with life’s goodness drew me back to God. After all, our very existence here is the fruit of this love. His love is not carefully budgeted; God is a spendthrift of lovingkindness. It falls outside of anything we devise to contain it. It is so abundantly available to us, it takes no more than a glance to find it in the most ordinary experiences or the most ordinary objects. Yet too many of us are, as he describes, “walking in darkness at noon-day,” ignorant of the blazing light of his gifts (see D&C 95).
God’s entire plan is nothing but forbearing and longsuffering. He sent all of his children away without memory of his presence so that we could freely and genuinely choose the good. Only in this freedom does the choice to obey become a reflection of who we really are and who we sincerely want to become. Despite the worst nightmares of human history—war, genocide, slavery, environmental degradation and every other mistake of humankind—God has never once violated our agency. If long-suffering, gentleness, meekness, and love unfeigned are enough for God, they should be enough for us (D&C 121:41). The louder we shout the truths of the gospel and the more frantic and fearful and angry we become at a disobedient world or disobedient children, the less faith and trust we seem to have in the timing and purposes of our Father. Our determination to be obedient should never cause us to miss love, the most important and sweet ingredient of life. If we are truly grateful for this precious gift of our life and for the goodness of God, and are aware of our own nothingness, as King Benjamin calls it (see Mosiah 4), we won’t feel shame but humble gratitude and love for God, for his creations, and for our brothers and sisters. I know of no better motivation to obey God than that.
George B. Handley is Professor of Interdisciplinary Humanities and Comparative Literature at Brigham Young University and author most recently of The Hope of Nature, If Truth Were a Child, and the novel American Fork.
Art by Wayne Thiebaud (1920–2021).
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