The Jews were a special people. God had made his covenant with them, that they were his people. That was the covenant: If they obeyed his commandments, God would be their God and they would be his people.

So God gave them his commandments, but the Israelites both forgot about God and didn’t obey his commandments.

Yet some of the people, some of the Jewish religious leaders, looked back to God’s commandments and determined that they were the special people. They had received the commandments, they had received the commandments directly from God, so they determined that they, clearly, were God’s people.

Never mind the fact that they had broken the covenant in that they hadn’t actually obeyed the commandments.

Never mind the fact that they had rejected God and refused to live under his rule, in the way that God had originally intended their relationship to be.

So in the second chapter in his letter to the Romans, Paul points out that Jews have been judging the Gentiles, meaning that the Jews had been deeming the Gentiles to not be worthy to be God’s people. The Gentiles didn’t have the law, so clearly they couldn’t be God’s people! The Gentiles didn’t have the sign of circumcision, so clearly they couldn’t be God’s people!

Only the Jews…or so the Jews thought.

But Paul points out that it isn’t the fact that they had the law that makes them God’s people. It wasn’t the fact that they were circumcised that made them God’s people. No, it was obedience to God’s law and living as the people who were under the covenant that was demonstrated through circumcision that makes someone a person within God’s kingdom:

Circumcision has value if you observe the law, but if you break the law, you have become as though you had not been circumcised. So then, if those who are not circumcised keep the law’s requirements, will they not be regarded as though they were circumcised? The one who is not circumcised physically and yet obeys the law will condemn you who, even though you have the written code and circumcision, are a lawbreaker.

A person is not a Jew who is one only outwardly, nor is circumcision merely outward and physical. No, a person is a Jew who is one inwardly; and circumcision is circumcision of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the written code. Such a person’s praise is not from other people, but from God.

Romans 2:25-29

As we teach people to follow Christ, we emphasize obedience to Christ.

But this can rub people the wrong way at times. I’ve heard various questions like these:

Aren’t you just teaching people legalism?

Aren’t you just teaching people empty obedience?

Isn’t that just the same as the Muslims or the Catholics or any other religion that is based on works?

No, it is not the same. Far from it.

In a legalistic religious system, we do good works so that we can make God happy, and as a result, he will allow us to go to heaven. For example, the Muslims pray five times a day so that they can build up their good works. Then, if their good works outweigh their bad works, God should then allow them to go to paradise.

And that is how most people think about religion. They want to be a good person and they think that if they are judged to be a good person after they die, they get to go to heaven.

Except that isn’t God’s story. There isn’t any who is “good”. Everyone is a sinner and their sin – any sin, even one sin – prevents them from being with God, a good and holy God who is without sin.

So this is why Jesus had to be the sacrifice for each of us. Every one of us needs a Savior. Every one of us needs a perfect sacrifice of perfect blood so that we can be clean before God.

The point is this: God did it all. Jesus paid for my sins and every person’s sins, if they will receive his grace and mercy by faith.

That is very different from being a prideful person following a religious system, essentially saying instead: I can do this. I will be good enough. Then, God will owe me. Then, once I have proven to him that I am good enough, he will – he must! – allow me to come into heaven.

But there is one more step to consider yet. Once we have received the grace and mercy and love of God, do we just move on and continue to live as we always have? Can we just assume that God has saved us, be baptized, and move on?

No, Christ bought us at a precious price. His own blood bought us so as to take us from the kingdom of darkness and redeem us – or we could use the words “ransomed us” – into the kingdom of God. My natural response should be that of thankfulness, gratitude, and love for God, both for who he is, but also for what he has done for me. I sinned and rebelled and went away from him, but Christ came to ransom me out of the state in which I had put myself. I was in the kingdom of darkness, but he came to purchase me with his blood to enter into the kingdom of God.

So my response must be thankfulness. My response must be love. But what does that look like? What does it look like to love a God that I can’t see? That I can’t touch? How can I love a God with whom I can’t even have a face-to-face conversation?

Jesus was clear and gave a simple answer to this question:

If you love me, keep my commands.

John 14:15

Do you love Jesus? You must do what he says.

How can I show Jesus that I love him? I keep his commands.

And so this is why we teach that to be a disciple is to obey Christ. Not because we want to create a bunch of religious robots, but because the sign of true change is obedience to Christ. We show him and the entire world that we love him by obeying him. It isn’t that we say that we must do this. Instead, we do this because he says that we must do this.

This was the problem with the Israelites that led them to stray away from God, breaking the covenant. They didn’t love him and so they didn’t obey him. God’s covenant required that the Israelites obey his commands and then he would be their God and they would be his people. But they didn’t do that. Instead, they preferred to focus on themselves and the fact that they were the people who were given the law. They were the people that were given the sign of circumcision.

But they didn’t love God, and therefore they didn’t keep the covenant and obey him.

We don’t want to make the same mistake. We want to be sure that we are a people that are in love with God through his Messiah, through Jesus Christ, and therefore we want to be a people who keep Jesus’s commands and teach others to do the same. Loving Jesus by obeying him, just as he told us to do.