What the Learning Cost: Obedience in Suffering

What the Learning Cost: Obedience in Suffering

Hebrews 5:7–9

There is a version of obedience most of us have quietly agreed to. We will follow when the situation stabilizes. We will give fully when the demands thin out. We will press into kingdom life when the particular difficulty we are managing either resolves or finally asks less of us. It is not a decision we announce. It is simply the shape our days have taken, and we have stopped noticing when it happened.

You can feel it in the week's design — how the schedule carries everything except the thing the week is supposed to be about. The spiritual life is fought in the millisecond between the impulse and the pause. Most of us are losing that fight before we know there is one.

There is a passage in Hebrews that does not allow for this arrangement.

In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to him who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverence. Although he was a son, he learned obedience through what he suffered. And being made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him. — Hebrews 5:7–9

Sit for a moment on the word learned.

He learned obedience. The Son of God — the one through whom all things were made, in whom all the fullness of deity dwells bodily — learned something. Not performed what he already possessed in full. Not demonstrated settled resolve from a position of distance. He learned it. Through what he suffered. With loud cries and tears. The learning was not overhead. It was at cost.

We have learned to treat suffering as an interruption. Hebrews 5:8 has a different category for it.

Suffering leaves sediment. Paul knew this, and said so plainly —

suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope (Romans 5:3–4).

The sediment is what the learning costs and what the obedience requires. There is no alternate version of Hebrews 5:8 where he learned it some other way, in more favorable conditions, without the weight. The verse does not exist. This is the verse.

Which means the difficult times are not what we are waiting to get through before kingdom obedience resumes. They are the ground where it is made. What is being held in reserve is not the idea of obedience.

We affirm it. We think well of it. We intend to return to its full expression. What is being held in reserve is the actual doing of it — in precisely the conditions where the text says the doing is formed.

I am not describing someone else. I have made this arrangement more than once. And each time, the thing I was waiting for either never arrived or arrived after the window had passed.

Happiness is the wrong target. Jesus wasn't always happy.

A man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief (Isaiah 53:3). He set his face to go to Jerusalem (Luke 9:51) and did not negotiate.

Flint doesn't flinch.

I am not asking about obedience in the abstract. What are you treating as a valid suspension of it right now? The conversation you are delaying. The thing you know to do and have not done. The posture you said you would take up again when this season ended.

What exactly are you waiting for? Hebrews 5:9 does not resolve gently.

He became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him.

Not to all who understood him when the understanding was comfortable. Not to all who followed when the path was unobstructed. To all who obey him. Present tense. No condition attached to the quality of the surrounding season.

Daily yielding is not a climb. It is a fall — in the direction of him. The obedience we are postponing is not a feat of spiritual strength. It is the release of the voice inside that keeps saying the conditions are not yet right. They were not right in Gethsemane either. Loud cries and tears. And he was heard — not because the difficulty was removed, but because of his reverence.

The text's language is not accidental: being made. The difficult times are the process named, not the delay before it begins.

Obey him. While it still costs something.

That is precisely what the learning is.