We are not special to God because we are “good,” we are good because we listen.

Christians often ask, “How did Jesus do it?” Meaning, how did He live his live so perfectly, “without sin?” Without breaking any single commandment.

In recent years I have been seeing that a key to Jesus’ obedience was His ability to hear His Father’s voice and thus to do His Father’s will unblinkingly. I have tended to, in the past, think of “obedience” as “doing the right thing,” keeping the letter of the Law, doing the opposite of what my sinful nature wants to do. But I am discovering even further now, this is not God’s intent. In fact, it wasn’t His intent from the very beginning when He called his children, the nation of Israel, out of Egypt to be to Him His “special, treasured possession.” (Exodus 19:5)

In the Biblical Hebrew language, the word we translate “obey” primarily means “listen/hear.” I remember my mother at times very frustrated with me as a child and saying “Why can’t you listen to me.” Well, I was “hearing” her but I wasn't “listening.” In other words, we may hear someone speaking but in our hearts and minds we aren’t really “listening,”  we’re just doing our own thing, probably even rebelling or thinking of some caustic retort.

Exodus 19 is the account of Moses going up on the mountain to receive the Ten Commandments from God. It is these Ten Commandments that truly distinguish Jews and Christians from the sinful, pagan nations. But, I am asking here, is it “obedience to the law” that makes us Christian or Jews, like circumcision for the Jew or tithing for the Christian? No. And it never has been. The apostles in Acts 15:10 realized that the law was “a yoke neither we nor our ancestors have been able to bear.” In other words, “no one can get it right.”

How did Jesus do it? In the same way God intended from the beginning with his people Israel as we see in Exodus 19:5 (My very literal translation of the Hebrew): “Now” (since you’ve seen how I delivered you from slavery in Egypt, vss 1-4), “if you listen to hear my voice and keep watch over my covenant, you shall be to me a treasured possession” (particular, special, protected possession).

We are not special to God because we are “good,” we are good because we listen. Jesus listened and He did everything He saw His Father doing and spoke only what he heard His Father saying. That's what made Him perfect. Perfect means complete, whole, healthy, good.

Hebrews 5:8 says about Jesus, “Son though he was, he learned obedience from what he suffered.” What? Jesus had to learn obedience from suffering? Again, the Biblical word for obedience has the root “hear,” literally it means “to listen under,” i.e. to hear and submit, to do what His Father was telling him.

God said to Jesus (Hebrews 5:5) “You are my Son, today I have become your Father.” Sons and daughters listen to their Papa. Like Jesus we too at times “offer up prayers and petitions with fervent cries and tears” (vs. 7) on behalf of the lost world around us, in the face of persecution or grave illness. But even in the midst of huge suffering, even death on a cross, we can say to our Father “into thy hands I commit my spirit” or “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

You are God’s treasured possession! He has hidden you in His heart, in a safe place. No matter what may be happening externally in your life, He wants to hear your voice and you to hear His. Obedience is nothing more than reverent, submissive listening and then doing. And as we center ourselves  in Papa’s love, reverent submission becomes  a joy and delight. When we  are experiencing Father delighting in us, delighting in Him comes naturally and easily. That’s how Jesus did it.