Duty...or Delight?

A couple of weeks ago I listened to a speech by Pastor John Piper on C.S. Lewis.  Piper read two quotes from Lewis that especially stuck me.  The first was this:

A perfect man would never act from a sense of duty; he’d always want the right thing more than the wrong one. Duty is only a substitute for love – of God and of other people – like a crutch, which is a substitute for a leg.

Is it not enough that we are often driven to do things out of a sense of duty?  The Bible teaches that it is not.  We read in Isaiah of God’s abhorrence of Israel’s sacrifices: “This people draw near Me with their mouth, and with their lips do honor Me, but have removed their heart far from Me” (Is. 29:13).  Jesus quotes the same verse in reference to the scribes and Pharisees, who so strictly observed God’s law on the outside, but were “within full of dead men’s bones” (Matt. 23:27).   “Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter,” writes the wise preacher in Ecc. 12:13, “Fear God, and keep His commandments: for this is the whole duty of man.”  Did you catch the first thing that is our “duty”?  “Fear God.”  Several weeks ago in our ladies’ Bible study we defined “the fear of the Lord” as a reverence for God rooted in such deep love for Him that we do not want to do anything that might offend Him.  When one fears the Lord, the two parts of the “duty” of which Solomon writes become one.  Ps. 1:2a: “But his delight is in the law of the Lord.”  Ps. 112:1b:  “Blessed is the man that feareth the Lord, that delighteth greatly in His commandments.”   This is the “true conversion” explained in the Heidelberg Catechism, Lord’s Day 33: “Sincere sorrow of heart that we have provoked God by our sins, and more and more to hate and flee from them,” and “sincere joy of heart in God, through Christ, and with love and delight to live according to the will of God in all good works.”  Good works are never performed out of a sense of duty: they are only ever driven…by delight.

And yet, there’s a conflict, isn’t there?  Paul addresses it in Rom. 7:22-23:  “For I delight in the law of God after the inward man: but I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members.”  We know that as long as we remain on this earth, the legs of our spiritual new man are not what they will one day be.  Too often we must lean hard on the crutch of duty when we should be delightedly skipping along.  Then our prayer is that of Psalm 119:35: “Make me to go in the path of Thy commandments; for therein do I delight.”  There is, too, the humble realization that even if we were able to fear God and keep His commandments, as is required of us, we would profit Him not at all.  Luke 17:10: “So likewise ye, when ye shall have done all those things which are commanded you, say, ‘We are unprofitable servants: we have done that which was our duty to do.’”

The second quotation that struck me was this:

We do not wish either to be, or to live among, people who are clean or honest or kind as a matter of duty: we want to be, and associate with, people who like being clean and honest and kind. The mere suspicion that what seemed an act of spontaneous friendliness or generosity was really done as a duty subtly poisons it.

               

How practically this doctrine applies to our lives as women in the church.  Do I submit to my husband because that’s what’s required of me, or because it’s my joy?  Which mother do my children see?  The one who does the laundry, bakes the cookies, or helps with homework because she sees it as her duty, or because it’s her delight?   Which committee member do you prefer?  The one who signs up out of obligation, or the one who serves out of love? 

And so we are compelled to the cross, are we not?  To the feet of the One who said, “I was daily His delight, rejoicing always before Him.”  To the only One Who could say this of and by Himself: “I delight to do Thy will, O My God: yea, Thy law is within My heart” (Ps. 40:8).  To the One Who saved us by His grace.  For it is by grace that we are saved, through faith, and that not of ourselves: it is the gift of God.  “Not of works, lest any man should boast.  For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them” (Eph. 2:8-10).