When the disciples finally told Jesus that they believed he was the Son of God, Jesus replied with skepticism: “Do you now believe? … You will leave me all alone” (John 16:31–32). Many Christians leave Jesus alone as they go about their work. They’re motivated by their conscience or a sense of duty, but their souls aren’t in intimate contact with their Lord; they’re leaning on their own understanding. It isn’t a sin to work for God in this way, and there’s no punishment attached to it, but when we catch ourselves acting like this, when we realize we’ve grown distant from Jesus and produced confusion and sadness for ourselves, we come back to him with shame and contrition.
We need to learn to rely on the resurrection life of Jesus on a much deeper level, to get into the habit of steadily referring everything back to him. We make decisions based on common sense, then ask God to bless those decisions. He cannot. Common sense is not in God’s domain; it is severed from divine reality. Common sense tells us that duty and moral obligation should be our guides. “I must do this; conscience compels me,” we say, haughtily. A decision based on common sense can always be backed up by an argument like this. But when we do something purely out of obedience to the Lord, no commonsense argument is possible. That’s why obedience is so easy to ridicule.
If we don’t want to leave Jesus alone, we must be willing to be ridiculed for his sake. We aren’t told to walk in the light of conscience or of duty; we’re told to walk in the light as God is in the light (1 John 1:7).
