Thursday of the Fifth Week of Easter
Acts 15:7–21; John 15:9-11
Our world does not like the word obedience.
It sounds weak, old, unfree.
We admire resistance. We praise rebellion. We suspect every authority.
And often, we have reasons.
Authority can become corruption. Religion can become control. Rules can become burdens.
But the question remains:
Does rebellion bring joy?
The Bible often joins together two things we usually separate:
obedience and joy.
For the Scriptures, obedience is not slavery.
It is the path of life.
Psalm 119 is the clearest example.
Again and again, the psalmist asks God to teach him His ways.
Not because he is forced.
Not because he is afraid.
But because he delights in them.
He loves God’s commandments. He finds joy in them. He even speaks of them before kings.
This is not the voice of a crushed man.
It is the voice of someone who has discovered that God’s will is not a prison, but a light.
That is why today’s reading is so important.
The question before the Church was not small.
Must Gentiles be circumcised and keep the law of Moses in order to be saved?
Peter stands up and speaks with unusual clarity.
Why place on others, he asks, a yoke that even we ourselves could not bear?
It is a striking moment.
Peter does not pretend. He does not glorify the past. He does not demand from others what he knows his own people failed to carry.
And then he says the decisive word:
We are saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus.
That is the center.
Christian obedience does not begin with carrying a burden to earn salvation.
It begins with receiving salvation as gift.
First grace.
Then obedience.
First the love of Christ.
Then the response of love.
This changes everything.
If obedience comes before grace, it becomes fear.
If obedience tries to purchase salvation, it becomes exhaustion.
But when obedience grows from grace, it becomes freedom.
Then we obey not as slaves, but as children.
Not to make God love us, but because He has loved us first.
That is why the decision from Jerusalem brought joy.
It was not only a theological solution.
It was good news.
The door to life was not being closed by impossible demands.
It was being opened by the grace of Christ.
And where grace is received, joy begins.
That is why a joyless Christian gives a poor witness.
For Christ did not come only to make us correct.
He came to make us alive.
He came that His joy might remain in us, and that our joy might be complete.
True obedience, then, is not the death of joy.
It is its flowering.
For the one who follows Christ does not lose life.
He finds it.
Scripture Attribution
New Revised Standard Version Bible: Catholic Edition, copyright © 1989, 1993
the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of
Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
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© 2025 Krakus.
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