The One Small Right Thing Nobody Is Going to Approve Of

It is never the big thing.

Everybody imagines that a test of this kind arrives as a confrontation: a moment in a room where you have to stand up and say something and everybody turns around. Those moments do come, once or twice in a life, and most people handle them better than they expect.

What actually decides a person's direction is much smaller and it happens on a Tuesday.

It is a phone call to somebody the family has quietly written off. It is fifteen dollars given to somebody who will not spend it well. It is going to see a person whose situation everybody has an opinion about. It is not saying the thing that would have been enjoyed at the table.

Nobody is going to praise any of that. Some of it, if it came out, would be mildly disapproved of, and none of it is going to be noticed at all.

And that is the exact position of the men in Acts 5, whose famous sentence is about who they were obeying rather than about who they were defying.

The sentence is about obedience, not defiance

Here is the scene. They have been told to stop, they have not stopped, and they are asked why.

And when they had brought them, they set them before the council: and the high priest asked them, saying, Did not we straitly command you that ye should not teach in this name?... Then Peter and the other apostles answered and said, We ought to obey God rather than men. (Acts 5:27-29, King James Version)

We ought to obey God rather than men.

Read the grammar. He does not say, we refuse. He does not say, this council has no right. Both of those sentences were available to him and neither is the one he chose. The sentence is built around the verb obey, twice, and it is a statement about which of two obediences is happening.

That distinction is the whole thing, and it is what keeps this passage from becoming a license. A man who has relocated his obedience is not less obedient than the room; he is obeying something the room is also supposed to be obeying, and he says so in a sentence that never once claims the right to do as he likes.

You are relocating an obedience rather than claiming a freedom. Acts 5:29 is built on the verb obey rather than on refuse, and it is the Holy Ghost who is named two verses later, Acts 5:32, as a witness given to them that obey Him.

Notice what they were actually doing

It is worth being specific about what the disobedience consisted of, because it is not dramatic.

They were teaching and healing in the temple. That is it. They were doing the ordinary, useful, unglamorous work they had been doing before anybody told them to stop.

They did not organize anything. They did not denounce the council. They did not gather a following against anybody. When they were let go, the chapter says they went straight back to the same activity in the same place.

And daily in the temple, and in every house, they ceased not to teach and preach Jesus Christ. (Acts 5:42)

Ceased not. The resistance is a continuation rather than an escalation, and that is why it worked and why nobody could turn it into a story about rebellious young men.

You are able to continue rather than escalate, and continuing is what the chapter records. Acts 5:42 has them going back to the same ordinary work, and it is by the Spirit, Acts 4:31, that ordinary people are described as speaking the word with boldness.

Daniel did it the same way and the detail is a window

The Old Testament version of this is famous and the detail everybody skips is the most instructive part.

Now when Daniel knew that the writing was signed, he went into his house; and his windows being open in his chamber toward Jerusalem, he kneeled upon his knees three times a day, and prayed, and gave thanks before his God, as he did aforetime. (Daniel 6:10)

As he did aforetime. Nothing changed. He did not pray longer, or louder, or in the street, or in front of anybody. He did what he had already been doing, at the times he had already been doing it, in the room he had already been doing it in.

And the window was already open. He did not open it to make a point.

That is the model, and it is much less exciting than the version people preach. The unapproved obedience is usually not a new act. It is the ordinary act, continued, with the approval removed.

You are able to keep doing what you were already doing with the approval withdrawn. Daniel 6:10 says as he did aforetime and puts the window in the room before the decree, and it is by the Spirit of the LORD, Isaiah 11:2, that the fear of the LORD is supplied rather than performed.

The instruction about being seen cuts both ways

There is an obvious objection to a whole page about unnoticed obedience, and it is a fair one.

Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven. (Matthew 5:16)

That is a command to be seen, and it is in the same sermon as the instruction about doing alms in secret, which means the two are not in conflict and the difference is in the purpose clause.

That they may glorify your Father. The visible version is aimed at somebody else's attention going somewhere. The secret version is aimed at a man's own supply. Both are commanded and they are doing different jobs.

So this article is not telling anybody to hide their life. It is saying that the particular test in front of a second generation reader, whose whole formation has been about how things look at a table, is almost always the unwatched version, and that the unwatched version is the one that tells him what he is made of.

You are commanded to both, and the two are doing different jobs. Matthew 5:16 aims the visible at God being glorified and Matthew 6:4 aims the secret at the Father who sees, and it is by the Spirit, Galatians 5:22, that the goodness in either is produced.

Peter puts honor and fear in one sentence

The New Testament never lets this become contempt, and Peter says so in the plainest possible arrangement.

Honour all men. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honour the king. (1 Peter 2:17)

Four commands, ten words, and they sit in one line without any of them canceling the others.

Fear God is in the middle, and honor the king comes after it, from a man writing under an emperor who was not honorable. So relocating the fear does not remove the honor, and the honor is commanded toward people who have not earned it.

I say that specifically for this site. Nothing about the fear of God gives anybody permission to hold their congregation in contempt, or their father, or the man who told them to stop. The men in Acts 5 addressed the council with the same word Peter uses here, and then went back to work.

You are able to fear God and honor the room in the same sentence. 1 Peter 2:17 puts both commands in one line without conflict, and it is by the Spirit, Galatians 5:22, that the gentleness which holds them together is produced.