Becoming a Christian has been equated with joining an army, entering into service. What many people fail to understand, however, is that being a soldier, like being a Christian, is much more than attaching a rank to your name and donning a uniform.

When you become a Christian, you are saved from your sins, you are counted as righteous, even as righteous as Jesus Christ. You are brought back to life from your prior condition of spiritual death through the imparting of the Spirit of God in your self. Who you are has been changed, what you call yourself has been changed; you are a new person, a new creature. And naturally what you do should change as well, right? So people, once they become Christians, set about changing their behavior, usually by themselves. Christendom puts great stock in eschewing sin, in the behavior that the Bible seems to say accompanies reconciliation and regeneration.

I myself spent most of my life, and all of my life as a Christian, attempting to avoid sin, both in the world and in myself. I have not been successful; in fact, I’ve been a colossal, sometimes, spectacular failure, and done damage to others as well as to myself, though by the grace of God the majority of damage has been self-inflicted. Nevertheless, I have been rather discouraged at times about my inability to crucify the flesh, to eschew the world, and resist the powers of darkness and sin. Understandably so; for as a new creature in Christ, I now posses the Spirit of God within me, who cannot abide sin.

Now, my soul is pure and righteous, covered and united with the life and blood of Christ. So all the sin does is bounce off my soul and rebound through my body and my surroundings. But it still has an impact, and the Spirit still gets front row seats to my own particular brand of depravity as the old flesh wars with the new creature. For all my devotion and genuine desire to be conformed to the likeness of Jesus, my behavior has not fallen into line with my intentions. No truer verse in the Bible bespeaks of my dilemma that that famous passage in Romans 7:14-24, ending with “O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of sin and death?”

If we compare conversion with joining of an army, a valuable lesson appears. For the initial stage of joining an army involves a commitment, a solemn oath to do certain things in a certain way, one of which involves following orders promptly and thoroughly. Once that is accomplished the training begins. You are assigned a rank (the lowest rank), and given a new uniform to wear that demonstrates your new identity as a soldier. Are you a soldier? Yes. Can you call yourself a soldier? Yes. Can you fight like a soldier? No. That’s what basic training is for, to give you the knowledge, the skills, the ability to behave like a soldier. If you get handed a uniform and a rank and then told to go out and fight the enemy, you’ll be pretty useless for the brief period of time that you survive. Or, if you don’t get killed, you’ll start learning pretty quickly how to survive, the techniques and practices, the tricks of the trade, the drills and weaponry that all soldiers need to know in order to survive as a soldier. And usually you need to be taught these things from someone else. That’s where Basic Training comes in. Its function is to prepare you to fight, to move, to think, to use the tools needed in order to behave like a soldier.

Now, it’s important to understand that as soon as you took the oath and were awarded a rank and donned a uniform, you were a soldier. Your identity was confirmed immediately, and you are as much a soldier as a grizzled veteran or a four-star general. But can you behave as one? Does your behavior match your identity? No. Because simply obtaining a new identity isn’t enough to enable you to change your behavior.

And part of the training all soldiers go through is learning to follow orders. Perhaps the hardest part, since it’s so counter-intuitive to our regular, civilian behavior, it’s such a big adjustment. But following orders is as much a part of being a soldier as the ability to strip a weapon apart for cleaning, or learning how to take a hill, or anticipating an ambush, or learning how to plant an explosive device. In fact, following orders is the very thing that separates a soldier from just a mercenary, a killer, or someone who knows how to do those other things.

Following orders is the essence of being a soldier; you place your confidence and faith in your superiors that when they tell you where to go or what to do, you will go and do secure in your faith that their orders are for the best. Not necessarily your best, but the best in terms of the battle you are fighting or the war you are waging.

Too many Christians have taken the oath to become a Christian. They’ve received their rank as one of God’s people, and been clothed in the righteousness of Christ. But they don’t follow orders. They’re not effective Christians in the sense that their identity doesn’t match their behavior. (And as I alluded to before, I must include myself foremost among these ranks.) Now, some may have some training: they’ve read their Bibles front to back many times, they’ve been to church every Sunday, they’ve led Bible studies and Sunday School classes, they may even be evangelists, preachers, or missionaries. But do they follow orders? Again, that’s the essence of being a soldier, and it’s infinitely more imperative in a Christian, to follow the orders of God. They may be deadly with apologetics, have much education or great stories full of pathos that they use to tug on peoples’ heartstrings. They may be skilled in debate or evangelism. They’ve got the tools of the trade down. But if they’re not operating on the basis of waiting for orders, listening to orders, and following orders, then they’re not really going to be effective soldiers in God’s war.

The importance of following orders is rather obvious, but for the sake of space I’ll elaborate. In a battle or overall war, there are strategic objectives, goals that encompass the entire effort among all fronts. In WWII, the global strategy was to push back Germany from the Atlantic coast. On the tactical level is where the strategy is enacted and accomplished, and that involved pitched battles, gunfights and devastation, small groups of men pushing back the Nazi forces. When you’re on the ground, when you can see only a small part of the battle, you know only a little part of the overall strategy. It is the role of the generals and top brass to formulate a strategy that will win the war, and they are best able to do so because they can view things in a global sense. They can see the entire front, multiple battles at the same time. And so they give the orders that are communicated down through the colonels, lieutenants, captains, and sergeants down to the corporals and privates who are the lowest rank, who actually do the fighting and killing and retaking of territory.

Now, if the top brass can see everything clearly, then they will know what best to do to win the war, not just the individual battles. So their orders may not make much sense to those who can’t see the entire picture of the war, who are mired in a single engagement. But the best soldiers are those who, when given an order, follow it precisely and immediately, because then the higher levels can implement strategies that will win not just one battle or two, but all battles and ultimately, the war. So the importance of obedience grows with the stakes.

The analogy is clear. God is the top brass and sees the entire battlefield, all the fronts of human hearts, and has formulated a strategy that will win as many as possible. (He won’t win all, because of free will; that’s a whole other can of worms, but it’s not because He’s unable to. The terms of the war don’t allow for absolute victory.) So when He gives us an order, even if it may be utterly incomprehensible to us in our individual struggles and opportunities, we can rest assured that He knows how best to wage His holy war for men’s hearts. And the better our obedience, the more effective and efficient soldiers in His service we become.

Lastly let me point out the role of the soldier in all this. His first duty is to make the choice, to become a soldier. If you’re not a soldier then you won’t have gone through training; your officers won’t be able to count upon your general basis of knowledge, and more important, your obedience to follow orders. So the identity comes first. After that, your second duty is to follow orders during training. Some training methods and content may seem unimportant or objectionable, but the good soldier trusts that his instructors and trainers know what a soldier needs to learn and be able to do to accomplish his duty, and so complies with even the most baffling or boring of drills. Even now the primacy of obedience shines through. And once training is over, the real war begins and the soldier now makes use of his training to accomplish his orders, which of course is the third duty of the soldier: to follow orders on the field of battle.

You may notice that at every stage of the soldier’s progression, his main role involves a certain amount of passivity. He accepts his rank and identity upon enlistment; he learns from instructors and completes the courses during training; and he follows orders when carrying out his duty in battle. He doesn’t charge into the fray half-cocked; he doesn’t try to create his own courses of study and devise a training regimen himself; and he doesn’t decide which battles to fight in and when, where, and how to fight. His is an active duty but based on a passive acceptance, obedience, and faith in his superiors. The obedience and faith must come before the activity.

So it is with Christians. If we are to be the hands and feet, the very body, of God on earth, then that means we will be doing things. We’ll be active in His war, we’ll be participating in reaching people He wants to reach. But before we can do that, we must accept that He’s calling the shots, that our role is to obey not initiate, that we walk in faith and not in self-actualization.

Are you a soldier? Have you taken the oaths and put on the uniform? Have you gone through training and developed the skills? And most importantly, are you following orders? Are you quick to listen and quicker to obey? Or are you attempting to order the battle yourself? Are you charging in without training and without orders?