What You Stopped Doing Won't Save You
Half Obedience and What the Law Was Always Trying to Produce
Let me ask you something that might feel like it’s coming from a different direction, but stay with me.
What does a tree look like when it’s healthy?
Not a tree that’s been pruned of diseased branches, though that matters. Not a tree that’s been treated for rot, though that matters too. What does a healthy tree look like in its fullest expression? It produces fruit. That’s the answer Jesus gave in Matthew 7. A good tree produces good fruit. The goodness of the tree isn’t established by the absence of bad fruit. It’s established by the presence of good fruit. Those are not the same condition. A tree can have no diseased branches and still be producing nothing. And a tree producing nothing is, in the accounting of the orchard, a tree that is failing its purpose regardless of how clean its record looks.
I’ve been thinking about that image in relation to something that troubles me about the way most of us were taught to think about obedience to God.
The framework most believers are working with is almost entirely subtractive. Remove the bad. Eliminate the violations. Stop doing what you shouldn’t be doing. And that framework isn’t wrong. It’s just catastrophically incomplete. Because it produces a person who measures their spiritual health by what’s absent from their life rather than by what’s present. A person who can point to the things they’re not doing and feel, on that basis, relatively clean. But the Matthew 25 ledger, the one that records what was done with what was given, doesn’t care much about what you successfully avoided. It wants to know what you produced.
And here’s where it gets personal in a way that I think most of us prefer to step around. The person who has been taught that grace means the law’s demands have been lowered doesn’t just lose their standard for what to stop doing. They lose their vision of what to start doing. The abolishment teaching doesn’t just reduce what obedience prohibits. It reduces what obedience envisions. And you cannot aim at a target you’ve been told doesn’t exist. A generation that absorbs the message that God’s moral standard has been retired doesn’t just become a generation that crosses visible lines more freely. It becomes a generation that never develops a serious vision of what active, generative, fruitful righteousness actually looks like in a human life.
That’s the pastoral catastrophe hidden inside the theological error. Not just that people do wrong things more freely. But that they never fully understand what the right things were supposed to be in the first place.
Think about what a full obedience looks like when you take the whole law seriously on its own terms. Not a person grimly managing a checklist. A person actively honoring God in every dimension of their life. Protecting the dignity and wellbeing of every person they encounter. Speaking truth even when it’s costly. Governing their desires rather than being governed by them. Turning every gift, every capacity, every opportunity in the direction it was given to move. That’s not a description of someone whose record is clean. That’s a description of someone whose life is generating something real, something that leaves every environment it touches better than it found it.
That’s what the law was always trying to produce. Not compliance. Character. Not a clean record. A transformed person.
And this is where the gospel stops being the law’s competitor and starts being its partner, which is what it was always supposed to be. The law shows you the shape of what God intends a human life to look like. The Spirit provides the power to actually build it. The grace of the gospel covers the gap between where you are and where the standard stands, not by lowering the standard, but by assuring you that the process is covered while the building continues. Jeremiah 31:33 says God would put His law in their minds and write it on their hearts. Ezekiel 36:27 says He would put His Spirit within them and cause them to walk in His statutes. The Spirit doesn’t make the law irrelevant. The Spirit is the power by which the law finally gets expressed from the inside out rather than imposed from the outside in.
The tree doesn’t produce fruit by straining. It produces fruit by being rooted in the right soil, drawing from the right source, oriented toward the light. The fruit is the natural outgrowth of a life properly connected to the God whose character the law describes.
Which leaves the question of what that law actually is at its deepest level. Not just what it requires. Not just how far it reaches. But what it fundamentally is, where it came from, and why its demands are what they are rather than something else entirely.
Because the answer to that question is what holds everything else together.
Focus Verse: “But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves.” — James 1:22 (NKJV)
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