“And if you faithfully obey the voice of the LORD your God, being careful to do all his commandments that I command you today, the LORD your God will set you high above all the nations of the earth… But if you will not obey the voice of the LORD your God or be careful to do all his commandments and his statutes that I command you today, then all these curses shall come upon you and overtake you. Deuteronomy 28:1;15 (ESV)

Motivating my four children, ages 4 to 12, requires different strategies. My 12-year-old is motivated by rewards, i.e., if you do all your chores and then some extra work, you can have an extra 30 minutes playing the Switch. Consequences, however, don’t seem to faze her quite as much. The other 3 children are less cut and dry and require a more measured approach with rewards and consequences; however, one great challenge is follow-through. As busy parents with hundreds of things to do each day and limited energy reserves, it can be difficult to be consistent and follow through on our threats and promises.

God is not inconsistent. God is merciful, but he follows through on his promises. In Deuteronomy 28:1, he promises a blessing in return for obedience, but in Deuteronomy 28:15, he promises punishment for disobedience. It's the same as a carrot and stick. Something tasty to motivate or something that brings pain to correct course. We see through Israel’s history that even though God followed through on his promises of blessing, he still had to break out the stick to use on a hard-headed people.

Over the past couple of weeks, I have been preaching from Romans 7-8. In Romans 7, Paul writes about not understanding his actions. Paul knows what is right, he knows what God desires of him, and he wants to be obedient, but there’s a problem. Despite the faith in and knowledge of God’s ways, Paul succumbs to human desire and does the things he does not want to do, i.e., the things of the flesh. Can you believe it? Paul, the apostle, was a “slave” to sin in the flesh! Is that hard to believe? Paul is human like us, and despite what we know is right, we often don’t do the right thing. Why, why, why? Because sin is ingrained in the flesh.

There are debates on something called original sin, which is not something we’ll get into here, but it is clear we learn how to sin from an early age. We are naturally selfish as children; we need to be self-focused to survive, but as we mature, we should become less self-focused and more focused on the big picture. In the Christian view, we should be imitating Jesus, who humbled himself (Philippians 2). Jesus was a model of selflessness and submission to God’s will. Jesus did not want to die, yet he was obedient to the point of death so that many could be ransomed from the death that comes from sin; he saw the big picture. Though we can see the big picture, we often fall short of the kind of selflessness that Jesus modeled.

Unlike the Israelites under the old covenant, we have Jesus in clear view. We are not holding out hope for a future savior but rather holding onto the promise that the blood of Jesus has covered our sins past, present, and future. While we are called to obedience, God does not hold our salvation in limbo every time we mess up. We are faced with the present consequences of our mishaps with sin, but we have constant forgiveness through the blood of Christ Jesus. “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness” 1 John 1:9 (NIV). We don’t have to go through the carrot and stick metaphor as partakers of the New Covenant in Christ’s blood. We must strive to be obedient, but fess up when we miss the mark, and move forward in each new day as we are redeemed by the blood of the lamb.