God doesn’t give you grace so you can live how you want. His agenda for grace is to transform you into a person who humbly recognizes your need for authority. Grace leads you to celebrate the holy, loving, and benevolent authority of God.

I think we misunderstand true freedom. Freedom that satisfies your heart is never found in setting yourself up as your own authority. True freedom is not found in doing whatever you want. True freedom is not found in resisting the call to submit to any authority but your own. True freedom is never found in writing your own moral code. True freedom is not the result of finally deciding on your own identity. When you attempt to do these things, you never enjoy freedom; you only end up in another form of captivity.
Why is this true? Because you and I were born into a world of authority. First, there is the overarching authority of God. Nothing exists that does not sit under his sovereign and unshakable rule.
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Let me tell you what has brought radical awakening to many a passive rebel. Begin treating God’s church as if it really were an extension of God’s authority….you cannot say that a church’s expectations are biblical and reasonable, join it, and then refuse to meet those expectations. That’s just passive rebellion, and it quenches the Holy Spirit’s work in your life.

Dear Robert,
Thanks for pursuing greater growth in the Lord. I am glad you have seen changes in Jake—I have too. I’m even more delighted that you’re asking for a similar pastoral perspective on your life. You asked if Jake’s problem is essentially yours as well. In a word, no, though as sinners in Adam, we often share sinful traits with each other.
Your spiritual block is not “the over-the-hill-commitment.” What I have observed in you is something more easily described, and yet less easily felt. Simply put, your approach to the Christian life is filled with passive rebellion to God’s authority. A low-grade, quiet, stubborn resistance to God retards your growth and ensures that your Christian life has a stop-start feel to it.
Passive rebellion is difficult to recognise in oneself. I’m sure you’re scratching your head right now, wondering how you’re a rebel, since you attend church regularly, serve in ministry, and would consider yourself far more spiritually active than the lukewarm and worldly Christianity that usually claims to be “born again”. But passive rebellion is a quiet and stubborn force which is present in some of the “nicer” Christians you’ll meet.
You can better understand passive rebellion by contrasting it with assertive rebellion. An assertive rebel openly defies God’s principles and commands in Scripture. He knows he is flouting God’s laws, so he instead gives reasons why his rebellion is justified. The passive rebel, however, disobeys by omission. I was too tired to obey. I forgot to obey. It was too hard to obey. It’s the sluggard of Proverbs (Proverbs 22:13; 26:13).
Let me make it really practical. You have joined our church, by your own free will. You joined knowing what our church is, how it runs, and when it meets. You made a covenant that you would regularly participate in worship, as well as supporting the church’s doctrine, discipline, and leadership. Why then do you attend roughly half of the services every week? I know nothing exists in your life that would make attendance at all three services insurmountable. You could be there, but choose to not attend.
Instead, you’ve made the calculation that a passive rebel makes: I don’t want to obey in the way the church expects. I will obey my own way. After all, the church is not God. But this is passive rebellion.
You are correct that the church is not God. You are right that a church’s authority extends only as far as it practises the Word of God. But what you fail to see is that what a church corporately agrees to do becomes voluntarily binding on those who submit to it. And those who refuse what the church expects (be a member, serve others, get involved in ministry, attend every corporate worship service), are refusing to obey God. It just doesn’t feel like it to you, because you think God’s authority and the church’s are completely separate. But this fails to understand how authority works.
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We have set this scene, yet when the predictable script plays out, we ask, “Why do we keep letting this happen?” Neither rifle bans, tougher background checks, nor any other “do something!” policy aimed at mass shootings will actually stop the carnage. 

As the country reels over the Texas massacre, where 19 children and two adults were gunned down by a single shooter who was barely more than a child himself, the question on everyone’s mind is why? Why would any person march into an elementary school and open fire on innocents? And why can’t we overcome such evil?
“Why are we willing to live with this carnage?” President Joe Biden asked. “Why do we keep letting this happen? Where in God’s name is our backbone to have the courage to deal with it?”
Of course, Biden was only asking the “why” questions as a rhetorical maneuver so he could weigh in with his predictable answer: guns. The usual political and media suspects joined the chorus. The left claims firearms themselves are the cause, and anything short of their preferred policy prescription of so-called “universal background checks” and an “assault weapons ban” is “irresponsible and egregious.”
But those who see through the left’s exploitation of this tragedy know there’s something much bigger going on here than a nefarious piece of hardware.
Amid the Texas news updates and hot takes, a stomach-churning TikTok made the rounds on Twitter. In it, a young, pro-abortion mother cradles her infant and says in a sing-song voice to the child, “Hi, I could have killed you, but I chose to let you live,” then likening the killing of babies in utero to killing germs with hand sanitizer.
“Yes, I realize what I just said, and I stand by it,” she concludes.
If Uvalde, Texas, is a tree, this culture of death is the forest. This environment of nonchalant killing is the biome that incubates and grows the most inhumane of humans, who have zero regard for life and bear the nasty fruit of that moral indifference in the form of violence and rape and murder.
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