When Love Transforms Duty – Sunday, April 12, 1981
We do many things in life out of duty. We pay our taxes, follow speed limits when we’re late, and come back to work after lunch—all in the line of duty. And many of us classify obeying God as a similar action. It is duty. We worry that He is peeking around some corner waiting to pounce on us if we disobey. So with faces tight as army sheets, we grimly do what we think is right, reading the scriptures when we ache to read the paper, gritting our teeth and paying donations, checking off our list of Christian attributes with fixed determination.
Now, duty has its place, of course. We admire it for what it is. It is a marvelous schoolmaster, a bell which stirs us from our slumber, a stick that reminds us that life is larger than our own small passions. Like children who would rather play in the sunshine than learn arithmetic, we sometimes, perhaps often, need duty to motivate us into higher action.
But let us never be blinded into thinking that duty alone is enough to transform our hearts and take us back to God. It is far too weak a current to light the way. At some mysterious point, love must transform duty as the morning light transforms a pool of ice. We must obey the Lord not because we fear Him, not even because it seems the right and proper thing to do. We must obey Him finally because we love Him. We ache to serve. We yearn to be like Him who is the center of our highest ideals and our fondest affection.
It is no accident that the Lord said, “Blessed are those which do hunger and thirst after righteousness.”1 Hunger and thirst are words we understand. They tell us something powerful about our human needs. As one writer said, “Nothing is real to us but hunger.”2 Love is another word with that kind of passion that cracks through barriers of the heart and moves us when nothing else can.
Yes, the Lord will take our actions born of duty and even bless us for them, but let us understand that there is more. It is love that writes a symphony, a fine novel. It is love that leads a parent to a child’s bedside. And finally, it is love, and only love, that can lead us back to the Lord.
1 Matthew 5.6
2 The Family of Man, created by Steichen, Edward, The Museum of Modem Art, page 152,
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April 12, 1981
Broadcast Number 2,695