Saved Unto Obedience

The Bible clearly teaches that by an act of deliberate obedience to the will of his Father, the Lord Jesus poured out his blood on the cross in order to secure the salvation of a host which no man can number. Obedience lies at the very heart of redemption accomplished by the ‘doing and dying’ of Jesus Christ. The Bible, however, does not stop here. The Scriptures also assert that the salvation which Jesus purchased in the course of his obedience, he now confers only in a way that makes all of its recipients obedient subjects of the living God. And thus in I Peter 1:2, the Bible speaks of people of God as those who are foreknown of God ‘unto obedience and sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ.’ The blood of Christ is never sprinkled on any man without Christ’s saving work bringing that man into a path of obedience to God. This is why the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews can write as he does: ‘Though he [i.e. Jesus] was a Son, yet he learned obedience by the things which suffered; and having been made perfect, he became unto all them that obey him the author of eternal salvation’ (Hebrews 5:8-9). When the salvation which Jesus purchased is applied with divine power, it produces in all of its recipients a course of principled obedience to the will of God that is reflective of the course which the Savior walked in securing that salvation.

[Martin, Albert N., A Life of Principled Obedience (Banner of Truth Trust, 1992), pg. 3]