How to Grow in Obedience

The whole drama of humanity began with disobedience

Scripture places at the origin of evil not a murder or a lie, but a disobedience: Adam wanted to decide for himself what was good and evil, refusing to receive the measure of his life from anyone but himself. This is why St. Paul contrasts the two Adams, making Christ’s obedience the exact remedy for the first disobedience:

“For just as through the disobedience of one man the many were made sinners, so through the obedience of one man the many will be made righteous.” — Letter to the Romans 5:19^[3]

Here the stakes are revealed in their full scope. Disobedience is not just one fault among others: it is the form of sin, the act by which the creature takes itself back from its Creator. And obedience is not just one discipline among others: it is the form of salvation, the act by which man returns to God what Adam had refused Him. Jesus said it to Luisa Piccarreta with brutal clarity: the root of the world’s disorder is a generalized rebellion against all authority, beginning with God Himself.

“The reason why the world is in such a pitiful state is that it has lost all spirit of submission to its leaders. And since God is the first leader against whom it rebels, it has lost all submission to the Church, to its laws, and to all legitimate authority.” — Jesus to Luisa Piccarreta, The Book of Heaven, vol. 2, March 20, 1899^[4]

“Obedience is better than sacrifice”

Obedience is not an ornament of the Christian life: it touches the heart of what God expects. When King Saul disobeys the divine command while claiming to offer God magnificent sacrifices, the prophet Samuel gives him a word that echoes throughout Scripture:

“Obedience is better than sacrifice, and submission better than the fat of rams.” — First Book of Samuel 15:22^[5]

The lesson is decisive and ever relevant. One can accumulate pious practices, mortifications, generous works, and yet keep one’s own will intact—preferring one’s own way of serving God to the way God asks. But God does not first demand our achievements, but our will. St. Faustina received the same warning: “I did not require your mortifications but obedience. By submitting, you give me great glory and gain merit”^[6]. Sacrifice offers God something that belongs to us; obedience offers Him ourselves. That is why it is worth more.

What obedience is not

Before going further, we must clear up a misunderstanding that discourages many from the outset. Many confuse obedience with servility: the attitude of one who submits out of fear, calculation, or weakness, who gives up judging and shifts responsibility onto another. This caricature is not the virtue; it is its counterfeit, and we will return to it.

Christian obedience is something entirely different. It is neither the erasure of the intellect, nor the abdication of conscience, nor the infantilization of the adult. It is a free and lucid act: to recognize that a certain will—God’s, or that of one who legitimately represents Him—is better than my own for attaining the good, and to choose to embrace it. Far from diminishing a person, it enlarges him, because it frees him from the narrowest of masters: his own whim. We do not grow in obedience by shrinking, but by opening ourselves to a will greater than our own.

Many fail to grow in obedience because they have a mistaken idea of it—too narrow, or too servile. Defining it precisely, with Saint Thomas, is already half the journey.

A Virtue of Justice

Saint Thomas classifies obedience among the virtues annexed to justice^[7]. The reason is clear. Justice renders to each what is due; now, it is due to God, and to those who exercise legitimate authority in His name, that we submit to their just commands. To obey, therefore, is not to yield to someone stronger: it is to render to authority what is its due, as one pays a debt. The order of the world rests on this dependence: no man is his own origin or his own law, and to recognize above oneself an authority received from God is simply to acknowledge reality.

“The duty of obedience requires everyone to render to authority the honor which is its due, and to surround their persons with respect and, according to their merit, with gratitude and goodwill.” — Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 1900^[8]

This obedience is never absolute toward a creature: it is so only toward God. All human authority is merely intermediary, received from above and limited from above; this is why Saint Thomas carefully distinguishes the obedience owed to God in all things from that, limited, which is owed to men^[9]. We will return to this limit, which safeguards the virtue.

Why Obedience Is the Greatest of the Moral Virtues

Here is the most striking point of Saint Thomas’s teaching. Among the moral virtues, obedience holds the highest place. Why? Because it sacrifices to God not an external good—money, pleasure, comfort—but the most intimate and precious good of man: his own will.

“Obedience, by which one despises one’s own will for God, is more praiseworthy than the other moral virtues by which one despises other goods for God.” — Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II-II, q. 104, a. 3^[10]

Everything is said. One can give away one’s possessions and keep one’s self; one can fast and remain master of oneself; but he who obeys gives up what is most his own, the secret spring of all his actions: to will for oneself. This is why obedience is, in the words of the mystics, “the death of self-will”—not the death of the will (which remains free and active), but the death of that jealous ownership by which we would have everything bend to our will. Jesus reveals this to Luisa with a decisive image:

“Obedience kills self-will and pours divine graces into the soul in torrents. One can say that the obedient soul no longer does its own will but that of God. […] In the practice of other virtues, even the most sublime, self-love can always slip in; but in the practice of obedience, never!” — Jesus to Luisa Piccarreta, The Book of Heaven, vol. 2, August 17, 1899^[11]

The Three Objects of Obedience

Christian obedience is not addressed to just any stronger will: it has precise, hierarchical objects, which must be distinguished in order to practice it rightly. Blessed Jan van Ruysbroeck reduced them to three: God, the holy Church, and the soul’s own discernment, toward which an equal obedience would be required^[12].

The first object is God Himself, to whom obedience is owed in all things, without exception: through His commandments, through the Gospel, through the inspirations of His grace, through the events in which His will is revealed. This is the fundamental obedience from which all others derive.

The second object is the Church, to whom Christ entrusted His authority (“he who hears you hears me,” Lk 10:16): to obey her magisterium, her laws, her legitimate pastors, is to obey Christ who speaks through her. Saint Charles de Foucauld made this a mark of Christian life: obeying the prescriptions of the Church in everything, without arguing or calculating one’s own advantage, out of a pure spirit of obedience^[13].

The third object encompasses all legitimate authorities that God places along our path—parents, superiors, and more broadly, the duties of our state in life—not for themselves, but as representing God. Saint Charles de Foucauld heard Jesus say to him: obeying not only God directly, but also, for His sake and as to Himself, all those He gives as guides—parents, superiors, spiritual directors—each to the extent that God asks to obey him^[14].

Obedience, Humility, Abandonment: Three Virtues to Distinguish

Spiritual language places obedience among neighboring virtues that are easily confused. Distinguishing them allows us to cultivate each rightly.

Reading the table: these virtues are connected and support each other. Humility is the root—one does not obey if one always thinks oneself wiser than authority. Obedience is its fruit in action. Abandonment extends it toward the uncertain future. Jesus also tells Luisa that obedience is what “crowns” and stabilizes the others: “what ennobles the virtues of resignation and humility, strengthens them, makes them persevering […], is obedience […]. Without obedience, resignation and humility are subject to instability”^[15]. For these sister virtues, see How to Grow in Humility, How to Grow in Abandonment to God, and How to Grow in Trust.

Like every virtue, obedience stands at the summit between two abysses. By default, one falls into disobedience; but by distortion, one falls into a false obedience that has only the name of virtue. Knowing both protects our growth, for one can fail in obedience by falling to either side.

Disobedience: Making One’s Own Will the Rule

The first fault is disobedience in the strict sense: making one’s own will the measure of everything, obeying only when the command suits us, arguing, delaying, murmuring. It has a spectacular face—open rebellion—and a subtler, much more common face: surface-level obedience, where one complies while dragging one’s feet, criticizing, and deep down keeping the feeling that things would have been better done one’s own way.

Saint Francis of Assisi unmasked this disguised disobedience, which thinks itself wiser than authority:

“Many religious imagine they have found something better to do than what their superiors command; they look back and return to their vomit, that is, to their own will.” — Saint Francis of Assisi, Admonitions^[16]

The image is harsh, but accurate: self-will is the “vomit” from which obedience had delivered us, and to which the disobedient returns. For disobedience is never neutral: “disobedience fits well with our passions, but never obedience”^[17]. Always, behind the refusal to obey, there is a passion being protected—pride in judging, comfort one does not want to leave, attachment to one’s own view of things.

False Obedience: Servility, Obedience to Evil, Abdication of Conscience

The opposite error is subtler, for it wears the mask of virtue. Not every submission is obedience. Three counterfeits must be distinguished.

First, there is false obedience through servility: obeying out of fear, self-interest, or weakness of character, without love or true assent. Thomas à Kempis describes it bluntly: “Some obey more out of necessity than out of love; such people, always suffering, are prone to murmuring, and will never possess freedom of spirit”^[18]. This kind of obedience is external and sterile: self-will remains intact, merely restrained by force.

Next, there is false obedience to evil: obeying an unjust order or one contrary to God’s law, under the pretext of submission. This is not a virtue, but a fault: one must never obey against God. “We must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29)^[19]: this word of the Apostles before the Sanhedrin sets the inviolable limit, to which we will return in detail.

Finally, there is the abdication of conscience: shifting onto authority the responsibility to judge and answer for one’s actions, as if obedience excused one from thinking. True obedience, on the contrary, engages the whole person—including the intellect. It does not suppress judgment; it puts it at the service of a will recognized as better. This is why Ruysbroeck united in a single duty obedience to God, to the Church, and to the soul’s own discernment^[20]: to abdicate one’s discernment is not to obey, but to resign.

The Just Mean: A Free and Loving Submission

Between these two extremes, the virtue stands in a balance that tradition sums up in a single phrase: a free and loving submission. It is submission, for it truly bends self-will; it is free, for it is neither forced by fear nor suffered through weakness; it is loving, for its motive is not constraint but the recognition of God in the one who commands justly. The following table sets out this discernment.

Reading the table: true obedience is not a fragile point between two dangers, but a fullness that holds together what each fault separates—a true submission and a true freedom, a true docility and a true responsibility. We grow in obedience by moving away from both extremes at once: neither the rebellion of the disobedient, nor the passivity of the servile.

Here is the practical heart of this article. The spiritual masters did not merely praise obedience: they pointed out precise, repeatable means within everyone’s reach. These can be grouped into a few major areas.

Contemplate the Obedient Christ

The first and most powerful means: contemplate the obedience of Christ. Christian obedience is not a technique of submission; it is an imitation. The Son of God, who had no superior, chose to make His entire life an act of obedience—to the Father, and even to Mary and Joseph in the hidden life at Nazareth (Lk 2:51). Saint Paul makes this the center of the mystery of salvation:

“He emptied himself, taking the form of a servant […]. He humbled himself, becoming obedient unto death, even death on a cross.” — Letter to the Philippians 2:7-8^[21]

The Letter to the Hebrews adds a striking word: “Although he was the Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered” (Heb 5:8)^[22]. The summit of this obedience is Gethsemane, where Christ, faced with the cup, sacrifices His human will: “Not my will, but yours be done” (Lk 22:42)^[23]. This is the model for all obedience: not the erasure of a slave, but the “yes” of a Son who loves. The Catechism notes: Christ’s obedience unto death repairs in man the disobedience of Adam^[24]. Looking at the crucifix in the trial of obedience is a reminder that our obedience has no meaning in itself: it is a way of following in His footsteps.

Take Mary as Mistress of Obedience

After Christ, Mary is the perfect model of the creature’s obedience. At the Annunciation, she does not understand everything, she asks a question, then she gives her whole will in a word that overturns Eve’s “no”:

“Behold the handmaid of the Lord; let it be done to me according to your word.” — Gospel according to Saint Luke 1:38^[25]

This fiat—“let it be done”—is perfect obedience: free, clear-sighted, loving, total. The Catechism places Mary, with Abraham, among the models of the “obedience of faith,” that free submission to the word of God “because its truth is guaranteed by God”^[26]. To take Mary as mistress is to learn to say yes before understanding everything, to trust the word received, to let God dispose of us. Her obedience diminished nothing in her: it made her the Mother of God.

Obey God First: Commandments, Duty of State, Will of God

Obedience does not begin in the convent; it begins in ordinary life, where the will of God is presented in three forms accessible to all.

First, the commandments: the most basic and decisive obedience is to keep God’s law, for “obedience in faith” (CCC § 144) is first expressed in a life conformed to what God prescribes. Next, the duty of state: the concrete obligations of our vocation—spouse, parent, worker, religious—are the primary place where obedience to God is exercised, for He wants us to be faithful where He has placed us. Finally, the will of God in events: health, setbacks, encounters, inner promptings of grace, by which God traces a path we have not chosen. To obey God is to welcome these three voices as one. Sister Léonie-Marie Nastal heard Jesus sum up this docility: “Obey blindly and know well that true wisdom is the love of God and that I am its Source”^[27]—“blindly” not against reason, but beyond what reason sees, by trusting in the One who sees all.

Obey Promptly and Without Murmuring

A great part of growth lies in the manner of obedience. One can obey poorly while obeying: reluctantly, arguing, delaying, or keeping murmuring in the heart. Saint Benedict, in his Rule, made this the first degree of humility, and describes perfect obedience as obedience without delay:

“The first degree of humility is prompt obedience. […] This obedience will be acceptable to God and sweet to men only if the command is carried out without hesitation, without delay, without lukewarmness, without murmuring, and without any word of resistance.” — Saint Benedict of Nursia, Rule, chapter 5^[28]

This promptness is not haste: it is the sign that the will has truly yielded, that it no longer offers secret resistance. Murmuring, on the other hand, empties obedience of its value: one does the thing, but keeps the heart in revolt. Thomas à Kempis adds the note of peace that this submission brings: “It is much safer to obey than to command […]. Go where you will, you will find no rest except in humble submission”^[29]. Learning to obey quickly and wholeheartedly, without bargaining or complaining, is one of the most concrete and liberating exercises of the spiritual life.

The Three Degrees of Obedience According to Saint Ignatius

Saint Ignatius of Loyola, in his famous Letter on Obedience (1553), described a progression that every Christian can apply to himself, and which precisely measures the path to be traveled. He distinguishes three degrees.

The first is obedience of execution: doing what is commanded. This is the lowest degree, but already real—one carries out the order, even if the heart resists.

The second is obedience of the will: not only doing what is commanded, but willing what the one who commands wills, making his will one’s own. Here, inner resistance falls away; one obeys wholeheartedly, as if the command came from oneself.

The third and most perfect is obedience of judgment: judging good what is commanded, even aligning one’s understanding with that of the superior in all that is not manifestly sinful. This is the most demanding degree, for it touches what is most independent in man: his mind^[30]. This progression offers a true spiritual thermometer: one begins by executing, learns to will, and ends by consenting. But it is valid, as Ignatius insists, only within the limits of the good: this docility never goes so far as to approve evil.

Allowing Oneself to Be Led: Docility to Grace and Spiritual Direction

Obedience is also cultivated through docility to a guide. Entrusting one’s spiritual life to a director or confessor, and obeying him in matters within his competence, is one of the surest schools of obedience, because it uproots self-will where it hides most cunningly: in the “spiritual” realm, where one is most tempted to believe oneself accountable to no one. Saint Josemaría Escrivá made this the condition for all progress: “One must have great obedience to one’s director and great docility to grace; for if one does not allow the grace of God and the director to act, the sculpture, the image of Jesus, which is what the saint becomes, will never appear.”^[31] Jesus told Luisa to place almost unreserved trust in her confessor: “I want you to have complete trust in your confessor, even in the smallest things, so that there is no difference between him and Me.”^[32] This docility is not a surrender: it is the wisdom of one who knows that no one guides themselves. See How to Grow in Spiritual Direction.

A recent testimony illustrates this simply: in a word received at Varazze on January 19, 1968, Jesus says to the mystic Véra Grita: “This is your new vow — a promise entrusted to God —: obedience. Obedience to Me, in the person of the Priests”^[33]. Here obedience passes through a concrete mediation: it is through her priest that Véra receives the road to follow, with gentleness and in trust, without fear. This word belongs to a private revelation: it illustrates docility to one’s guide, without standing on the same level as Scripture or the Catechism.

Asking for Obedience as a Grace

Finally, like every supernatural virtue, true obedience—one that bends the heart and not just outward actions—is a gift to be asked for before it can be attained. Breaking one’s own will is beyond the strength of nature alone: by temperament, one may be outwardly docile yet inwardly rebellious. The Christian’s reflex, therefore, is not to grit one’s teeth, but to pray: “Lord, give me an obedient heart.” Saint Gemma Galgani received the same instruction from her guardian angel: a “punctual obedience without reply” to her confessor^[34]. To ask for obedience, especially at the moment when the will rebels, is already to exercise it; for this prayer is itself an act of surrender that disarms rebellion before it erupts.

It remains to set the limit, without which all that precedes would become dangerous. Obedience is never unconditional toward a creature, for no human authority is God. It has an absolute boundary: one must never obey an order contrary to the law of God.

“The citizen is obliged in conscience not to follow the directives of civil authorities when they are contrary to the demands of the moral order, to the fundamental rights of persons, or to the teachings of the Gospel.” — Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 2242^[35]

The apostolic rule is clear: “We must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29). All human obedience is therefore subordinate: it is valid as long as the command remains within the bounds of good, and it ceases—and even becomes a fault—as soon as the command enjoins evil. This is what Saint Thomas already taught: one must not obey superiors “in all things”, but only in what falls within their authority and does not contradict God.^[36]

This limit, far from weakening obedience, purifies it. It distinguishes virtue from servility: the servile person always obeys, even in evil; the truly obedient person obeys God through authority, and thus disobeys as soon as authority opposes God. The expression “blind obedience”, used by the saints, never means obeying against one’s moral conscience: it means obeying beyond what reason can grasp, in indifferent or legitimate matters, out of trust in God. It never exempts one from refusing sin. Properly understood, obedience does not extinguish conscience: it puts it in its true place—sovereign when it comes to discerning good and evil, docile in all else.

How can one recognize real growth in obedience? Not by a feeling, but by stable fruits that the saints consistently describe.

Peace of Soul

The first fruit is peace. The soul that obeys ceases to struggle against reality, against authority, against God; it lays down the exhausting burden of wanting to control everything. Jesus makes this a law without exception for Luisa:

“There is no true peace without obedience. If one thinks they enjoy a certain peace without it, it is a false peace. […] When one moves away from obedience, one moves away from Me, the King of this noble virtue.” — Jesus to Luisa Piccarreta, The Book of Heaven, vol. 2, August 17, 1899^[37]

The reason is profound: self-will is an inexhaustible source of agitation, for it constantly clashes with whatever resists it—others, circumstances, even God Himself. The obedient person, on the other hand, has achieved unity within: he wills only what God wills, and thus finds rest even in adversity.

True Freedom

The second fruit confounds common sense: obedience makes one free. Our age opposes these two words; the saints unite them. Freedom is not the absence of a master, but deliverance from the worst master: our passions, our whims, that tyrannical “self” that tosses us about with every mood. To obey is an experience of radical freedom, because one who obeys only God is no longer a slave to anything else. Thomas à Kempis noted it: the soul that obeys possesses “freedom of spirit” that the slave of his own will shall never know.^[38] One becomes truly free only by ceasing to belong to oneself.

Union with the Will of God

The third fruit is the summit: obedience leads to union of our will with God’s, which is holiness itself. By continually embracing the divine will in commandments, duties, and legitimate orders, the soul gradually acquires the habit of willing nothing but God. Jesus expresses this to Luisa in a phrase that touches on mystery: “Obedience is Myself.”^[39] To obey perfectly would be to have but one will with God—which is precisely the goal of all Christian life, and the threshold of life in the Divine Will.

The spirituality of the Divine Will, transmitted to the Servant of God Luisa Piccarreta (1865–1947), gives obedience its ultimate emphasis. The words of Jesus quoted in this section belong to a private revelation: they illustrate and extend the doctrine set out above, without standing on the same level as Scripture, Saint Thomas, or the Catechism. In these writings, obedience is not merely a discipline: it is the key that opens to the soul the very life of God, because it destroys the one obstacle—the self-will—that separates the creature from the Divine Will.

Jesus first presents His own obedience as the source of all Redemption: it is through obedience that He was born and that He died, through it that He conquered death and reopened Heaven.

“Obedience was everything for Me and I want it to be everything for you. It was obedience that made Me be born and it was obedience that made Me die. […] To what greatness did obedience not lead Me? Through it, I conquered death, crushed hell, freed man from his chains, and opened heaven […]” — Jesus to Luisa Piccarreta, The Book of Heaven, vol. 2, September 1, 1899^[40]

He then reveals its highest nature: obedience is not a cold virtue, but the summit of love, for it leads the soul to give itself entirely.

“Do you want to know what obedience is? It is the quintessence of Love. It is the greatest, purest, most perfect love, flowing from the most painful sacrifice. It invites the soul to annihilate itself so as to live anew in God. […] Obedience is Myself.” — Jesus to Luisa Piccarreta, The Book of Heaven, vol. 2, October 3, 1899^[41]

Finally, He gives two images of pedagogical precision: fire and wax. Obedience burns away in the soul what is not divine, and makes it malleable in the hand of God.

“The intensity of the fire corresponds to the amount of wood you put in it. […] Such is obedience. The greater it is, the more it is able to destroy in the soul what is material. Like soft wax, obedience gives the soul whatever shape it wishes.” — Jesus to Luisa Piccarreta, The Book of Heaven, vol. 3, March 10, 1900^[42]

To grow in obedience, from this perspective, is not merely to bow before orders: it is to allow oneself to be shaped like soft wax, until self-will, burned away by this fire, gives way to the Will of God alone. Human obedience, grafted onto that of Christ, then becomes the narrow gate through which the soul enters into the freedom of the children of God. It nonetheless remains distinct from the gift itself: to obey—to do the will of God—is not yet to live in the Divine Will, which is something else and infinitely more: see What Is the Difference Between Doing the Will of God and Living in the Divine Will.

Obedience does not grow through grand resolutions, but through small, repeated fidelity. The means studied can be summarized in a simple program, graduated from the most accessible to the most demanding:

Reading the table: none of these exercises is spectacular; it is their faithful repetition that transforms. One begins with obedience in action, learns obedience of the will, and strives toward complete union with the will of God.

The essential thing is not to aim for obedience in general, but to perform, today, the concrete act that presents itself: this duty to be fulfilled without delay, this legitimate order to be carried out with good will, this way of doing things to yield to another’s, this self-will to lay down. For obedience is the slow and gentle death of the selfishness of self-will; and this death, as Jesus says to Luisa, is the threshold of a new life: “When the soul seems to die, it is then that her true life begins.”^[43]

• How to Grow in Humility — the root of obedience: one does not obey if one always thinks oneself wiser than authority.
• How to Grow in Abandonment to God — obedience extended into the future: entrusting to God one's timetable and what one cannot control.
• How to Grow in Trust — the trust that grounds “blind” obedience: one embraces a will only because one knows it is good.
• How to Grow in Spiritual Direction — the surest school of obedience: letting oneself be led where self-will hides most deeply.
• How to Grow in Faith — the “obedience of faith” by which one freely submits to the word of God.
• How to Grow in Perseverance — the endurance that crowns obedience: remaining steadfast in good until the end.