Delvianna,
While there are probably as many answers as there are people, I believe the very concept of obedience is both misunderstood and rejected for "doctrinal" reasons.
When most people think of obedience in their Hebrew Bible, they tend to focus exclusively on the man-God relationship. Sinless God and sinful mankind always in tension. In reality, a significant component of discussion about obedience in the Hebrew Bible is about the person to person obedience. From beginning to end, the God of the Hebrew Bible required that obedience also meant how you treated your neighbor. Prophet after prophet excoriated people in the name of God to return to God's demand for social justice where people (usually the rich and powerful) were predatory on the poor and the needy. The second most important commandment in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament is to love your neighbor as yourself amplified in the story of the good samaritan and the entire chapter in Matthew 25.
For the first 1,500 years of Christianity, obedience was a prominent obligation. Even after Martin Luder's important input that focused on faith as the basis of salvation as opposed to works-based salvation he still maintained that the saved will "bear fruit in demonstration of their salvation," or they never had saving faith to begin with. What struck Protestant theology in the head was it's incorporation into the competing political power games and wars of the follow centuries. Protestant theology has always asked the wrong question, "What do you believe?" Usually meaning are you part of our sect or not? Thus what you believe became the centerpoint of Christian Protestant theology. The question of who are you becoming was unimportant. Believe right subtly enabled you to live any damned way to liked....just so long as you believed "right." Thus a 100 deep blanket of sectarian Dogmas covered the Protestant landscape.
As an example of how important it is to Protestant theology that living the Christian life is only about church attendance and tything. Paul's extensive treatise on love being the objective of the Christian in 1st Corinthians where he clearly tells us that faith alone is can leave you spiritually dead. Or Paul's checkup from the neck up for what a Christian life looks like in Galatians 5. His description of what living in the Spirit of Christ results in your day to day life is usually just winds up a wall plaque. The least preached or taught chapter in the entire New Testament is an entire chapter of Jesus teaching what obedience looks like in Matthew 25.
Many claim to see the bible as a map to heaven, but they refuse to leave the comfort of home to go there. 21st Century Protestant and Non-Denominational Christianity has achieve one major objective, they have become great marketers of dirt cheap salvation. Nod your head to a 60 second pulpit pray and you get a guaranteed ticket to heaven. Perhaps that is why we all intuitively know that we could not pick Christians out of any crowd. From the crowd at the bar or the crowd at the game or any crowd. When obedience is not a requirement there is no such thing as a Christian life. They only thing left is a Christian wish. We preach "let Jesus into your heart" but refuse to give Him control over the rest of our body. The observation of the old country Baptist preacher that "that the praying knee and the dancing foot don't grow on the same leg," seems quaint and amusing. It harkens back to a time, perhaps in small Christian communities where there was something distinct about living a Christian life.
