No, I don't think that working from obligation is always wrong. It's wrong, as you said, Arnold, when the unloving helper believes that he has met God's requirement by so doing. Many times I didn't feel like helping someone, yet I helped the person nonetheless, asking for God's forgiveness and asking Him to fill me with His love. As C. S. Lewis said, in Mere Christianity:

“When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him. If you injure someone you dislike, you will find yourself disliking him more. If you do him a good turn, you will find yourself disliking him less.”

Being sinners, sometimes we obey the law not because we feel like it, but because we know we should do it.

Rosangela - this could be described as "in bondage to the letter of the law".

One must believe Jesus had a different motivation.
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As different as is Sinai from Jerusalem above.
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The man who attempts to keep the commandments of God from a sense of obligation merely--because he is required to do so--will never enter into the joy of obedience. He does not obey. When the requirements of God are accounted a burden because they cut across human inclination, we may know that the life is not a Christian life. True obedience is the outworking of a principle within. It springs from the love of righteousness, the love of the law of God. The essence of all righteousness is loyalty to our Redeemer. This will lead us to do right because it is right--because right doing is pleasing to God. {COL 97.3}

Yet agape LOVE is a principle not a feeling.

Do we need to FEEL like it before we obey?
If a mother really loves her child and that youngster is crying in the middle of the night and the mother is really tired, SHE DOESN'T feel like getting up yet again, and may even groan at the thought, but she does it anyway and lovingly cares for her child.
Is she acting out of love or out of obligation -- or is it both?
Because she loves that child she will fulfill her obligation even if she doesn't feel like it.

Notice in the quote from COL 97 the word MERELY

"keep the commandments of God from a sense of obligation merely--because he is required to do so will never enter into the joy of obedience"

We need to understand that love for God must be the foundation. When this gift is firmly planted within our hearts and minds, then we chose to do His will because we love Him even when we don't FEEL like doing whatever that might be.

Memory Text: “For judgment will be merciless to one who has shown no mercy; mercy triumphs over judgment” (James 2:13, NASB).

What does it mean?

Compare it with
Luke 6:37 Judge not and you will not be judged
condemn not and you will not be condemned
forgive and you will be forgiven.

and

Matt. 6:14 For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you:
6:15 But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.

AMEN!

We need mercy. James makes it clear that those who prefer certain classes of people before others are guilty of breaking all of the commandments. And this is a commandment all of us are breaking. Therefore we are only saved by the mercy of God because mercy triumphs over judgment,

Jesus was God in sinful flesh. So, yes, His nature was radically different. But, as you know, He never used His divinity to resist temptation. Jesus resisted the same temptations born again believers resist. Jesus' fallen humanity also had the same defects and weaknesses. However, like believers who are abiding in Jesus, He did not cherish them or act them out. Thus, He never incurred guilt. You seem to think merely having them counts as sinning.

The fruit of abiding in Jesus is the fruit of the Spirit - not sinning that requires mercy. Believers who have learned to live in harmony with everything Jesus has commanded, and who are abiding in Jesus, do not and cannot sin. That is, they do not and cannot sin while they are actively, consciously, deliberately abiding in Jesus, walking in the Spirit and in the mind of the new man, partaking of the divine nature. Of course they are free to neglect or to reject Jesus and then all they can do is sin, everything they do is stained with sin.