Thursday, February 20th, 2025
There is a little bit more God is speaking to me about obedience. As I said in the last blog, we think that obedience is a measure of our skill or ability, but in reality it’s a measure of our love for and faith in God. If our response to God’s request for obedience is a string of questions or doubts, it’s because our faith is in ourselves. We think we have to figure out the situation or need to possess a certain skill set in order to get the job done.
On the other hand, if our response is simply, “Yes, Lord” it’s because we trust that God’s ways and thoughts are higher than ours. We say yes because we love Him, and we don’t want to express anything contrary to love. Look what it says in 1 John 5:3:
3 For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments. And His commandments are not burdensome.
And John 14:21:
21 He who has My commandments and keeps them, it is he who loves Me. And he who loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I will love him and manifest Myself to him.”
There is no requirement that God’s request make sense to us. We can’t see all the moving pieces that God does. We don’t know all the people that He wants to reach at the same time. We have no idea how long it may take for our single act of obedience to bring completion to whatever God is trying to do. And as I mentioned last time, it’s quite possible that we may never even know the result of our obedience. What might not look like much to us or may not appear to impact someone as much as we think it should, may be an iceberg with 95% of its ice mass invisible below the water. God is aware of 100% of that iceberg. The 5% is the only part we are involved in. He will do the rest.
Final Thoughts…
Oftentimes our inability to obey is due to a lack of faith in God, a fear of man or a misunderstanding of our identity in Christ. Once our identity is grounded in Christ, we mature past people-pleasing and we put our faith in God instead of ourselves, obedience will become simple and almost automatic. Let’s take some time to ask God what our barriers to obedience are. They are most likely different for all of us. If we ask, Holy Spirit will show us our hurdles and help us to leap over them with ease.