Skip to main content

The Prolonged Outcome of Obedience

            I rarely like to obey what I feel God is asking of me, especially when it comes to humbling myself and not demanding justice my way.  If He asks me to go on a long vacation or enjoy a wonderful prize, I’m eager to obey.

            Obedience starts with a mustard seed of faith.  I believe that God is good and that He would not ask me to do something that is not good for me, even though I cannot see the goodness of the proposal.  My pattern is to get started on obedience reluctantly.  I don’t like it one bit, but I do it anyway, just not with all my heart, mind and spirit.  That kind of obedience is an invitation for the enemy of my soul to double up efforts to show me the insanity of doing it God’s way.  It leaves me open to consider all the myriad of ways I could handle the same situation and leads me to daydreams of the options.  That is until I remember that God said NO! to all those possibilities and gave me one direction. 

            I’m not sure what instant obedience looks like yet, but I can witness to the fact that prolonged obedience has surprising results.  Once the battle begins, I find myself obeying in behavior, yet not in heart.  I trust God enough not to go off and follow my emotions and fallen reasoning therefore making matters worse.  That is spiritual progress for me.  (Although the times I do act out differently than God has asked me, I do repent and receive forgiveness so that I can renew my efforts to do what God has told me to do.)  Rarely are the rewards of my obedience instant.  In fact, the majority of the time I don’t see the results until I have walked so long in obedience that I no longer battle to have my own way, and I forget that I once felt so strongly opposed to God’s way.

            There is a moment that God shows me the outcome of my long journey of obedience.  I feel His delight in me and my choice to honor Him above my own will.  I love how Ruth Myers describes John 15:5 and Philippians 2:13 in her book 31 Days of Praise. 

I’m so grateful, Lord, that the Christian life is not a rigorous self-improvement course or a do-it-yourself kit…that it is not a call to prove myself or improve myself by overcoming my own shortcomings and failures, in my own way, by my own resources.  Thank You that, instead, You are at work in me and in my situation to break old patterns of thought and action to create within me both the desire and the power to do Your gracious will…and to make me a joy to You in new ways.

            God does not look on me and hope that I will be a moral human being.  Obedience is much more than that.  It’s not that He likes people who perform certain behaviors.  Obedience is about intimacy.  Intimacy is about love and trust.  I never truly obey until I am obeying out of love and trust in God’s goodness, especially when I can’t see how it can be good for me to follow where He leads me.  God isn’t as much interested in my behavior as He is in my soul.  He is about renewing the parts of me that instantly connect to Him and see how wonderful and present He is and how all His actions are loving and good for all the world.

            That kind of obedience is impossible for us humans.  We must have the Holy Spirit working inside of us to obey like that.  That kind of obedience does not come instantly for me, but it does come powerfully.

Copyright © 2014 Deborah R. Newman teatimeforyoursoul.com  All Rights Reserved.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Fifth Monday in Lent through Palm Sunday

Fifth Monday in Lent: Righteousness Needed Jesus is all about bringing us righteousness yet we are too worldly focused to think we have much of a need for righteousness. Most of us think we need healing or exciting miracles. We might try to get a little righteousness by going to church on Sunday and giving some spare change to a beggar. God sees the bigger picture and knows that there is nothing which we are more bankrupt than righteousness. He sees that we are totally incapable of getting the righteousness we need through our own actions, so He sent Jesus to give us His righteousness through His sacrificial work on the cross. Lent is a season of repentance and preparation for the Easter celebration. No matter how sacrificial your Lenten fast, it could never be enough to earn your righteousness. I have been practicing Lent for   years, and every year at the end of my fast I come face to face with how far I am from righteousness. Some of the first recorded words of Jesus in th
Post a Comment
Read more

A Pilgrimage that Started with Tears

                Who would think I would shed tears deciding to set out on a wonderful journey that I have longed to take for many years?   Before I was ready to fully accept God’s invitation for a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, I had to journey to a place of agreement between what my soul wanted and what the Lord wanted for me.   For years I have been declining opportunities to travel to Israel—not because I didn’t want to go but because I wanted to go with my husband by my side.   I know that God could have arranged that for me, but instead He asked me to accept that He wanted me to be willing to go and leave everything behind.   When I was asked to make a decision about going on a Pilgrimage to Jerusalem, God gave me this verse in answer to my prayer -- Debi, observe therefore all the commands I am giving you today, so that you may have the strength to go in and take over the land that you are crossing the Jordan to possess (Deuteronomy 11:8).   I decided through tears that I would go on
2 comments
Read more

The Missing Tribe of Dan

            The reason I love studying the Bible with a group of people is that they teach me things I don’t know.   I love it when I don’t know the answer to a question.   That is how I learn.   So when someone recounted the ugly tail of Dan’s idolatry in Judges 18 concluding with the passage in Judges 18:30-31 :   There the Danites set up for themselves the idol, and Jonathan son of Gershom, the son of Moses, and his sons were priests for the tribe of Dan until the time of the captivity of the land.   They continued to use the idol Micah had made, all the time the house of God was in Shiloh. I wanted to know if that could possibly be true that the Danites never ever worshiped God!   How could that be?             Before I had a chance to settle that question, someone in the class read the passage from Revelation 7 where the tribe of Dan was omitted.   I never considered that!   I never realized that a whole tribe of Israel was not found in the New Testament.   What could that
2 comments
Read more