Obedience

I was correcting one of my children the other day and I was reminded of something I heard once. You know that random thought that you just know is from God cause it brings such conviction but excitement at the same time? Yeah, it was one of those moments.

"If we need to hear the benefits of obedience in order to obey, it's not really obedience."

Ouch.

So while I used it to alter the way I was instructing my child, I also started thinking about it in terms of my own life. Isn't that what we do sometimes to God? We need to hear what we will get out of it before we fully commit.

How many times have we filtered our obedience to God through our emotions or our own logic?

The danger with doing this is that serving God becomes all about us and what we get from God, not about our response to who He is.

But following Jesus isn't about doing what feels good. What a faulty foundation for a Christian to live by. This thinking will produce a believer who is up and down, serving God only when everything is good and going our way but who will walk away when things get hard ... when the cost gets too personal, too expensive, too time consuming, too...much.

We've said things like "God wouldn't ask me to give up something I love" "God wants me to be happy!" "God is a good God, He will give me the desires of my heart."

Matthew 16:24 - "If anyone wants to follow after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me."

Deny means to lose sight of your own interests.

Yes, there are blessings when we choose to obey. Yes, as I tell my children, obedience brings joy. But what if the blessings are eternal, not immediate - will we choose to obey then? And what if those blessings come in completely unrelated ways. Shall we look at a few different ways people were blessed when they chose to obey?

Abraham: obeyed God by getting ready to sacrifice Isaac. His blessing came through the provision of the ram; and he got to bring home the very son he was asked to sacrifice.

Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego: obeyed God by not bowing to other idols. Their blessing came when Jesus walked with them through the fire and they walked out unscathed.

Joseph: obeyed God by fleeing temptation of Potipher's wife. His blessing came when he went to jail. Wait, what?

You read that right. His obedience landed him straight in jail...for years. But the blessing did eventually come; not in the form of Pharoah coming and apologizing to him for wrongly imprisoning him...but something even better, in the form of the provision, protection, and ultimately the restoration of his family.

There are loads of more examples that we could take time to discuss. But the point is this. When we choose to obey God only when we agree, only if it lines up with our feelings, only if we understand it, or only if we will get something out of it. That's not really obedience. Instead, it's a rebranding, a repackaging of obedience into something that is less about God and more about ourselves.

Obedience is a learned behavior. Nothing has made me more convinced of that than dealing with toddlers for the last four years. It is not something they are born with, not something that comes easy - but every choice to obey today, gets them closer to obeying something tomorrow.

Even Jesus had to learn obedience. Not just to Mary & Joseph when they pulled the caravan around to take Him home, but when He was in the garden, praying "Take this cup from Me, nevertheless Your will be done". Jesus chose to be obedient, even to the point of death.

So let me ask you, what is God calling you to do in 2025? Are you willing to lay aside your dreams, your reasonings, your feelings, your own interests all for the sake of obedience? Are you willing to obey, even if you never see your rewards on this side of eternity?