Tag: obedience

1 Samuel 15:10-31

On By Tim EhrhardtIn Daily Bible Reading Blog, Year BLeave a comment
“Does the LORD really want sacrifices and offerings? No! He doesn’t want your sacrifices.  He wants you to obey him” (verse 22), so said Samuel to King Saul.
God had given Saul explicit instructions on how to handle a group of people called the Amalekites.  Saul obeyed… some of the instructions, but not all of them.  He rationalized his behavior as worship.  But God would have none of it.  The Lord rejected Saul as king; He wanted no monkey business when it comes to obedience.
            I’d like to think I’m not like Saul.  But I sat a bit with this verse, and realized I sometimes do the same thing:
·         Whenever I say I’ll do something and then get busy and not do it, I sometimes rationalize my lack of follow through by explaining what good things I was doing with my time instead.
·         I sometimes justify a purchase of something I don’t really need but want with the excuse to God that I put a lot of money in the offering plate for Him.
·         Occasionally slandering another person, even though it is forbidden by God, with the knucklehead notion that I’m protecting and helping others from that person’s evil ways.
·         I sometimes keep quiet in the face of a bad situation when I should be speaking up, and dismiss the lack of engagement and involvement with the fact that I need to save my energy for people who want it….
I got too convicted to keep thinking about it anymore, but I could have kept going. *Sigh*
            Before we get too uppity about saying we are not like Saul and would never be like him, perhaps we ought to sit with this story and this verse of Holy Scripture for awhile and allow a mindfulness of any unacknowledged disobedience.
            Rationalization is the way of sinners.  Repentance is the path of saints.  Which road will you choose today?

 

Holy God, you expect obedience to clear instructions.  I’m sorry for all those times I’ve found creative ways to circumvent your teaching.  Help me not to avoid your good commands, but to own them with vigor and vitality through Jesus Christ my Lord in the power of your Holy Spirit.  Amen.

Be a Doer, Not Just a Hearer

On By Tim EhrhardtIn Exploring Church Ministry BlogLeave a comment
“Be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves” (James 1:22, ESV).
 
  “Obey God’s message!  Don’t fool yourselves by just listening to it” (CEV).
 
 
 
            The Word of God has not been truly received until it is put into practice.  This is a consistent theme in the New Testament.  Paul warned the church in Rome:  For it is not those who hear the law who are righteous in God’s sight, but those who obey the law who will be declared righteous (Romans 2:13).  Our Lord Jesus himself stated the same truth:  Blessed are those who hear the word of God and obey it (Luke 11:28). 
 
The person who only hears is like a Mr. Potato Head that is only ears.  He can’t stand because he has no feet.  He cannot do anything because he has no hands.  Mr. Potato Head needs some feet so that he can follow Jesus wherever he goes.  And he needs hands so he can do God’s will.
 
Listening to the Word without obedience is just that – it is mere hearing.  Profession of faith in Jesus means nothing without a practice of that faith; learning the Bible is useless without living it; and acceptance of the Word is nothing more than a mental exercise without action to back it up.  Profession, knowledge, and acceptance alone does not satisfy God’s plan for our lives. 
 
The danger is that we have the potential to deceive ourselves into thinking we are okay just because we know the right things and believe the right things.  Christianity is a vital love relationship with Jesus, and, so, is not merely a matter of hearing and affirming orthodoxy; it also involves orthopraxy, that is, having right practice, the doing of truth.
 
True hearing leads to true response.  When my firstborn daughter was still in the womb, I constantly talked to her.  I was in seminary at the time, and I would come home and read her fairy tales in Hebrew.  I spoke to her when I got up in the morning and when I went to bed.  I told her all about how God was going to bless her and do great things through her.  I told her of Jesus and his love for her.  I practiced my sermons and Sunday School lessons on her – all before she was born.
 
When the day came that God graced us with her birth, the nurses took her and she cried and cried.  She cried so much and so hard that I finally said to them, “Let me hold her.”  The minute I held her, I began speaking to her, and what happened next got the attention of everyone in the room:  little baby Sarah immediately got quiet.  It was like that the entire time she was in the hospital.  The only time she was happy was when I was speaking to her.  It would be no surprise for you to know that Sarah has always been a Daddy’s girl.
 
We respond to God’s voice when we recognize it.  If we are not in the habit of responding to God’s Holy Word, it is likely that we do not know his voice.  Baby Sarah did not need a lesson on how to respond to me; she knew exactly who I was:  her father.  Do we know our heavenly Father?  Can we distinguish his voice?  The greatest need that we all have is to be servants of God who hear his voice and respond to it, and not soakers who just sit and hear without any response at all.
 
Whenever we refuse to love the unbelievers around us, we are not hearing God and doing his will.  When we listen to the gospel, but then have no intention of sharing that same gospel with others, we are being disobedient.  When we hear about how God forgives us in Jesus’ name, but then we insist on not forgiving another person, we are not being doers of the Word.  When we read the Holy Scriptures as an end in itself without the expressed intent of doing whatever we find in it, then we merely hearing.
 

 

            The Bible is only boring and irrelevant when we read it with no intention of doing what it says.  This is why whenever we read it we need to write out what action we are going to do after having read it.  This is also why the church needs to corporately and collectively covenant together to act on what they hear from God’s Word as they examine it together.  Without this, we are only a random collection of individuals listening to a talking-head preacher.  We go home and forget what we just heard.  Instead, let us act in unity and purpose to do what we find in Holy Scripture.  Can you imagine even just one church who devotes themselves to such a sacred task, and what impact it would have in the world?

Revelation 3:7-13

On By Tim EhrhardtIn Daily Bible Reading Blog, Year CLeave a comment
            Over thirty years ago, Chuck Colson wrote a timely and influential book entitled Loving God.  In it, he presented a simple yet biblical premise concerning the life of every believer in Jesus:  The way to love God is to obey God, period.  Everything turns on our listening to God and doing what he says to do.  Jesus himself communicated to the church at Philadelphia (not Pennsylvania, but Asia Minor) and affirmed how they obeyed the message.  Because of their faithful and steadfast obedience, the Philadelphian believers would be protected and loved by Jesus. 
 
            The church at Philadelphia did much more than offer a confession of loving God – they affirmed that confession by obeying Jesus.  In my Christian circles, we call this “living into our baptisms.”  That is, it is one thing to experience the sign of baptism as being set apart by the Holy Spirit for a relationship with God through the person and finished work of Jesus.  It is quite another thing to “live into” this reality by knowing God’s Word and obeying it.
 
            There is much complexity to humanity and its psychology, sociology, and history.  But there is at least one simple straightforward Scriptural truth that we all can live into:  To love God is to obey God.  Therefore, it is quite necessary for us to spend extended times reading our Bibles in order to know them well so that we can obey what it says. 
 

 

            Gracious God, thank you for the message of good news that in Jesus Christ I have forgiveness of sins.  Help me to hold onto this gospel through all of the vicissitudes of life so that obedience springs from my heart in all things by the power of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

Deuteronomy 11:1-17

On By Tim EhrhardtIn Daily Bible Reading Blog, Year BLeave a comment
            God has boundaries.  That is, he does not just flit about doing whatever seems alright for the moment because he is firmly secure in who he is and what exactly he wants.  God is not okay with his creatures, us, having no boundaries.  Since we are people created in his image, we are to reflect him in all things, including having the established boundary of taking charge of our own spiritual lives and obeying him in all things.
 
            God has opened the way of redemption to his people, first in the incredible event of the exodus from Egypt, then in the culmination of our freedom through the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  Therefore, God expects us to live into this opportunity without acting like all our problems are his fault.  Just because God stands up to people and does not cave into their demands and their whining does not make him mean or unjust – it simply means he doesn’t need people to give him props.  God is secure enough to not be dependent on humans.
 
            God is quite clear on what he wants, and where the boundary lines fall:  “You shall therefore love the LORD your God and keep his charge, his statutes, his rules, and his commandments always.”  There is no fudge factor to that statement, scratching our heads wondering what we ought to be doing.  If we will obey God, we will experience life as it ought to be lived – free from all the machinations of sinful brokenness and insecurity, yet, securely confined within godly boundaries.  God can tell his people to be strong and take the land because he has made it possible for them to do so.  He has acted in history, and expects us to respond in obedience to the boundary lines he has established that will allow us to flourish and grow as people in a new land.
            Great God Almighty, I choose today to obey you in all things out of the grace given to me because of Jesus Christ.  I want to please you in all I say and do, so that you will be seen as the glorious and exalted king of the universe.  Help me to live up to my standing in Christ in the power of the Spirit as I step into your world with the keys of the kingdom.  Amen.