Obeying God – Pt. 3 — A ‘Time With God’ Devotion

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Transcript

Good morning. Each weekday morning at this time, we’re talking this week about obeying God.

We started out by pointing out that all the problems that we have in our lives stem from the first man and woman, Adam and Eve disobeying God, and that broke something inside of them. It led to consequences that God had warned them about, and we are experiencing the repercussions of that in our own broken lives. Obeying God leads to such goodness in our lives and disobeying Him only damages ourselves.

And we saw yesterday that obedience is God’s love language, that the commands of God in the Bible are simply descriptions of how to love God, and He’s given us His Holy Spirit to enable us to live out that desire to please Him and love Him.

If you want to love God, obey Him.

Today we want to go to another lesson about obeying God, and that is this. Don’t look for excuses and reasons not to obey God.

Let me read you a story from 1 Samuel in the Old Testament of the Bible.

The prophet Samuel had come to King Saul and said, Saul, here’s God’s message for you. I want you to go fight with the Amalekites and really destroy them for the disobedience, the way that they have responded to me. So Saul goes and fights with them, but doesn’t follow through with the command from God.

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Samuel comes to Saul and says, Let me tell you what the Lord said to me last night. Tell me, Saul replied.

Samuel said – Although you were once small, even in your own eyes, did you not become the head of the tribes of Israel? The Lord anointed you king over Israel, and he sent you on a mission, saying, Go and completely destroy those wicked people, the Amalekites. Wage war against them until you have wiped them out. Why did you not obey the Lord? Why did you pounce on the plunder and do evil in the eyes of the Lord?

But I did obey the Lord, Saul said. I went on the mission the Lord assigned me. I completely destroyed the Amalekites and brought back Agag, their king. The soldiers took sheep and cattle from the plunder, the best of what was devoted to God, in order to sacrifice them to the Lord your God at Gilgal.

But Samuel replied.

Does the Lord delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as much as in obeying the Lord? To obey is better than sacrifice, and to heed is better than the fat of rams, for rebellion is like the sin of divination and arrogance like the evil of idolatry, because you have rejected the word of the Lord. He has rejected you as king.

Now when Saul went to obey the command to destroy everything, not to take anything. He did a lot of what God had asked, but because he didn’t want to destroy the good stuff, they kept it.

And Samuel said, Why am I hearing all this bleating of sheep in my ears? You’ve kept all of these animals and goods that you’ve plundered. Well, Saul felt like he had done enough.

But God is not satisfied with our excuses. Saul was trying to say, Look, I’ve kept it for sacrifice, and Samuel says, what God wants is obedience, not for you to keep it for sacrifice when he told you to destroy it. What are you saying in your life to excuse disobeying God, to tone down how bad disobeying Him feels or looks to you or to others?

What is God saying to you today? How do you need to obey God in your life?

I’m John North.

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