Obeying God – Pt. 4 — A ‘Time With God’ Devotion

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Transcript

Good morning. We’re talking this week about obeying God. Now that thought may not be a positive thought to you. It sometimes is negative to us because we feel like life is about self-fulfillment, doing what fulfills me, what actualizes me and my sense of identity, not obeying God or respecting a higher force in our lives.

And so we struggle with this, but what we need to understand is that obedience is something that puts us in the path of God’s blessing. It is the way that God has designed us to live to the full.

God has a wonderful plan for your life. He’s designed you to experience His goodness, and it’s only when we step out of God’s plan for us that we experience the ruin and devastation that comes into our lives when we push God away. Well, that’s what happened with the first human beings. We inherited the brokenness that they got as a result of that sin.

And so we’re born with that. We have this brokenness in us.

And God wants to lead us back into a good relationship with Him.

And so He tells us, if you love me, keep my commandments. Obedience is the key to your relationship with me. And in fact, my commands are just descriptions of how to love me. Do you want to love God? Then read the Bible. Learn how He wants you to live and obey Him in your life. He’s sent you the Holy Spirit to help you, to enable you to live that way.

Sometimes we find excuses why we can’t obey God, why we shouldn’t do this, why we shouldn’t do that, but in reality, we should be looking for ways to obey God and please Him in our lives.

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And what we want to see today is that obeying God leads to blessing in our lives.

Do you know when the people of Israel obeyed God, trusted Him, and He delivered them from their slavery in Egypt, and they came out and they came to the promised land. God told them – I want a whole bunch of you to line up on the slope of one mountain. And the rest of you, these hundreds of thousands of people, right, to line up on the slope of the mountain opposite that met in a V-shaped valley at the bottom, and He gave them words to shout out to one another and first one side would shout out.

If you obey God, here are all the blessings that God will bring you, and they called them out to the other side, and the other side then called out, and if you disobey God, here are the curses, the terrible life that will be in store for you if you push God away.

This is the way it is. Obeying God leads to blessing. In the Book of Malachi, right near the end of the Old Testament in the Bible. God is speaking to the people of Israel, and He says, I want you to bring 10% of your crops and things into the temple, into the storehouse there to take care of my people, the priests and Levites who are serving me in the middle of you.

And He says in verse 10, bring the whole tithe into the storehouse that there may be food in my house. Test me in this. Obey me and see, He is saying to them. Test me in this, says the Lord Almighty, and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that there won’t be room enough to store it.

I’ll prevent pests from devouring your crops. The vines in your fields will not drop their fruit before it’s ripe, says the Lord Almighty, and all the nations will call you blessed, for yours will be a delightful land, says the Lord Almighty. What a beautiful description of how God responds to obedience in our lives.

What are you struggling with in your life right now about obeying God in? Do you feel like if you obey God, you’re gonna lose so much, you’re gonna lose this or that, or things will go bad, or you won’t be able to do this or that other thing?

All of that is such a lie.

Disobeying God is what leads to destruction in your life. Obeying God leads to such incredible blessing, and what God says to us in this passage we just read is, I want to bless you. I want to make your life so full of joy.

But you need to obey me and go my way in order for that to happen.

I’m John North.

To go deeper in your faith, visit AFCI.com.au.