Obedience

I went to an all girls military boarding school as a preteen/teenager for about 3 years before I convinced my parents to let me change schools for high school. One of the mantras then was “to obey without complaints”. You can only imagine how hard that was for young girls. As I’ve gotten older, being a type A personality, obeying blindly is still something that is so hard for me. Is there any other person like me? We want to understand the pros, cons, consequences before willingly giving our obedience. We want it to make sense first.

A couple of months ago, I read a story in the Bible that I had read so many times before and noticed something I had never seen before. The story of the ten lepers who asked Jesus to heal them. I had always been focused on the part of the story about the Samaritan that returned to say thank you and was made whole. These lepers shouted from a distance asking for healing. Jesus looked up at them and asked them to go show themselves to the priest. He didn’t say to them “you are healed”, He didn’t lay hands on them. They knew that according to Jewish law, you go show yourself to the priest after your leprosy was cured so that you can be allowed back into the group. Many of us would have probably wondered why, you didn’t even heal me or speak a word to my problems yet you want me to go show myself to the priest. The Bible records that they did not say a word to this, they just turned and went and WHILE THEY WERE ON THEIR WAY, they were cleansed of leprosy.

Think about that for a minute, they obeyed without it making sense, without having an answer to their problems. And on their way, in the middle of their obedience, they got their answer. Obedience means so much to God. There may be something God is telling you to do but because it does not make sense to you, you are not doing it. I want you to remember that only God has the full picture. He alone knows the end from the beginning. He is good! He will not ask you to do something that is bad for you, ever. Everything He does comes from a place of love because He is love. He can’t help it. Saul lost his kingship because he disobeyed. This illustrates how much God values obedience. You may not be walking in the fullness of what God has for you today because you have not yet obeyed.

I want to encourage you today to step out in obedience to where God is leading you. You do not need to see the full picture right now. You don’t need to know what’s around the corner. You just need to know that the One who is telling you to do this is good, loving and faithful. Even more than that is the fact that He does not change. God can be trusted. He is asking you to follow His instructions for your own good. May God give us all the grace to do what He asks.

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