If you love me, you will keep my commandments. – John 14:15
According to Jesus, obedience is the proof of our love. Our relationship with him should drive our desire to please him.
As obedient children, do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance, but as he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, – 1 Peter 1:14-15
God is holy which means “separate”, “set apart” or “sanctified”. If we are to have a relationship with God, He calls us to peruse holiness by seeking to please him in every area of our lives.
Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord,’ and not do what I tell you? – Luke 6:46
We are not only to study and memorize the Bible, but we are to obey it. If we call Jesus our Lord then are to be doers of his word and respond obediently to what it says we should do. Obeying God is like building a house on a strong solid foundation that is form when the storms of life come. The more obedience we show to the word of God is the more of Jesus we will experience when the trials of life come.
Praise the Lord! Blessed is the man who fears the Lord, who greatly delights in his commandments! His offspring will be mighty in the land; the generation of the upright will be blessed. Wealth and riches are in his house, and his righteousness endures forever. – Psalm 112:1-3
This is a great passage to stand on and memorize. It gives some amazing promises that you can stand on your your entire household. But this is a conditional promise though. This means that we have to do something first to see the blessings of this promise. We need to reverence God and take great delight in his commands. Which means to obey. So if we want to see all the blessings listed in this verse then we need to be obedient to His word.
But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. – James 1:22
Without application there is no spiritual transformation. We need to obey what the Word of God says in order to be spiritually transformed into who God wants us to mature into.
For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ. And we will be ready to punish every act of disobedience, once your obedience is complete. – 2 Corinthians 10:3-6 NIV
This verse has been used to describe spiritual warefare and shows the authority that we have in Jesus name. There is a very key point in verse 6 that holds all of this together. And it is that we can punish all forms of disobedience only when our obedience is complete. So in a nutshell, if you want to operate in your God given authority, you have to be obedient to God.
And when they had brought them, they set them before the council. And the high priest questioned them, saying, “We strictly charged you not to teach in this name, yet here you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching, and you intend to bring this man’s blood upon us.” But Peter and the apostles answered, “We must obey God rather than men. – Acts 5:27-29
I’m todays society it’s hard to make a stand for God. Peter and the apostles were on trial before the Sanhedrin for preaching about Jesus. Even through they could’ve been killed, they were stayed obedient to God and continued preaching the gospel of Jesus. We too need to make such a stand for Jesus today. It’s a very bold move but God will always back is up when we are obedient to him. You can read Acts 5 for this entire passage in context.
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. – 1 Samuel 15:22
I’m this passage Saul only did a part of what God told him to do. He was to completely destroy the Amalekites. Instead he thought if would be pleasing to Hod if he brought back some spoils to make a sacrifice. As a result of this disobedience, God rejected him as king. We can learn from this that partial obedience is disobedience from Gods perspective. We are to obey all of Gods instructions 100%.