Obedience to the Lord
Once you are willing to commit to making a full and complete surrender of your body, your soul, your spirit and your entire life into the hands of God the Father, then God will take immediate control of your life and He will then start to lead you and your life into the specific direction that He will want it to go in. He will perfectly lead you into what your true calling is going to be in Him. He will lead you to the person that He will want you to marry if it is His perfect will that you get married in this life. He will supernaturally open up doors for you so that you can advance from one level of service to the next level of service. And not only will God be perfectly guiding you every step of the way as you advance up your own personal ladder of success in Him, but He will also be divinely protecting you along the way so that you can make it into each of these levels of service in one piece. And as long as you are willing to stay in this full surrender with Him, He will take you all the way to your own personal finish line, which will be the end of your life, so that you can fully complete all of your divine assignments and missions for Him in this life. All of this is fully explained to you in our article "The Full Surrender" in the Bible Basics section of our site. In that article, we give you all of the appropriate verses from Scripture that will show you that this is what God is really wanting from each one of us and exactly how to enter into this full surrender with the Lord if you have never done this before. The Bible tells us that God will actually guide our steps in this life through the Holy Spirit. It is now the job of each Christian to be fully led by the Holy Spirit in this life. What this means is that we are no longer in control of our life. God will now be the Captain of our ship and the Commander-in-Chief in our lives. God will now be the One to run the entire show of our lives. We are no longer even our own, as Jesus Himself has now bought us back at the price of His death on the cross. We now belong to God and Jesus and no one else in this life - including ourselves. However, as perfect and rosy as this scenario appears to be, there is just one small little problem with all of this. This one small little problem is our flesh and ego. Our flesh will not want to take orders from anyone - including the Lord Himself. Our flesh and ego will still want to try and run our own lives, decide what jobs and vocations we will strive after in this life, decide who we will marry, and choose who our friends will be in this life. We want to be in total and complete control of our lives, and we want to sink or swim all on our own efforts so that we can have all of the glory and fame for ourselves if all of our efforts turn out to be successful. Though we know God is all-powerful and all-perfect and that He knows much better than we do what we should really be doing with our lives, there still seems to be something inside of most of us that still wants to try and do all of this on our own, operating out of our own strength, wisdom and intelligence. As I stated in my article on the full surrender, you will end up laboring in vain if you try and build the house of your life operating all on your own efforts and wisdom. The Bible tells us that the Lord has to be the One to build the house of our lives. Anything that we build, earn, achieve or accomplish operating out of own flesh in this life will in no way be as highly rewarded once we enter into heaven as the works that are done operating in God's perfect will and plan for our lives. What this means is that each and every Christian has to make one, big whopper personal decision in this life - and that one decision is who is going to run your life from here on in - you or God? This is an all-or-nothing decision. Either you are going to let God have full, complete and total control of every aspect of your life or you are not. You cannot straddle the fence post with either yourself or the Lord on this decision. If you do, you will end up paralyzing yourself and you will never accomplish anything of any real worth in this lifetime. If you decide that you do want to make this full and complete surrender with the Lord and let Him guide your steps in this life into His perfect plan and destiny for your life - you will now have to make one more big decision. You will now have to make sure that you will be willing to be perfectly obedient to the Lord with whatever He will be asking you to do for Him in this life. It is one thing to be able to start out making this full surrender with the Lord - but it is going to be quite another thing to be able to stay in perfect obedience to the Lord as you proceed along in your life's journey with Him. There will come times when God will tell you to do one thing and you will want to do another thing. At times, it may literally become a battle of wills - your will against God's will over certain issues or certain situations that will occur in your life.
Though God will sometimes be willing to consider your personal arguments and contentions over certain issues or matters in your life - what you will have to really ground on is that God will always be knowing what is going to be best for each situation that you will be personally encountering in this life. As a result, you are going to have to be willing to accept whatever God's final decisions are going to be on certain issues in your life. And this is where it can get really tough and trying. Though you know God will always know what is going to be best for each major decision that you will have to make in this life - your flesh will still try to act up and try to get its own way - especially if it is something that you are really wanting.
It really is that simple, but yet so many Christians completely miss out on what their true callings and divine destinies would have been in this life - all because they did not want to be perfectly obedient to the Lord with what He was calling and asking them to do for Him in this life. Two of the most glaring examples of this obedience factor coming into major play in the Bible has to be the story of Abraham and Moses. God first tested Abraham's obedience. He asked Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac on an altar. God obviously had no real intentions on having Abraham literally kill his son. All God wanted to see was if Abraham would really obey His specific command. And once Abraham showed God that he would perfectly obey this order and would be willing to go all the way through with it - God commanded him to stop and then pronounced one of the most incredible blessings and rewards that would ever befall anyone in the Old Testament. He told Abraham that from his seed all the nations of the world would be blessed and that from his bloodline His Son Jesus would be born into this world. Abraham thus started the generational blood line that would eventually lead up to Jesus being born into this world through the virgin Mary. And all of this incredible domino action started as a result of Abraham being perfectly obedient to the Lord on that one special order. Abraham was thus highly rewarded because of his perfect obedience to God the Father. However Moses managed to do just the opposite. Per our two articles that we have on Moses in the Bible Stories section of our site, Moses was not allowed to go into the Promised Land because he directly disobeyed a specific command given to him by the Lord. What happened in this incident is that God told Moses to speak out to a rock in the presence of the Israelites and that the rock would then bring forth water for the people and their animals. However, for some strange reason, Moses strikes the rock twice with his rod instead of just speaking out to the rock as God had specifically told him to do. He was thus in direct violation of a direct command by the Lord. The Bible really doesn’t say why Moses did this. He obviously should have known better. Though Moses ended being one of the greatest men in all of the Bible with everything that He had accomplished in the Lord, his story ends on a rather sad and tragic note - all because he did not perfectly obey God the Father on this one specific command. These two men's dramatic stories in the Lord should be a major lesson to each and everyone of us on the extreme importance that we get it through our sometimes thick skulls that we have to walk this walk in perfect obedience to the Lord. If we don't, the results could end up being very sad, if not possibly tragic and fatal. The Scripture VersesHere are 9 powerful verses from the Bible all having the word "obey" or some form of that word in each one of them. As you will see in reading each one of these powerful verses, God is not mincing any words. You can tell by the tone and the straight forward language being used by the Lord that He is letting all of us know, loud and clear, that He is the One who has to call all of the shots in our lives - and it is up to each and everyone one of us to perfectly obey Him every step of the way as we journey through this life.
The first verse has a major key phrase that should be memorized by all Christians. Peter says that we should "obey God rather than men." This powerful command really has major relevance in this day and age, especially with our young children who are constantly having to battle the temptation to follow after other people who are not living their life the way God would like them to live it. Every minute of every day someone is getting burned, hurt or possibly killed as a result of following after the wrong people or the wrong crowd. What they are doing is "obeying" and "following" after other people in this life rather than obeying and following directly after the Lord The second verse above is one of the strongest verses in all of the Bible on how God has the big picture all set up. Either we choose to fully "obey" God's voice and follow directly after Him and all of His ways for our life and receive His "life" and "blessings" for our life - or we can choose to follow other people or the ways of this corrupt world and then end up bringing down "death" and "cursing" upon us and our families. Again, there are no middle grounds or neutral areas with the way this verse is being specifically worded. Also notice that these verses are telling us that in addition to obeying the Lord direct, that we have to obey His "truth" and His "doctrine" - which means that we have to obey all of the direct words and truth of the Bible, since all of the Bible comes to us direct from God the Father through the Holy Spirit and is thus perfectly inspired, infallible and inerrant. The last verse is talking about King Saul and how he got into major trouble with the Lord because he was not being obedient to the Lord with some of the decisions he made in his life. Notice that Saul actually tells Samuel that he directly transgressed and sinned against the Lord as result of obeying the people's voice instead of directly obeying God's voice. He apparently obeyed the people rather than God because he "feared the people."
The last verse really sums up the extreme importance of being perfectly obedient to the Lord to the best of our abilities when God is telling us that "rebellion" is as the sin of "witchcraft" and "stubbornness" is the same thing as "iniquity" and "idolatry." In other words, every time you directly disobey the Lord, you are committing a direct sin against Him, you are committing idolatry before Him since you are placing your wants and your desires over Him and what He wants to do with your life, and you are no better off than a witch or a warlock if you seek to follow after your own way or the ways of this world rather than the Lord Himself and His ways for your life. These extremely harsh and strong words being spoken by the Lord through the prophet Samuel to King Saul really apply to each and everyone of us if we try and buck the Lord and directly disobey Him like Saul managed to do so many times. Again, there can only be one true captain of your ship, one true commander-in-chief and one true shepherd in your life. You can either choose to make yourself the captain of your ship, some of the other people in your life, or God Almighty Himself. All of the above verses are as clear as day as to who should be the Captain of your ship and the Shepherd of your soul - and that one Person is our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and His heavenly Father, who will then lead us in this life through His Holy Spirit. Specific Areas of Obedience With the LordAs I said at the top of this article, even though this appears at first glance to be a very easy principle to abide by with the Lord, there are times that it will really be tough to do - especially with our flesh and spirits constantly warring against one another. Here are several specific areas that you could find yourself engaging in a major tug of war on with the Lord. 1. Your Divine Call in the LordEither one of two things will happen in this first area. Either you will be in full and complete agreement with the Lord with what He will be calling you to do for Him in this life, or you will have initial problems with the call, and you will then start to try and wrestle with the Lord over the specific call. Here are several examples of where you could possibly find yourself in a major wrestling match with the Lord: a) Perhaps God has given you an incredible singing voice. Your initial desire is to want to become a famous pop singing star. However, in God's perfect plan and destiny for your life, your singing talent is only going to be secondary to what His main purpose is going to be for you. He may be calling you to be a pastor of a large church and your singing talent will only be used as secondary gift next to your primary gift of being a great pastor to a large church. What this means is that you will have to be willing to give up a major career in Hollywood in order to step into God's true calling on your life. And for some, this will be very hard to do because the flesh will want all of the glory and fame of becoming that famous pop singing star. b) Perhaps God is calling you to be a stay-at-home home for the first 20 years of your marriage - but then you are also given an incredible opportunity to work yourself up in the higher levels of management at the company you used to work for. The temptation of all of that extra money, power and possible fame will be very tempting. But God's perfect will for the first 20 years of your marriage is that you be the best stay-at-home mom that you can be for your children. As tempting as this golden opportunity may at first appear to you, you will have to rely on God's final decision on this and if He tells you that He wants you to be a stay-at-home with your children, then you will have to go with His final decision on the matter.
c) For some others, God may call them to become doctors, attorneys, missionaries, evangelists, policeman, or business executives. But they may want to be something else entirely different. They may want to become musicians, politicians or high school or college teachers. Bottom line - God has a specific plan for your life and a specific direction that He will want to take your life in. Once you find out exactly what God wants to do with your life and the direction that He will want to take it in - you can either choose to come into full agreement with His perfect plan for your life or you can choose to walk out on Him and make your own decisions as to what jobs and vocations you will be seeking after in this life. As all of the above Scripture verses are telling us, we have to obey God in this life rather than ourselves or the other people in our lives. And the very first order of business with the Lord is that we perfectly obey the call and the direction that He will want to take our lives in. If we do, then we will be led on the path of our true divine destiny in Him and will thus be highly rewarded once we enter into heaven after we have completed and fulfilled that divine destiny for Him. 2. Who You Will Marry in This LifeThe next major order of business after making sure that you will perfectly obey the call that God will want to place on your life - is to make sure that you let God choose who you will be marrying in this life if it is in His perfect will that you get married in this life. I literally cannot even begin to count the number of Christian men and women I have met in my life who have never asked God who they should be marrying in this life. As a result, many of them have either gone through multiple divorces or they are now living in lifeless, dead and miserable marriages. Many people, when they are still dating at a young age, may fall madly in love with their current steady boyfriend or girlfriend. They think this person has to be their true soul mate. But then when they go to God to ask His opinion as to whether or not they should be marrying this person - and then God comes back and tells them that they have the wrong person - they end up in major wrestling matches with the Lord because they do not want to wait any longer and they are so sure that they have found the right person. Not fully realizing that God can perfectly see into their futures and that He can see who is going to change for the better and who is going to change for the worse over time, they decide to make their own decision and completely ignore what God is trying to tell them to do. They then end up marrying that wrong person and further on down the road they end up going through very painful, messy and traumatic divorces, not to mention the possibility of becoming the victims of verbal, physical or sexual abuse from someone who may have become completely psychotic over the years. Only God knows who would be best suited for you. Only God knows who will change for the better or who will change for the worse over the years of your marriage. Only God knows who will stay true, loyal and faithful to you. And only God knows where this person is located and exactly how to lead you to meet this person. And the only way to be able to get God to match you up with the man or woman of your dreams is to perfectly obey Him every step of the way as He leads you on your journey to eventually meet this person at the prescribed time that He has it set up to occur and manifest in your life. But if you disobey God and marry someone that He doesn't want you to marry, then you will never meet the true soul mate of His choice for your life and you will either end up living in a second or third best marriage if even that, or you will end up going through multiple partners trying to find that right person for you. Obey God every step of the way in your personal walk with Him, and He will then eventually lead you to the mate of His choice for your life if it is in His perfect will that you get married in this life. This means that if God tells you to stay away from a certain person or to sever the dating relationship that you may already have with someone, then you have to do exactly what He is telling you to do - no matter how good looking or how pretty that person may appear to you, and no matter how much you are in love with that person. Bottom line - Father always knows best! Let God be the One to make these big decisions for your life. 3. Choosing Who Your Friends Will Be in This LifeAnother major area where you can really get into some major wrestling matches with the Lord is in the area of choosing who your personal friends are going to be in this life. Per the article we have titled "Choose Your Friends Carefully" in the Bible Basics section of our site - this is one major area that you really have to be led by the Lord on as you could get yourself into serious trouble if you choose to hang out and associate with the wrong type of people or the wrong crowd. In this article, I give you all of the appropriate verses from Scripture showing us that we have to choose our friends very carefully in this life and that if we don't, bad and negative type friends can corrupt us and completely sever our personal walk and divine destiny that we will have with the Lord. Many Christians never enter on the road of their divine destiny in the Lord because they could never give up some of their negative friends. As a result, their negative friends keep them bound up in their lower way of living in this life and they never break free from the chains of their dysfunctional destructive influences. If God is telling you that He wants some of your negative friends pruned out of your life - then you will have to go with His orders or you could possibly end up keeping yourself in the dugout for the rest of your earthly life - never accomplishing God's perfect will and plan for your life. Due to the very important influences that friends will have in our lives, we have to let God run this part of our life and let Him make the calls and the decisions as to who will become our good personal friends in this life. Again, God knows much better than we do who we should be hooking up with in this life and who we should be staying away from since His knowledge and wisdom on all matters is absolutely perfect and ours is not. 4. Giving Up Different Vices and AddictionsOnce you enter into a true full surrender with the Lord where He is now going to fully guide you into your divine destiny for Him, one of the first things He is going to do is to make an attempt to clean up any bad vices and addictions you may have in your life. We all have certain weaknesses and character flaws in our personalities due to the sin nature that we have all been born into this world with, but there are certain things that there will be no slack on with the Lord. Two specific things that He will definitely come after are the abuse of alcohol and any type of drug use - including pot! Once you step out into God's perfect plan and destiny for your life, you cannot give demons any kind of legal right to be able to start coming after you. And two of the biggest legal rights you can give demons is the abuse of alcohol and doing any type of drugs. Drugs especially are major door openers to the dark side since they directly affect your mind and mental abilities. The mind is the battlefield between God and the devil - and anything that you do to your mind to weaken its ability to properly function will cause demons to come after you. I have met numerous Christians who tried to make a full surrender with the Lord, but they were not willing to give up their pot smoking. In each one of these cases God came after them with a very heavy hand and He made it known very quickly and in no uncertain terms that they would not even get out of the dugout unless they were willing to totally and completely give up their pot smoking. Some people think that since pot is the lesser evil of all of the bad drugs that are out there, that maybe God will cut them some slack on it. But I can tell you from first-hand experience as a result of working with newborns that there is no slack with the Lord on this issue and if you continue to try and buck Him on this issue, then sooner or later He will come after you with a very heavy hand. He will only give you a certain amount of time to see the errors of your way on this issue, and if you are not willing to give it up, then you will be benched in His dugout - or should I say the doghouse! The same thing goes for the abuse of alcohol. I believe that there is some slack with those who can drink in proper moderation and do not abuse alcohol, but once you step past that slack line and start to abuse it, you will enter into major two-by-four territory with the Lord. If you can't control your use of alcohol, then sooner or later the alcohol will start to control you and when it does, you will not be able to properly function in your call with the Lord. That is why God will try and nip this abuse very early on in your walk with Him once you enter into this full surrender with Him. What this means is that you will have to make a decision on the areas that God will want to get properly cleaned up. You can either choose to obey the Lord and work with the power of the Holy Spirit to break these bad vices and addictions off of you - or you can choose to directly disobey the Lord and keep doing things your way. If you choose to keep disobeying the Lord on these kinds of issues, then you will get benched and your divine walk with Him will get completely shut down until you can agree to see and do things God's way. There will be no negotiating or trying to compromise your way out of some of these heavier sin areas with the Lord. Many Christians never enter into their true divine destines with the Lord, much less ever fully fulfill them, because they would not be obedient to the Lord with some of the areas that He was wanting to get cleaned up. If you are really serious about entering into a true full surrender with the Lord so that He can guide you into His perfect plan and destiny for your life - be very sensitive to the Holy Spirit with anything that He will want to bring up that will need to be taken out of your life. Obey the Lord in this area of your sanctification with Him, and He will then cut you free to fly into His perfect plan for your life. Choose to disobey and ignore God's orders - and you will stay stuck and grounded right where you are at until you can agree to do things His way. 5. Being Willing to Forgive Others Who Have Wronged YouAnother area in your sanctification with the Lord that He will make a very strong attempt to get cleaned up to some type of reasonable degree is in the area of being willing to fully forgive all of the people in your past who have hurt or trespassed against you in some way. With all of the dysfunctional abuse that has gone on and keeps going on in many marriages and families throughout the world, many people have been seriously hurt and wounded, and in many cases, quite severely. Physical and sexual abuse is rampant across this world and the victims are left with trying to get their lives back in order once they have broken free from their abusers, if they ever do. Once God has broken you free from any abusive situation you may have been caught in, one of the first things He is going to ask you to do is to try and fully forgive the people who have abused you - no matter how bad or how severe that abuse may have been. In the Psychological Issues section of our site, we have an article titled "How to Handle Negative Feelings When Wronged By Someone Else." In this article we give you some insight into how to deal with this kind of problem and all of the Scripture verses to back it up. Bottom line - God will ask you, sooner or later, to make an attempt to forgive all of those who have hurt and trespassed against you. The reason for this is contained in the following verse:
Notice two very important things in this verse. First, God will not forgive you of your sins unless you are first willing to forgive all of those who have trespassed against you. Second, God may not even be willing to hear any of your prayers until you are willing to do so since this verse is specifically starting out with the words "And whenever you stand praying." If you can't get any of your personal sins properly forgiven with the Lord or get any of your personal prayers answered with Him, then you will never make it out the dugout since your prayer life is the lifeblood of your engine with the Lord. This is why the Lord will make a very strong attempt to have you fully forgive all of the people who have ever wronged you in this life. Obey the Lord on this issue, and through the power of the Holy Spirit operating on the inside of you, He will give you the supernatural power and ability to be able to forgive all of these people - no matter how bad or how severe they may have hurt or wronged you - whether it be from verbal, physical or any type of sexual abuse. 6. Waiting For God's TimingAnother major area where you can really get yourself into trouble with the Lord is in the area of properly waiting on God's timing to bring something your way. One of the first rules of a true surrendered walk with the Lord is that not only will God be guiding your steps in this life - but He will also be guiding them according to the timetable that He has set up to make these chess moves in your life. For instance, if God has it set up that He will want you to marry in this life - then not only will God lead you to the person that He will want you to marry, but He will lead you to this person at the exact prescribed time that He has it set up to occur on His timetable - not your personal timetable! And not only does God have the exact date and time set up for you to meet this person, but He also has the rest of your earthly divine destiny set up on this same timetable.
What this means is that you are going to have to be willing to obey the Lord on these timing issues and not try to buck Him or get ahead of the game and try to force things to happen before they are ready to happen on His set timetable. If you ever get out of and off of God's timetable to any serious degree, you could seriously jeopardize the rest of your divine destiny with Him. Marrying the wrong person because you got impatient and could not wait for God's timing to bring you His choice for your life could cause you to lose valuable years on the mountain you are attempting to climb for Him as a result of having to deal with either living in a bad marriage or having to deal with a messy, painful and expensive divorce. Taking the next new wrong job because you could not wait for God to promote you into the next new job that He has set up for you to take could cause you to get completely knocked off the course that He has set up for you to follow. In the very fast-paced world in which we now live in, your flesh will really try to act up and try to force things to happen before they are ready to happen with the Lord. This is where you are going to have to really exert self-control and override any frustrations or impatience you may be experiencing.
Some of the chess moves God will be making in your life will be coming through on very short windows of opportunity. What this means is that you have to wait for that window to open up before you attempt to go through it - but once it does, you also have to make sure that you barrel though that window when it does open, as it will not stay open forever. Your life is thus like a chessboard to the Lord. This is why you have to be guided by the Holy Spirit as to not only what moves to make on that chessboard, but exactly when to make those chess moves. Since only God's knowledge is absolutely perfect on all matters, then only God Himself will know exactly what chess moves you will have to make and exactly when those chess moves will have to be made. Try to make any of these chess moves yourself without consulting God first, especially on the bigger actions and decisions, and you could either end up having valuable years lost in building the house of your life in the Lord or the house you are attempting to build could come completely crashing down on you - all as a result of not being willing to be guided by the Holy Spirit as to exactly what chess moves to make and exactly when to make those chess moves.
7. Obeying All of God's Ways and CommandmentsIn the Bible are listed all the ways and commandments of our Lord. God lays out exactly what we can and cannot do in this life. It is then up to each and everyone of us as to whether or not we will choose to obey all of God's ways and commandments for our lives. When God says we are to obey all 10 of His commandments, that we are not to engage with anything having to do with the occult or homosexuality, and that we are not to take vengeance on our enemies, then it is up to us to obey all of these specific commands and not tempt our hand or fate with the Lord with what He is wanting to do with our lives. How many anointed vessels have lost their calls, their anointings, and possibly their lives as a result of directly disobeying the Lord in some of these forbidden areas? These ways and commandments of our Lord are all for our own good and for our own protection. But yet so many of His own have completely lost all of their calls in Him and have failed to fulfill all of their divine destinies because they had treaded into some of these dangerous and forbidden areas. This is why it is so vital and so important that each Christian spend as much time as they can in studying and reading from the Word so that we know exactly where our boundary lines are set at with the Lord and exactly what we can and cannot do in this life. The Bible tells us that God's people will perish for having lack of knowledge and that knowledge can only be received by reading directly from the Bible. There is no other book that will give us this direct knowledge. The Bible says that the wages of sin will always be some kind of death - and unless you are willing to obey the Lord by staying out of and away from some of these forbidden areas, you could have your walk or possibly your life cut completely short as a result of the consequences that could occur from entering into some of these different sin areas. Bottom line - God expects all of us to obey and keep all of His commandments as best we can. And when we do find ourselves falling short - we have the power of the Holy Spirit Himself literally residing on the inside of us to help us to combat and overcome any temptation to fall into some of these sin areas or to help us pull out of any of these sin areas if we have already fallen into it. ConclusionAll of the above areas are just some of the areas that you could find yourself having a hard time in being able to fully obey the Lord. There obviously are many others - but the point to get is that you simply have to make a choice as to whether or not you will fully obey all of the Lord's directives for your life.
Do and accomplish all of that - and you will then carry an eternal satisfaction, an eternal sense of fulfillment, and an eternal sense of peace into the next life that you did not waste or squander your one and only chance to become all that God was asking you to become in Him - and to accomplish all that He was asking you to accomplish for Him in this life. In other words, you will be able to leave and depart from this life with absolutely no regrets. And that in itself will be your ultimate and highest reward.
Lessons from the Story of Moses Full Surrender to God's Perfect Plan for You Get 20% off at our
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s you will see repeated over and over in many
of our articles, the absolute #1 key in being able to find
exactly what your true divine destiny is going to be in
the Lord is to be willing come into a full and complete
surrender of your entire life with Him.
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