Audio Software icon An illustration of a 3. Software Images icon An illustration of two photographs. Images Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape Donate Ellipses icon An illustration of text ellipses.
It appears your browser does not have it turned on. Please see your browser settings for this feature. EMBED for wordpress. Want more? All our attempts after full obedience will be failures until we get access to His abiding fellowship. It is God's holy presence, consciously abiding with us, that keeps us from disobeying Him. Defective obedience is always the result of a defective life. To rouse and spur on that defective life by arguments and motives has its use, but their chief blessing must be that they make us feel the need of a different life, a life so entirely under the power of God that obedience will be its natural outcome.
The defective life, the life of broken and irregular fellowship with God, must be healed, and make way for a full and healthy life; then full obedience will become possible.
The secret of a true obedience is the return to close and continual fellowship with God. And why was this needful? And what is the blessing He brings us? Listen, 'He learned obedience by the things which He suffered, and became the author of eternal salvation to all them that obey Him.
Christ needed suffering that in it He might learn to obey and give up His will to the Father at any cost. He needed to learn obedience that as our great High Priest He might be made perfect. He learned obedience, He became obedient unto death, that He might become the author of our salvation. He became the author of salvation through obedience, that He might save those ' who obey Him?
As obedience was with Him absolutely necessary to procure, it is with us absolutely necessary to inherit, salvation. The very essence of salvation is —obedience to God. Christ as the obedient One saves us as His obedient ones. Whether in His suffering on earth, or in His glory in heaven, whether in Himself or in us, obedience is what the heart of Christ is set upon. On earth Christ was a learner in the school of obedience; in heaven He teaches it to His dis, diples here on earth. In a world where disobedience reigns unto death, the restoration of obedience is in Christ's hands.
As in His own life, so in us, He has undertaken to maintain it. He teaches and works it in us. Let us try and think what and how He teaches: it may be we shall see how little we have given ourselves to be pupils in this school, where alone obedience is to be learnt. Let us see what each of these is in Christ's school of obedience. I have said that the power of true obedience is to be found in the clear personal relationship to God. It was so with our Lord Jesus.
And I know that His commandment is life everlasting; whatever I speak therefore, even as the Father said unto Me, so I speak. This does not mean that Christ received God's commandment in eternity as part of the Father's commission to Him on entering the world. Day by day, each moment as He taught and worked, He lived, as man, in continual communication with the Father, and received the Father's instructions just as He needed them.
It is everywhere a dependence upon a present fellowship and operation of God, a hearing and a seeing of what God speaks and does and shows. Our Lord ever spoke of His relation to the Father as the type and the promise of our rekvfeion to Him, and to the Father through Him. With us as with Him, the life of continual obedience is impossible without continual fellowship and continual teaching. The imperative need of the continual receiving our orders and instructions from God Himself is what is implied in the words:.
The expression 'obeying the commandments' is very seldom used in Scripture; it is almost always, obeying Me, or obeying or hearkening to My voice. With the commander of an army, the teacher of a school, the father of a family, it is not the code of laws, however clear and good, with its rewards or threats, that secures true obedience; it is.
It is the joy of ever hearing the Father's voice that will give the joy and the strength of true obedience. It is the voice gives power to obey the word; the word without the living voice does not avail.
How clearly this is illustrated by the contrast of what we see in Israel. The people had heard the voice of God on Sinai, and were afraid. They asked Moses that God might no more speak to them. Let Moses receive the word of God and bring it to them. They only thought of the commands; they knew not that the only power to obey is in the presence of God and His voice speaking to us.
And so with only Moses to speak to them, and the tables of stone, their whole history is one of disobedience, because they were afraid of direct contact with God.
It is even so still. Many, many Christians find it so much easier to take their teaching from godly men than to wait upon God to receive it from Himself. Nothing can receive or know love but a loving heart. And it is this loving heart that enables us to obey. Obedience is the loving response to the divine love resting on us, and the only access to a fuller enjoyment of that love. How our Lord insisted upon that in His farewell discourse! Thrice He repeats it in John xiv. The gift of the Spirit, the Father's love and His own, with the manifestion of Himself; the Father's love and His own making their abode with us: into these, loving obedience gives the assured access.
In the next chapter He puts it from the other side, and shows how obedience leads to the enjoyment of God's love—He kept His Father's commandments, and abides in His love. If we keep His commandments, we shall abide in His love.
He proved His love by giving His life for us; we are His friends, we shall enjoy His love, if we do what He commands us. Between His first love and our love in response to it, between our love and His fuller love in response to ours, obedience is the one indispensable link.
True and full obedience is impossible, except as we live and love. Do beware of a legal obedience, striving after a life of true obedience under a sense of duty. Ask God to show you the ' newness of life' which is needed for a new and full obedience. Claim the promise, 'I will circumcise thine heart, to love the Lord thy God with all thy heart; and thou ehalt obey the Lord thy God.
Believe in the Spirit given in you, enabling you to love, and so causing you to walk in God's statutes. In the strength of this faith, in the assurance of sufficient grace, made perfect in weakness, enter into God's love, and the life of living obedience it works. For it is nothing but the continual presence of Jesus in His love can fit you for continual obedience. I close with once again, and most urgently, pressing home this question.
It lies at the very root of our life. I beseech you to give a definite answer to the question. If in the light of God's provision for obedience, of His promise of working all His good pleasure in you, of His giving you a new heart, with the indwelling of His Son and Spirit, you still fear obedience is not possible, do ask God to open your eyes truly to know His will.
Do beware lest the secret fear of having to give up too much, of having to become too peculiar and entirely devoted to God, keep you back. Beware of seeking just religion enough to give ease to conscience, and then not desiring to do and be and give God all He is worthy of. And beware, above all, of 'limiting' God, of making Him a liar, by refusing to believe what He has said He can and will do.
If our study in the school of obedience is to be of any profit, rest not till you have written it down —Daily obedience to all that God wills of me is possible, is possible to me.
In His strength I yield myself to Him for it. But, remember, only on one condition. Not in the strength of your resolve or effort, but that the unceasing presence of Christ, and the unceasing teaching of the Spirit of all grace and power be your portion. Christ, the obedient One, living in you, will secure your obedience. Obedience will be to you a life of love and joy in His fellowship. ALL these words breathe nothing less than the spirit of world conquest.
He counts on His disciples to undertake and carry out the work. As He stands at the foot of the throne, ready to ascend and reign, He tells them,' All authority hath been given unto Me in heaven and on earth,' and points them at once to 'all the world,' to 'the uttermost parts of the earth,' as the object of His and their desire and efforts. As the King on the throne, He Himself will be their helper: 'I am with you alway.
He Himself will carry on the war. He seeks to inspire them with His own assurance of victory, with His own purpose to make this the only thing to be thought of as vorth living or dying for—the winning back of the world to its God.
Christ does not teach or argue, ask or plead: He simply commands. He has trained His disciples to obedience. He has attached them to Himself in a love that can obey.
He has already breathed His own resurrection Spirit into them. He can count upon them. He dare say to them: 'Go ye into all the world. But here, as quietly and simply as He speaks these divine words, they accept them. And no sooner has He ascended than they go to the appointed place, to wait for the equipment of a heavenly power from their Lord in heaven, for the heavenly work of making all the nations His disciples.
They accepted the command and passed it on to those who through them believed on His name. And within a generation, simple men, whose names we do not even know, had preached the gospel in Antioch and Rome and the regions beyond. The command was passed on, and taken up into the heart and life, as meant for all ages, as.
Plus Toggle navigation. Password Assistance. Email address. The School of Obedience. Share Tweet Save. Gbe Scbool of Obedience. In connection with this let me press upon you three things.
0コメント