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Two Kinds of Obedience

Tonight while the kids were running around the FRWY I overheard Lucas, yes he’s six and has his own blog, try to get out of his responsibility. He was simply playing with a toy and his mom told him to not leave it on the floor and to bring it back. Begrudgingly he grabbed it, looked up, saw his little brother and without hesitation asked him if he would take the toy back to where it belonged.

I believe there are two types of people that obey. The first type are the types that obey a command because it was a command given to them and it’s up to them to carry out the command. So if I told someone to grab me a water, the only way obedience would be carried out for that person would be for them to get it themselves. The second kind of people that obey are not ones that obey the actual command, but look beyond the command to the purpose of it and figure that as long as the purpose is fulfilled then they are doing their job. So in this case, if I asked someone to get me a glass of water and they would get someone else to get it for me.

I think that God wants the first kind. I don’t think he wants people who just try to figure out what God is trying to accomplish by getting something done and doing that. He wants people to obey what he says originally. We always try to figure it out don’t we? We always think that we have the answers and so we end up attempting to get those answers and forget about the command and end up not understanding what God is doing. For instance, God tells us to pray for the sick. For some reason, a lot of places that I’ve been to will say that it is God’s will for everyone to be healed from their sickness and that everyone ‘should’ be healed. So what ends up happening is we pray for the sick yes, but if the outcome is something rather than what we intended then we start to point fingers and we blame it on all kinds of things like lack of faith, or sin in our lives or something stupid like that. What if it is just our job to pray, and maybe the outcome looks different than what we expect because He isn’t trying to get us to bring about the outcome, He’s just trying to get us to pray.

Learning to obey a command, instead of just trying to accomplish the purpose of the command is two very different things and I think that we will all be better of with the former. It will save us work of trying to figure things out that were never meant to be and it will allow us to surrender ourselves to Jesus and to put our trust in him.

2 thoughts on “Two Kinds of Obedience”

  1. Interesting; I just spent the weekend at a
    vibrational healing seminar and one of the things being stressed was to “let go of the outcome -” that the outcome was not our responsibility. I agree !
    We are told to pray. Its simply our responsibility to do as the Lord says and leave the rest up to Him… I have seen many people that walk away still physically ill, but spiritually and/or emotionally healed. Some die – the Ultimate Healing !

  2. I think with little stretching this piece could move in the direction of redefining how we view success. Is the bottom line for God, I want the water or bring me that toy or this man needs to be healed? Or is it something completely different. I want you to learn to serve or like already mentioned I want you to pray.
    I think its a both/and situation

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