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Be Obedient to What He is Saying to Us

by Jerry Ousley  
9/28/2018 / Christian Living

The Challenge of the Word

JOHN 1:1-14

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God,

and the Word was God.”

(John 1:1)

 

 

BE OBEDIENT TO WHAT HE IS SAYING TO US

 

It is one thing to know that Jesus is the Word and recognize His voice, but it is another to be obedient to it. Jesus told a story about two sons who were asked to go to their father’s vineyard to work (see Matthew 21:27-31). The first son flatly refused, bordering disrespect for his father, whereas the second son immediately agreed to do the job. Yet, when it came right down to it, the first son repented of his words to his father and went to the vineyard to do the job. The second son, who had accepted the challenge, never showed up. Jesus asked the question, “Which of the two did what his father had asked?” The obvious answer was the first son.

 

Many hear the word of God. It is spoken on the airwaves of great radio and television stations. It is bouncing all over the Internet.  Thousands upon thousands of books have been written about His word. In our great country, though there may yet be some who haven’t, most have heard the word of God from a church service or by one of these other means at some point in their life. The word is being preached and proclaimed and many are hearing with their ear.

 

Some are even hearing with a spiritual ear. They take the word to heart and have believed it. Yet, they do nothing about it. A word spoken but not acted upon might as well not be said in the first place.

 

You can own a library of thousands of volumes but if they are never opened then they are just wasting space. I have some books in my meager library that I have owned for years, yet I have never read them. Are they doing me any good? Have I gleaned from their pages the truths that they are waiting to teach me? Have I experienced the

story of the great novel that waits to be unfolded? I have not. Until I take that particular book off the shelf, open it up and begin to let my mind take in the information found there I will never know it, never experience it, and never have the privilege of occupying my mind with the wonderful story to be found there.

 

And what if I do get the book down, read it, understand the teaching, but then never apply it to my life? If I know all the knowledge that is to be found there, perhaps something that will change my life, and have done nothing with it, then I might as well

not to have read it to begin with. What if it were about how to balance my budget? It told me exactly what I needed to do to straighten out all my finances and get completely out of debt. It perhaps outlined a way that I could be debt free and financially secure in say, five years. It sounds great and I see the plan and know what to do, but never act on

that.  Will my budget ever get balanced? Will I ever crawl out from under the mountain of debt? I think not. Why? Because I wasn’t obedient to its teaching.

 

The same holds true with Jesus, our living Word. He has plainly told us what to do. He has given us prescribed ways for our hearts to be free. Yet we continue, even after salvation, to go on living the way the world tells us we must live. We never seem to be happy. We are always under the thumb of depression. How many Christians today

live like being accepted by God requires us to be plunged in despair all the time? I know there are trials and hardships. That’s part of it and our Lord plainly told us that these things would be. But He also taught us how to have joy, happiness and security even in the midst of these things.

 

If we don’t apply the Word to our lives, if we live one way in church and with our Christian friends, knowing the right words to say, all the catch phrases and so forth, yet we live like we have not been redeemed by the blood of Christ away from this setting, then what have we accomplished in our lives? The challenge of the Word requires action. It must be lived out. It must become a part of our everyday life if we are ever to be free from this world. We can be free from this world even while we must occupy it. But it only comes in recognizing the Word and applying it to our lives. We must be

obedient to what our Lord is saying, living, and showing us every day if we’ll only take the time to see it.

 

(To Be Continued)

Jerry D. Ousley is the author of ?Soul Challenge?, ?Soul Journey?, ?Ordeal?, ?The Spirit Bread Daily Devotional and his first novel ?The Shoe Tree.? Visit our website at spiritbread.com to download these and more completely free of charge.

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