Focus: Total Obedience

Text: 2Cor.10:6

"And having in a readiness to revenge all disobedience, WHEN YOUR OBEDIENCE IS FULFILLED."

God demands absolute obedience from all of us. He requires our obedience, not our opinion. God cannot be advised. He cannot be counseled. He cannot be instructed. He cannot be manipulated. He cannot be bribed. He cannot be brainwashed. He cannot be intimidated or victimized. He cannot be mocked or deceived. He cannot be blackmailed, forced or coerced to do anything. God can be approached, but He cannot be reproached or reprimanded.

What we owe God most is our trust, our love, and our obedience.

Nothing short of it or outside of it is acceptable to Him. He delights in our confidence and obedience. Believing, loving and obeying God is the summation of our Christian Faith.

God demands that we obey Him properly, perfectly and promptly. Obedience to God is the highest form of worship. We have not truly worshipped Him until we have truly obeyed Him.

A lot of us give God delayed obedience. That means we obey Him at our convenient time. It means that we do not placed a high premium on obeying God. Obeying God is not our priority. We only obey Him when it's convenient for us. We are unwittingly telling God to wait until we are done with more pressing issues about us. We do not think that anything that has to do with God should be attended to with a sense of urgency and responsibility. We regard the things of God as everyone's things and nobody's things in particular, and so the things of God suffer in everyone's hands. But Christ thought differently. He said, "I must be about MY Father's business." He saw His Father's business as His personal business, not OUR business.

God has no respect for partial or selective obedience. God told Moses to speak to the rock, but out of anger against the people he struck the rock. Interestingly, water came out of the rock even when he did what was not required of him by God. That tells us that 'results' are not enough proof that a man is doing the will of God. 

A man can be successful in ministry without being faithful to God. God wants us to be both faithful and successful in life and ministry.

We must do everything possible to rise above convenient obedience. Obedience as we want it is convenient obedience. Saul destroyed the Amalekites according to the instruction given to him by God, but he spared some things for sacrifice to the Lord contrary to divine instruction. It is totally an error to see good in anything that God has seen nothing good at all. We cannot afford to commend what God has condemned.

It is compromised obedience when God tells you to do one thing and you end up doing another.

At the end of the day, whether it is delayed obedience, false obedience, convenient obedience, compromised obedience or partial obedience, they all amount to disobedience.

Choosing what to obey, when to obey, where to obey, and how to obey God is not obedience to God at all. Doing God's will must be on God's terms and conditions, and at His appointed time.

Paul is telling us that God will take action against every form of disobedience when our obedience is complete or fulfilled. When the goal of obedience is reached or achieved, then God steps into action against disobedience of all sorts. God uses our obedience to judge and pass sentence on the world's disobedience.

God delights in our prompt and wholehearted obedience. Indeed, He delights in our total obedience - in that obedience which is the proof of faith. A heart totally surrendered to God will equally be obedient. Let's obey God fully and surely!

by Bishop Moses E. Peter