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Heart Obedience


“So then, just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live your lives in him” (Col. 2:6).

We are to obey the same way we received Christ, that is, by grace through faith.

Obedience is always from the heart. If it is from the head only, it might be by the act of will only, and therefore it will be by effort and not by grace.

Before I became a Christian, I lived a life of “obedience” in that I did not use profanity or slang, smoke, drink, or have sex. I was impressed with my goodness (or lack of badness). I impressed my non-Christian classmates with my “goodness.” I did not impress the Christians.

I had two strong attributes which also happen to be the primary attributes of Satan:

·       Arrogance: I was self-righteous and proud of it. Satan said, “I will be like the Most High.”

·       Lying: I lied very much. Jesus said of Satan that when he lies, he speaks his first language.

I was being like the devil and thinking I was good. That changed on October 18, 1947, when I came to know the Father.

Some things changed immediately: I confessed my sins and obeyed by grace.

Over the next several years, I memorized many verses of Scripture. At the time, I thought that it was a good spiritual thing to do. Under the conviction of Psalm 119:11 (“I have hidden your word in my heart that I might not sin against you.”), I memorized 108 verses in the first 14 months that I was a Christian. The next year, I memorized 3 verses a week. The following year, I memorized 5 verses a week.

During that year, I began to suspicious—I had memorized several hundred verses, but I was still sinning.

The problem was that these verses were in my head, not in my heart. I realized that they needed to be hidden in my heart in order to keep me from sin.

Then on a canoe trip to Hudson Bay in 1952, our canoe got swamped in some rapids we were trying to run. All of my cards with handwritten verses on them got soaked and blurred. I had become arrogant about how many Scriptures I knew, and this wiped away the record I had been keeping of all those memorizations. I thanked God. 

How do you hide God’s Word in your heart? By believing it and obeying it.

 

Written 2022.

This post coordinates with tomorrow's reading in the To the Word! Bible Reading Challenge. If you are not in a daily reading plan, please join us at TotheWord.com. We would love to have you reading with us.

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