On Our Knees
There are 75 Mighty Bible Scriptures on Obedience. You find the word “obey” 170 times in the Old and New Testaments.
Obedience demonstrates our faith and trust in God; Obedience is the key to our success; Obedience is the sure and promised way for unlocking blessings for our lives. For us to be able to fully obey, we must read His word every day and ask God to empower us with His holy spirit so that our life is going to honor Him.
Biblical obedience to God means to hear, trust, submit and surrender to God and His word. When we love God and obey Him, we naturally have a love for one another. Obedience to God’s commands will make us light and salt in evil and tasteless world.
Matthew 5:13-16
We show our love for Jesus by obeying Him in all things: “If you love Me, keep My commandments” (John 14:15).
A Christian who is not obeying Christ’s commands can rightly be asked, “Why do you call me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not do what I say?” (Luke 6:46).
We are all guilty of sometimes making the Christian life more complicated than it needs to be and more complicated than it ought to be. For when it comes right down to it, God calls us to nothing more, and nothing less, than to obey.
Obedience is the “key.” The only thing that really matters in any context or any circumstance is obedience to God’s will as revealed to us in God’s Word. Thus, it is always necessary, and one can never oversearch the Bible, to know the mind of God. It is always right, and never wrong, to pray, “Lord, teach me to obey you in this.”
If God calls us to possess great wealth, then he calls us to live with great generosity toward others.
If God calls us to possess scant wealth, then he calls us to live obediently with reliance upon him and trust in his provision.
If God calls us to experience times of great joy, he calls us to enjoy them, to rejoice in them, to acknowledge them as a blessing from his hand.
If God calls us to undergo times of sore losers, we are to rest in God’s will and to raise hands of worship rather than fists of rebellion, to grieve over our sorrows but to never charge God with the least wrong and like Jesus to say, “not my will but thine be done.”
If God calls us to suffer weakness, then we are to undertake the kinds of ministry that weakness permits and invites—prayer, encouragement, love, support.
There is no circumstance in which God has nothing for us to do, no situation in which we cannot be faithful and obedient to his calling on our lives.
He calls each of us to be obedient in the context he has ordained for us. For the end of the matter, when we have heard all else, is that we are to simply fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the sacred duty of every man, the kind expectation of a loving God.
When all has been heard, the conclusion of the matter is this: Fear God and keep His commandments, because this is the whole duty of man.
Ecclesiastes 12:13 (BSB)
Testimony
This month’s testimony is from J.L. Robb.
J.L. Robb has published the seven-book series about life in the end times leading up to the physical return of Christ in the book series The End The Book.
Journey to Jesus
JL Robb
January 25, 1947, I was born into the Polio Pandemic. At age 5, my parents sent me from High Point, NC to Waynesboro, GA to get me away from the increasing crisis. It was there, First Baptist Church, that I received my Christian upbringing during childhood. Jesus Loves Me and Bible School every summer until I was 16.
Raised in a family with much abuse, not sexual but physical, there were beatings every night, at least it seemed to me. I never understood how my mother put up with it; but she said, “Marriage is for better or worse. Says so in the Bible.”
There was a lot of worse; and as I got older, I learned that the Bible did not say that.
Every summer until age 16, I pleaded to go to Waynesboro and visit my family there, more than my family in High Point. It was a 2-month escape.
It was at Aunt Kiki’s home in Waynesboro that I read Revelation for the first time, at age 10 (1957). The Book of Revelation had me hooked. My cousin and I would read it every night; very scary.
In my senior year of high school, I left home and lived in a boarding house until graduation and enrolled at North Carolina State University until drafted during the Vietnam Conflict. I joined the US Navy, became a Hospital Corpsman, and met my best friend, Edgar Allan Poe, a staunch Catholic. Ed delayed my drift away from God; we are still best friends today.
I went back to NCSU after my tour in the Navy and majored in Zoology-Pre-Med. Now married for the second time and with a daughter, I entered the medical equipment business and the drift continued. Big money. Big times.
I transferred to Atlanta, 1977, and decided to quit the medical job, the best and best-paying job of my life, and go into the disco business. Now divorced for the second time, the owner of Medline called and asked me to stay. They had six sales managers, and I was one of them. I declined, and Jim Mills wished me luck. Then he made a comment that helped me see my way.
In 1978, seven of us opened what Billboard Magazine said was Atlanta’s Hottest Disco, we bought new luxury cars and dreamed about what kind of yacht we would buy. Six months later, my daughter was” kidnapped” by her mother and boyfriend; and, the Disco was no more.
My life was suddenly repossessed. The luxury cars were gone. All our newly made friends just disappeared!
I was fortunate to have made it through the fast lane in good health. My drug was pretty ladies, and I married for the third time. Three marriages by the age of 31.
I then began the journey to find my daughter- five years of heartbreak. Today we once again have a father and daughter relationship.
My wife and I saw a movie one evening in 1979 that changed my life, The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey. The next morning, I bought a Bible and started on page one. I read the Bible all the way through Revelation, then read it again. After that I read it backwards, starting at Revelation. I read the fifteen additional books that were in the original King James Version. I read Bible Archaeology books. Then one Sunday morning at 6:00 AM, I discovered Ben Haden, pastor of Changed Lives Ministry. Every Sunday morning for years, I would go get my coffee and ride around 30 minutes with Ben. Best preacher/teacher I ever heard. He left his ministry to Michael Youssef, Leading the Way.
I became a believer; and because of my sinful past, I remember being so thankful of God’s great gift to mankind, a Son, and a Sacrifice for me, and you. However, I was talking the talk more than I was walking-the-walk, and was soon divorced again after an 18-year marriage. When she left, I was not sure I would survive. I surely did not want to.
But eventually, I ended my pity party and figured I got what I deserved, reaped what I had sown. Then one day I heard, at least I think I heard, a voice: "Jerry, I am grateful that you follow the Laws that you do, that you do not eat squid or bacon or the unclean foods. But I would rather you eat bacon and stop screwing around."
That was 13 years ago. I dropped to my knees and said, “God, I cannot control my pretty-lady addiction. I have never been able to. It is out of my hands, beyond my capability and I am out of control. Please; You do it.”
The next morning the desire was gone – like God had raptured it - it had vanished. It was an absolute, instantaneous miracle and it has been that way for 13 years. It freed me up to do what God told me to do over and over and over in my life…to write books about Him.
The last 12 years, I have written a 7-book series about Prophecy and the end-times, my life-long passion since reading Revelation in 1957, The End The Book. I have written a 2-book series about animal abuse, Joey’s Legacy, and am working on a biography of John Biffar, Godincidents; and God dropped this one right in my lap. John is a 9-time Emmy winner and one of the great documentarians of the world. He is working on a 1-hour documentary right now about Joey’s Legacy.
When I first found God in 1979, my faith was very immature; but God molded me like gold, always trying to guide me to the right track. It did not happen until that night I begged Him to do it for me, 30 years later.
There have been adversities. When I started The End Part One, I had always been healthy. I was 63. Three months into writing, the doctor diagnosed me with prostate cancer. While writing The End Part Five, I had open-heart surgery and a stroke. Then I had head surgery for malignant melanoma. Then there was the bout of Bell’s Palsy and another minor stroke. Now the ticker is acting up again.
I thank God for Jim Mills, owner of Medline, when his last words to me were, “Jerry, I hope you find God.” Jim was a genius and Jewish. It started me thinking.
I thank God for Hal Lindsey, who wrote The Late Great Planet Earth. It kept me thinking.
I thank God for Ben Haden and how I wish he was still with us. He taught me how easy it is to talk to God.
I thank God I am writing a Bible Study on Genesis. That is where it all starts.
And I thank God that the Jews rejected their Messiah. It had to happen. It was a prophecy. It opened salvation to the entire world, including me.
“What, then, shall we say in response to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us?”
Romans 8:31
The Beatitudes
Matthew 5:43-48; Leviticus 19:17-18
43 “You have heard that it was said, ‘YOU SHALL LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR (fellow man) and hate your enemy.’ 44 But I say to you, [a]love [that is, unselfishly seek the best or higher good for] your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 so that you may [show yourselves to] be the children of your Father who is in heaven; for He makes His sun rise on those who are evil and on those who are good, and makes the rain fall on the righteous [those who are morally upright] and the unrighteous [the unrepentant, those who oppose Him]. 46 For if you love [only] those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do that? 47 And if you greet only your brothers [wishing them God’s blessing and peace], what more [than others] are you doing? Do not even the Gentiles [who do not know the Lord] do that? 48 You, therefore, will be perfect [growing into spiritual maturity both in mind and character, actively integrating godly values into your daily life], as your heavenly Father is perfect. (Matthew 5:43-48 AMP)
17 ‘You shall not hate your brother in your heart; you may most certainly rebuke your neighbor but shall not incur sin because of him. 18 You shall not take revenge nor bear any grudge against the sons of your people, but you shall love your neighbor (acquaintance, associate, companion) as yourself; I am the LORD. (Leviticus 19:17-18 AMP)
4 “If you meet your enemy’s ox or his donkey wandering off, you must bring it back to him. 5 If you see the donkey of one who hates you lying helpless under its load, you shall not leave the man to deal with it [alone]; you must help him release the animal [from its burden]. (Exodus 23:4-5 AMP)
As you read the Law of God nowhere does it say to hate your enemy.
Jesus defined our enemies as those who curse us, hate us, and exploit us selfishly. Since Christian love is an act of the will, and not simply an emotion, He has the right to command us to love our enemies. After all, He loved us when we were His enemy (Romans 5:10).
How do we show our enemies love? First, by praying for them, our prayers are meant to bring us in alignment with God’s will, and it is harder to hate someone when you are praying for them. Our prayer will take the “poison” out of our attitudes toward them.
God expects us to live on a much higher plane than the lost people of this world who return good for good and evil for evil. The Lord teaches that we must do all the real kindness we can to everyone, especially to their souls. We must pray for them.
The word “perfect” in Matthew 5:48 does not imply sinlessly perfect, for that is an impossibility in this life. It suggests completeness, maturity as the sons and daughters of God. God loves His enemies and still seeks to make them His children, and so should we.
Food for our Souls
Genesis, Chapter 29
In this chapter, we are reading about character changes happening in Jacob's life.
The most noticeable is the boldness in his approach toward others, another is the fact in verse 29:18 he tells the whole truth to Laban.
What Jacob is going to find out real fast is life is not always easy and what life does to us depends a great deal on what life finds in us!
What we are reading regarding Jacob’s “baggage” is the same for all of us. Jacob could easily leave his family problems behind him BUT, his bigger problem was -----Himself. That he could not leave behind.
Jacob’s life with Laban is really a contemporary story about all of us in one way or another. The Bible is so on target because human nature was the same then as it is today. The customs may be somewhat different, but the human heart is the same and in need of the same redemption.
For the next twenty years, Jacob would experience many painful trials in Laban’s household. Many of them like the very ones he experienced in his own home. One being deception.
As we read about Jacob we will see how God, despite the circumstances, guided Jacob in his decisions, so that in the end, those decisions determined Jacob’s character and destiny.
Next month I will discuss Chapter 30.
The wives, the maids, and the children.
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