February 8 – Love = Obedience

February 8 – Love = Obedience

Whoever has my commands and obeys them, he is the one who loves me. He who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love him and show myself to him.”

Then Judas (not Judas Iscariot) said, “But, Lord, why do you intend to show yourself to us and not to the world?”

Jesus replied, “If anyone loves me, he will obey my teaching. My Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him. He who does not love me will not obey my teaching. These words you hear are not my own; they belong to the Father who sent me (John 14:21-24).

If we love Jesus, we will obey him.  If we love Jesus and obey him, God will love us and then they will make their home in our hearts.  It really is quite a simple formula, isn't it!

Love = Obedience = Relationship.

There aren't too many people I know who like the word ‘obedience.’ Somehow it has taken on all sorts of negative connotations, mostly because we prefer to set our own rules for life rather than allow anyone else to set them for us.  We refuse to acknowledge there are people in authority over us.

Employees do their best to subvert their supervisors, doing just enough work to ensure no one knows what they are actually doing during the time they are paid to work.

Children find every possible means of disobeying their parents.  If they can get away with it, they will.

The last thing any spouse wants to hear is that they must be obedient to the other.

We bristle when presented with anyone who is in authority over us.  Unless we choose to make rules for our lives, we aren’t going to obey. We do not want to be limited in our choices or our behavior by someone we don’t trust.

The thing is, we don’t necessarily trust those in authority to deal with us with grace and fairness.  Over and over, we are proven correct in our mistrust of their motives and behavior.  Consequently, obedience is a negative word in our vocabulary.  We don’t want to be tied to a set of rules and regulations … commandments that are going to take away our freedoms.

Because of this, the passage from John 14 can be difficult to swallow for many of us.  We've never truly experienced a time when obedience and freedom were part of the same thought.  We have never experienced someone who is not only completely trustworthy, but who is the definition for that since before time began.  We don’t know what it is like to be subservient to someone who will not take our gift for granted, nor will He (Jesus) every take advantage of us.

To love, though, we must learn what it is to be obedient and to be obedient is then the big step we take in building a relationship to God.