Good day everyone. Today is day 12. It is obedience. Restful one, I call your spirit
to attention in the name of Jesus of Nazareth. Listen with your spirit to the
Word of God for you. As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you. Now remain
in my love. If you obey my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have
obeyed my father's commands and remain in his love. I have told you this so that
you may, that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. John 15
9 through 11. Restful one, I bless you with the joy of obedience and with
obedience being a joy, not a bondage. I bless you with the unique joy of
obeying your father in great detail because you are motivated by love. It is
a terrible thing to obey because of fear that disobedience could cost you
something or to look at an authority and do what you need to do to avoid pain and
punishment. It is beautiful when you obey God because you know it brings pleasure
to him and you experience pleasure in experiencing the joy and love of your
father. I bless you with seeing in the natural the results of your obedience. I
bless you with understanding natural law, the universal cause and effect
relationships that God has installed in the world, and with finding tremendous
joy in understanding the design of nature, of relationships, of spiritual
intimacy and power. I bless you with seeing how to weave these laws together
and new ways to produce new results. I bless you, restful one, with discovering
hidden truths in Scripture. I bless you with the immense joy of firstfruits
investments and these truths you discover quickly seeing the fruit in
your life, the fruit in your own life, and the lives of others and celebrating
the liberating power of God's truth. I bless you with having people bring to
you problems that direct you to the Word of God. I bless you with eyes to see the
biographies of Scripture and to mine out of those biographies rich understanding
to see where they are reaping generational blessings and where they
are reaping the results of God's law. I bless you with eyes to see the joy of
being God's truth. I bless you with experiencing the rich rich love of your
father as you are obeying him. I bless you with seeing, hearing, and knowing the
pleasure of your father when you demonstrate your love for him by your
love for his commandments. Each lover of your level of your obedience will
release a new level of your father's joy to you. When you obey his law your father
will celebrate you. I bless you with spiritual ears and your spiritual eyes,
the eyes of your understanding to be open and to know the love of your father
so that this will become the driving motivation to obey more and more. I
bless you with setting the standard of obedience in your community. Make it your
spiritual ambition to be known as a person who loves the Lord and who is
loved by the Lord. I bless your place in the new generation who will blot out the
old stigma of legalism because the world will see in your life the complete
merging of obedience and love. I pray that as you celebrate all that your
father has for you, you will relish his love and that will be your
mark in your community. I bless you with obedience that leads you to that level
of love and that level of love that leads you to obedience. Just as it says
in the passage from John 15, as the father has loved me so I have loved
you so remain in my love. If you obey my commands you will remain in my love
just as I remain in my father's commands and remain in his love. I have
told you this that my joy may be in you and your joy may be complete. Restful one,
I bless you with complete joy with discovering areas of obedience that
will bring greater levels of joy as you experience more and more of your
father's love resting upon you. I bless you in the name of Jesus of Nazareth.
What is so interesting that for so many they look at Christianity, if we want to use that
terminology in a sense, they look at Christianity as a list of rules of the do's and don'ts
when Christ himself came to set us free from the law, but from those sitting in the bleachers
it can often look like following you is all that you have to give up.
And hidden in that truth, in that mystery, is by giving up those things you actually
apprehend them.
By giving things up, you actually receive.
By giving up control, you receive control, by, well, in a sense, by giving up your freedom
in a sense, you gain it.
By giving up your identity in a sense of who you are, you really come into who you actually
are.
And so in the place of obedience, it isn't to be, as they discussed, where we obey solely
out of fear.
There is a healthy place of the fear of the Lord, but a misunderstanding of what the fear
of the Lord is.
There's a time when we are to be in awe of the enormity of an almighty God.
It is a fearful and powerful thing to be placed in the hands of an almighty God.
That we really, like so many, may be in a sense that when you grow up with a dad, he's
just your dad.
He isn't the CEO or the President of the United States or the MMA champion of the world.
He is those things, but to you, he's just a father.
And we forget, in a sense, of who God really is in the fullness.
We can come to a place where we really obey in love, and our obedience brings about love,
and then our motivation is love, and then the more that we obey, the more we love, and
the more we love, the more we obey.
It's a little like when Moses was saying, Lord, teach me your ways so I may find your
favor and give me favor that I may know your ways.
And there's this cycle, this circle of ever increasing glory or ascension.
You know, Lord, it says often that you want obedience, not sacrifice.
But our heart's position before you is so important.
There are many that do a lot of things in your name that you say you will never know,
and that is a terrifying scripture, if you're not in relationship.
You don't want automatons, you don't want robots.
That we are slaves in a format of, in a way, we're slaves to righteousness, but you want
a relationship.
So Lord, I pray that there be a heart change for all of us today.
I'm reminded of a wonderful, wonderful man, everybody calls Papa Ron, and he's been serving
you, Lord, longer than I've been alive, let alone that I've known you, and he learned
a hard lesson.
He was getting tired and burned out in ministry and the whole service aspect of things, and
the Lord, just in a loving kind of confrontive way that only he can do, you talk to him about
what service really was, and you change his heart towards it.
Once his heart towards it changed,
his attitude about it all changed.
His heart changed.
And so then he would go,
and he would go to other churches
and he would preach about service
and then everything in the church would change.
Papa Ron would say,
I've never heard anybody talk about service
like that before.
I had it all wrong.
Lord, I pray that there be a loving embrace of between us
to increase our love towards you,
to be more soft towards you,
to remove any misunderstandings
of what love and obedience and submission is.
Any barriers that would keep those things
or keep aspects of us removed from you,
where we have a certain level of identity or self,
independence from you.
But there'd be a real growth today, Lord,
in our love and obedience and our obedience in love.
And that we would kind of looks like a bird,
like an eagle.
This bird I'm seeing is,
looks even bigger than an eagle,
has a tremendous wingspan.
And as my friend Chris says,
that when an eagle,
once it gets off the ground,
it locks its elbows,
it locks its wings, its arms in position
and it doesn't flap them anymore.
They just ride the thermals.
That Lord, that we would be in ever increasing heights today
in this place of love
and obedience or submission to you.
And the more Lord we can love you,
the more we can do things from a place of love.
There's this ever increasing mutual escalation
between the two of us
or between each and every person here and you.
Oh, that we could get it Lord.
So today pray Lord,
I pray you would lavish your love
and increase each person's capacity for love.
That you would rewrite our definitions for yours.
It would be like our dictionary,
our internal dictionary
and yours to come into alignment.
And that you would speak into this place.
Then you would change our understanding of love
and obedience to you.
And you would change our understanding of what this means.
Like to obey your commandments
and what does this really mean to each of us?
That Lord, even if it's just one thing,
just one whisper that today you would change,
you would speak into this place.
And that something would be reframed.
There would be a shift in some area today
and that our hearts would change,
our motivations would change
and our actions would change as a result.
We bless you and we love you Lord, in Jesus name.