Necessity of Obedience

Open your Bibles to Deuteronomy chapter 11. Which one do you want to turn to? You just turn to whichever page you want. One time I had a course, a night course in seminary and they asked me to teach it. It was lay people. It came to a course on church history. And all the class got there. There was about 20 people in it. And as a graduate student, doctoral student, I had a chance at night to teach this class. So there was a lady sitting on the front row. And they all got their textbooks. And I kept watching her and she would turn the pages for it. And I got to look a little closer. It was on church history. And I got to looking at her book and on the front of it it said Baptist history. Which would be entirely different than the whole church history course. About the third day, after class, I stopped her and I said, You know, you may be having trouble finding, when I turn to page 25, you may have trouble in your book finding what I'm reading from. She said, Oh no, I'm doing fine. She never bought a book the entire course. She didn't pass either, but I guess that's beside the point. So you can just look at whatever you want to. It doesn't make any difference to me. Chapter 11, verse 13. Moses is delivering this sermon to the people of Israel before they embark on this great task of claiming the land of promise that God had promised to give them. And in this whole chapter, he's repeatedly talking about the necessity of obedience to Him. One of the difficulties that Baptists have in our talking about salvation by grace through faith and not of works, is that we de-emphasize works so much that we don't really understand that there is a correlation between our obedience to God and how He responds to us. There's a fine line to be drawn between doing good things as a result of earning salvation and doing good deeds as a result of God's presence in our life and His instruction to us. It's a difference between a relationship. For example, if a parent, you don't base your relationship with the children around you based on whether or not they do the chores at the house that you have them do. For example, if your neighbor kids could come in and you had a list on the wall that said, here's what I want you to do for your children, like wash the dishes, vacuum the house, and your neighbor children came in and saw that list and started doing all of them, you might want to adopt them, but they really wouldn't be your children just because they were doing all these things that you said you needed and wanted done. Because there is a relationship between parents and children that is not related to what they do. It's based on the fact that they are a part of you. And in the kingdom of God, those who place their faith and trust in Christ, He gives them the ability to become children of God. So their relationship to God is based on faith and trust, like the relationship of a child to the parent is based on birth. So the relationship between God and those who have faith in Him is based on the second birth, the spiritual birth, the birth in John chapter 1 that talks about, it's not of flesh and blood, but of the Spirit. Now, once you have this relationship, there is a correlation between the parent and the child with regard to responsibilities. In other words, if you have a child, and that child is old enough to do their part of the chores around the house, you would say to them, now, here are the things that I want you to do, and you expect because of your relationship as a parent that they would be obedient to what you ask of them, because of the relationship. If they choose not to do those things, then there is a repercussion on your part. Now, I don't know how people handle their families here, but when I was growing up at home, my dad would come home on the weekends, he didn't live there, he lived in Oklahoma, we lived in Arkansas, but he'd come home on the weekend, and he'd say, now, here's what I want you to do. You've got that field in the bottom where we have that alfalfa, and while I'm gone this week, I want you to cut that and rake it up so we'll be ready to bale that hay. And there's a fence on the other side, I want you to fix that. And he would come in that next Saturday night, and he would look to see if I'd done all those things. If I hadn't done all those things, he would be angry at me. He didn't run me out of his family, but there was a repercussion to that obedience or disobedience. And some of it relates to what the parent would allow you to do. If you do those things, then here's what you can do. You can have a day off, or you can have whatever the kind of reward is. In God's dealings with his people, he said, here's the contract I have with you. If you will do the things I tell you to do, then I will be your God. And whenever you want direction, I will give you direction, guidance. When you have needs, I will provide those needs. And whenever you're in danger, I will step between you and your danger. And whenever you want to be able to know that your life matters in this world, I'll make sure for you that your life does matter. Now all of these are contingent on the fact that you as my people will do what I tell you to do. So over and over, you see in the Old Testament, God keeps on saying to the people of Israel, you must do the things that I tell you to do. Now in verse 13, he's already talked about that in chapter 11, beginning in chapter 10, all the last half of that. In chapter 11, he's talked about it several times. Observe therefore all the commands I've given you today. Now remember all these commandments and laws in chapter, in verse 1, verse 8. And now he skips over to verse 13, and he starts the same kind of thing. So if you faithfully obey the commands I'm giving you today, to love the Lord your God, and to serve Him with all your heart and with all your soul. Here's this word love, which is a bonding word. The word that means that you and God are joined together. It's used as a way in the Old Testament of describing marriage. A man and woman are bound together because of their pledge to each other. The covenant of love has bound us together. God is saying to His people, the covenant of love has bound us together. That's what it is to commit your life to Christ. I give you my life completely, and God says, okay, I will take care of you in every situation all the time. I find a lot of people who've made a commitment to God, but deep down inside they know they haven't given a full commitment to God. And I talk to people all the time who say, well, I've not really given my complete commitment to God. I have yet to have a wedding, where I would say to someone, do you pledge to honor and love this person the rest of your life? And they'd say, well, most of it. I don't think there would ever be a wedding that would be done that way because the bonding is not there unless there is a commitment of faithfulness in that pledge. What God is dealing with is saying to His people, you must obey me, all the commands I'm giving to you. And this is a sign of our love. I will do my part in love to you, and you do your part as a result of the love you have for me. So, to love the Lord your God and to serve Him with all your heart, that's the decision-making processes of our life, that's how the Bible describes the heart in the Old Testament, and with all your soul. The soul is the inner spiritual nature of a person. Actually, it's just a word that describes the living of a person, a person's life. This is, with all your life, I guess is a good way to translate that word soul, or to understand it the way we would see it. Notice in verse 14 what He says, Then, after you've done these things, I will send rain on your land in its season, both autumn and spring rains, so that you may gather your grain, new wine, and oil. I will provide grass in the fields for your cattle, and you will eat and be satisfied. Here, God connects the obedience of His children to His material blessings for them. There's never anywhere in this passage that the Bible is trying to say to us, if you obey His commandments, then God has to give you material wealth. That's not the point. I think sometimes people read these passages, and because it's a conditional passage, they think that anyone can sit down and say, Okay, I'm going to obey God in every way, and then He has to give me material wealth, a way by which you can control God. There's never a way in which we can manipulate or control God. I mean, He is sovereign and supreme. He understands what our motives really are. And if you obey the commandments of God to manipulate God, He can see right through that, and He won't respond to it at all. But in the relationship of the Lord or the Father to His children, He sees that our obedience to Him, our respect and reverence for Him, so that we do whatever He asks us to do, as worthy of saying, Now that you have kept this part of our relationship, I will always keep mine. All of our behaviors as parents and children are sort of conditional. I will reward you if you do the things you're supposed to do. I will punish you if you don't. And that's what He's talking about with His children. So what this is focused on is to say, If you've made yourself a commitment to God, to live in obedience to Him, there is a connection between your obedience and His blessings to your life. I think many people suffer because of these absences of God's blessings, because in their heart they've reserved a place to say, Here are some things that I'm just not going to do. I don't care what God says. Whenever you have that spirit of rebellion, it's like a child who looks at their parents and says, I don't care what you say, I'm not going to vacuum the floor. Any person that has that kind of rebellious spirit about them, the parent is not going to respond with generosity and kindness. Because they know that the spirit needs to be corrected. And it needs to be corrected by discipline. Withholding the blessings that God has promised to His people as a result of their disobedience is an effort to discipline them. I want you to see when I withhold the rain, when I withhold the crops from you, I want you to stop and say, Why is this happening to me? And I want you to search your heart and to see if you've kept the commandments that I'm giving you. And if you realize you haven't, then you come back and you apologize to me and begin again to keep the commandments that I've given to you. And when you do, when you're faithful to be the kind of child that I want you to be, I will respond to you as I promised that I would. When most people face trouble in their lives, whether it's financial trouble or other kinds of trouble, the very first place we ought to start when we're trying to find out what's wrong is to look inside of us and say, Is there something I know that God wants me to do that I'm not doing? We ought to look inside of ourselves and say, Is there something I'm doing that I know God doesn't want me to do? I don't mean you'll always find an answer there. Sometimes there are no answers as to why things don't go the way we expected or hoped they would. But this is the most important place that you can start. Because whatever else there is in your life that's created this situation, you need to have a perfectly clean and clear relationship with God. You need to make sure that you have accepted His authority over your life and you've submitted yourself to Him as a faithful child and servant. Because if there's any other answer to the difficulty you have, you need His guidance to figure out what it is. You need His power to be able to overcome those things that are in your way. And so making sure the relationship is proper is absolutely essential. That's why Moses keeps bringing this up. I think that so many people suffer financially because of their failure to be obedient to God. I find very few people who are faithful in their financial matters with God and how they deal with their finances who have serious financial problems. Because God gives us clear guidance about that. And our failure to do it, to say, well, I don't see any reason why I have to do that. I don't see why that's important. It causes us to put ourselves in a position where God says, wait a minute. I'm going to let you suffer the consequences of this without intervening so that you will wake up and see that I really demand of my people absolute obedience. So here he connects obedience and material blessings. Not as a way of saying you can earn those or you can make God give them to you. But as a way of saying the relationship between the one in charge and the servant has to be based on the willingness of the servant to be a servant and then God is his God. So this is a clear indication for the people who are getting ready to go in the promised land about how to keep track of themselves. Verse 16, he says, Be careful, or you will be enticed to turn away and worship other gods and bow down to them. He continually is warning them all through these last two chapters about the dangers that they're going to face as a result of prosperity. I am going to bless you, but I want to warn you right now that because of the prosperity that I'm going to give you, you're going to have a tremendous temptation to turn aside. The promise he makes in verse 14, I will send rain on your land and seasons both autumn and spring rain so that you may gather grain and new wine and oil. He makes this promise because they're going into the land of promise and the primary God in that land was the God of Baal. And Baal was the God of fertility. He was the God of rain. Now, what Moses is saying to the people, you're going to go in this place where everybody's going to tell you if you serve and worship Baal, you will have good crops. But I want to remind you that it is the Lord who brings rain. It is the Lord who controls the natural order. They had already seen in their journeys through the wilderness how God had controlled the natural order. He was reminding them that the promises of Baal were false and that the real power to bring rain on the land was in the hand of the One who created heaven and earth. There was no claim on the part of Baal to be a creator of the world. He was just the promise that He controlled the rain. Here is the One who made everything. He is the One who brings you rain. Don't be confused by this. Don't think that there is another source for being able to find it. Now, in verse 16, He says, Be very careful, for you will be enticed to turn away and worship other gods. And the God of Baal was a primary one. And when you read through the Old Testament over and over again, you see that they did succumb to this temptation to be enticed. It's a promise, a bribe. If you do this for me, here's what I'll do for you. I'll offer you a reward if you'll do this for me. And when they were to get in the promised land, all their neighbors said, All our crops are due to the God of Baal. He's really helped us out and made us good. So the temptation on their part was to say, Well, why don't we worship the God of Baal? Now, we live in a culture where we're so accustomed to believing only one God that when you read these stories, you think they did away with the God Yahweh and turned completely to Baal. But they didn't do that. What they said was, You know, we've been offering sacrifices to Yahweh God on the altar. And He promised He would help us. What if we were to go over and also offer sacrifices to Baal? Then we'll have the best of both worlds. There's a movie. I forgot now what the name of the movie was. But this guy was helping these nuns build a chapel. And he was Sidney Poitier. And he was... Lilies of the Field, is that it? And so the people come out there and find him working on this building. And one of them says to him, I didn't know you were a Catholic. He said, I'm just covering my bases. This was exactly the philosophy of the people of Israel. We're just covering all of our bases. I had a man one time who joined our church and he said, after he'd been baptized, he said, Well, I was baptized as a Methodist and I was baptized in another church and now I've been baptized here. I've got all my bases covered. He was doing the same thing. What the temptation for all of us is is to compromise. To try to get the best of both worlds. To get the best of the Christian faith and yet not miss out on all the fun and enjoyment that the world has to offer. It's a big temptation. Because you can kind of compromise that. You can kind of justify it. You say, well, I do go to church, read the Bible and I believe these things. But I don't see anything wrong with this. Even though it may in the Bible say it's wrong. I don't see anything wrong with it. We base it on our own judgment. What God was warning them is there will be tremendous temptations to everybody who tries to live for me. Because Satan always comes along and says, I'm not asking you to give up. Have you noticed that? A lot of people think that Satan's temptation is to say, I know you're a good Christian, but why don't you go murder somebody? He never does that. You notice with Jesus, He didn't say to Jesus in the temptations, Now I want you to turn away and not be a good follower of Yahweh. He said, you know, Yahweh said you should come here and get all the followers to follow you. But He told you you're going to have to die on a cross. What if you don't have to do that? What if you go ahead and get all the people to follow you? And here's how we'll do it. If you'll just come and kneel down in front of me, one time I'll give you all the world's kingdoms that your father said you should have. When he turned that down, he said, you know, you don't have to suffer and die. What if you just went up to the temple and you jumped off and the angels caught you before you hit the ground? Wouldn't everybody say, this has to be the Messiah? He never said, don't be the Messiah. He said, do it my way. And with people of Israel, and all of us are all caught up in, it's the same thing. God generally doesn't ask people who are moral followers of His to do something terribly wrong, illegal and immoral. He asked us just to step over the line a little bit and to do what we think looks right as opposed to what God says is right. And those little compromises, most people around you won't complain about. They just won't. Because they look so small to them, but you know you have. Be careful because Satan will entice you. He will offer you benefits. He will bribe you. He will promise you that good things are going to come to you if you just do this one thing. Even though you know in your heart you really believe in God and you want to obey Him. And you know it's kind of stepping over the line a little bit. Nothing but disaster will follow. Then the Lord's anger will burn against you. And He will shut the heavens so that it will not rain. And the ground will yield no produce. And you will soon perish from the good land the Lord is giving you. When you become a disobedient child, your father will cut off the benefits. You don't want to do the work I'm giving you to do, okay? I'm not going to pay you. Because I've told you to do that. It's not that you have this blessing from God by your works. It's by your obedience that results in works. So what God is trying to do is to tell the people the connection we have in this covenant requires obedience. I will not bless you unless you're obedient. So if you know in your life, in your mind, in your heart that you're stepping over the lines where God wants you to be, you have to stop and examine that again. If you really are, you ask God, what am I doing that you don't want me to do? What am I not doing that you want me to do? And what are the consequences of this misbehavior? Now you just ask that. And you sit still and just think. And God will put in your mind what it is. Now you may not like it. And you may not even agree with it. But He will tell you that. He has great interest in our living and obedience to Him. Great interest in this. He doesn't want to keep it a secret. He's trying to guide us. I'll tell you up front, He said to the people, when you go in there and you keep doing everything you can to raise your crops and you don't make anything, you look and see if you disobeyed Me. Because that's what I'm going to do. So every time they had crop failures, they knew to sit down and say, was this God the result of disobedience? Now, verse 18. Fix these words of Mine in your heart and mind and tie them as symbols on your hand and bind them on your forehead. How do you avoid slipping over the line to disobedience? You have to know what the commandments and rules of God really are. If you don't know what they are, then you're going to disobey them. Now, I want to go over this just a little bit to talk about what He's talking about here. He's not talking about if they don't do what they're supposed to do. He's going to send them to hell. Someone told me the other day, Don, I think that maybe Larry Fry and you were talking about if you disobey commandments of God and you don't know what they are, will God hold you accountable for them? And when Larry was talking to me about this, he was thinking, you know, if you disobeyed them and you sinned because you disobeyed them, would you go to hell even if you didn't know what the commandments were? There are two different ways by which sin is described in the Bible. One is conscious rebellion against God. I know what you want me to do and I know you're the Lord and I'm going to tell you I'm not going to do it. I'm going to do what I want to do. This conscious rebellion separates us from God and that's what makes us destined for eternity without Him. Conscious rebellion. Not immaturity, not weakness, but conscious rebellion. And that's one thing. To do that, you have to know what the command is. For example, with parent and child. If a child is young and immature and you say to them, I want you to go in and clean up your room and they go in and they see their toys, they start playing with them. You know they're distracted because they love the toys. They're not saying, I don't care what my mom and dad says. I mean a two-year-old. I don't care what my mom and dad says. I'm going to live my life the way I want to. They're not doing that. They're just saying, Oh yeah, that toy, I forgot all about that toy. And they start driving it around or flying it or picking up the baby or whatever it is. And a parent understands the difference between that and a 15-year-old that looks them right in the eye and says, You can't tell me what to do and I will not do it. There's a whole difference between those two. The sins that he's talking about here, the laws and rules of the children of Israel are the first of those. The immature things. He's not talking about the rebellion and denial of the authority of God over him. He's talking about weakness, spiritual weakness. All of us have that. He's talking about immaturity. All of us have plenty of that. He's talking about the things that normally come from someone who's trying to begin or start in this process. And those are the ones that we'll be guilty of that you don't know about because you haven't yet learned about those. Take, for example, a child. A child, you're trying to help learn how to do things and the child may come in and put his feet on the coffee table. And you say, Don't do that because it'll scar the coffee table. If you have a husband that comes in and puts his muddy boots on the coffee table, a whole different reaction will occur. Because when a child is learning, you always stop them from something that's dangerous to them or dangerous to the things you have or people around you. If they know better, then a more severe discipline will come. That's the way God works with us. I want you to make sure that you learn what my commandments are. That's your requirement. So how do you do that? They didn't have books like we do. So you take the commandments, he said. Fix them on your hearts and minds. You go to the temple. You learn what the commandments are. They read those every year. And you go to the temple and you listen to those so that you have in your mind and in your heart the instructions I give you. That makes you accountable to me for obeying me. And then you bind them on your hands and on your foreheads. He means make them present in front of you all the time. You make them so that you keep your commandments in front of you. He didn't physically mean even though they did bind them on their hands and put them on their forehead. It wasn't just physical thing he was talking about. He was talking about keep reminding yourself of these things that you've learned. Make it so that they're like visible in front of you. Keep it in your mind so that you know exactly what I've told you to do. I want you to learn what I've told you and live in obedience to those and keep going over them so that you repeat them over and over again. So you get them in front of you. Next, in verse 19, teach them to your children, talking about them when you sit at home, when you're walking along the road, when you lie down, and when you get up. So your neighbor does something to you and you know that he's been mean to you and nasty to you. As a Christian you say to your children, well you know this neighbor has been mean and nasty to us but you know what God tells us is we should forgive them and do something nice for them. So let's just sit down here and pray. Or you're going down the road and somebody cuts you off. Instead of saying nasty things to them and about them and getting all mad, you say to your kids in the car, what does God tell us we should do about this when people cut us off and do bad things for us? We should say, God, would you forgive them for their carelessness and for their thoughtlessness? And if we were to find this person stopped by the road with a flat tire, we wouldn't say, boy, that scurried guy, what he's coming to him. We would stop and help him. So what you're doing is you're teaching your children what it means to respond by turning the other cheek, by forgiving people those who offend you. He's talking about the normal everyday events of life are opportunities for us to teach the things that we've got in our head to our children. That's how they learn how to live the Christian life. That's how the people of Israel were to teach their children what they were supposed to do. Walking along, as you live your life, as you're sitting in the house, all of these, you're looking for opportunities to be able to teach how to be able to live. Okay, what if you make a mistake? What if something happens in your house and your spouse does something you don't like and it's the 50,000th time they've done the same thing and each time you've said, I don't want you to do that anymore. It hurts my feelings. And your kids are all there. They hear all this. They know what you've said. They say, okay, we're going to get it now. They're watching. You have an opportunity to teach what it means to forgive and turn the other cheek. That's what he's talking about. We are to be responsible for passing on to our children the lifestyle of obedience to God. And whenever you teach the lifestyle of obedience to God, then you have an accountability to doing it. It's like going and signing up for Weight Watchers and you have to go in and weigh every week. Everybody knows what you were supposed to do. You were 165 last week. Now, let's see what you are today. When you have everybody in your family who knows what the rules are and you as a mom or dad don't keep them, there is a check for us. Everybody in your Sunday school class, everybody in your family, we are accountable to each other. You can learn to live this life if you both teach it to people and live it in front of them. Would you bow your heads for just a moment? I don't want to ask you to say that you're perfect because no one is. But can you say to God honestly and sincerely right now that you want to know everything that God wants you to do? Does it reflect in your Bible study and your church attendance? Ask God right now, am I doing the things that you want me to do? Listen to what comes to your mind. Is there something I'm doing that you want me to stop doing? You've given us as your children a clear path as to how life becomes successful. Listening to you and living in obedience. Father, I ask if any of us have heard from you today that our lives are not completely devoted to you, that we haven't said to you I give everything in my life to you. That you would keep reminding us of that until we're ready to say, okay God, I'll do it your way, not mine. Give us the strength, Father, to do the things you want us to do and stop doing the things we shouldn't do. Give us the power beyond our own to live the life you've called us to live. In the name of Christ, amen.