It is for each of us freely to choose whom we shall serve, and find in that obedience our freedom. — Mary Richards

As eager as we can be to obey God, leaping in too quickly is also a problem. In modern evangelism, we can occasionally skip over love and empowerment—the necessary first two steps—and dive right into action. Without the motive of love or the power of dependence on Christ, we blast away and cause damage.

Because of the service by which you have proved yourselves, others will praise God for the obedience that accompanies your confession of the gospel of Christ, and for your generosity in sharing with them and with everyone else. (2 Corinthians 9:13)

You can see what obedience done right looks like: Others will see it and praise God. Apart from a heart that is truly learning to love God, we will have no motivation for obedience other than the abject fear of punishment. A lack of understanding of love and dependency always leads to legalism.

Is obedience important? Yes! Do we produce it out of the flesh? No! Our love for Him, yielded to Him as He lives within us, is where we should find ourselves walking in obedience.

A boy can learn a lot from a dog: obedience, loyalty, and the importance of turning around three times before lying down. — Robert Benchley

Being loved and empowered by God leads us into obedience to whatever He asks of us. We don’t just begrudgingly submit to His commands like He is some far-off tyrant. We don’t have to obey to earn His favor or acceptance, or be fearful or tentative when our efforts fall short. That’s not the way He designed it to work. It’s actually joyful!

And this is love: that we walk in obedience to his commands. As you have heard from the beginning, his command is that you walk in love. (2 John 1:6)

In our human terms, we don’t normally equate love with obedience. But that’s just how God set it up. Since He loves us so much, we are hardwired to return that love by joyfully obeying Him. We know where true joy is—not in quick-fix earthly stuff, but in a steady relationship with Christ. If we have experienced His unconditional love, we will love Him back. And if we love Him, we will naturally follow His lead.

A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it. — John Steinbeck

When I first began a relationship with my wife, I wasn’t dependent on her. We fell deeper in love, we got married, we made a commitment to become dependent on one another, and over time it became more and more natural to become dependent on one another.

Love is the motive we have for not only getting married, but also becoming dependent on Christ. True love is like that; it draws us together in a way that makes separation and independence seem impossible. Through our love for Him, we become dependent on Him. As we immerse ourselves in His unconditional love, allowing Him to accept us just the way we are, a new strength is found within:

I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. I can do all this through him who gives me strength. (Philippians 4:12-13)

Being dependent on Christ is how we get power to “do all things.” We are equipped for His service by being attached to Him, relying on Him for everything. What a relief! It’s not up to us!

Pete Briscoe’s Daily Devotional – ‘Experiencing LIFE Today’

The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread. — Mother Teresa

Major Ian Thomas wrote about something he called “The Threefold Interlock.” Sure, it sounds like a wrestling move, but what he was describing is how we live a life of faith:

1. We love God.
2. That love for God leads to dependency on God.
3. Dependency on God results in obedience to God.

That’s good stuff, but it’s not the whole story. Love doesn’t start with us. Our love for God could never originate from our own hearts. And unlike a lot of love we experience on earth, God doesn’t love us because we love Him first… that’s actually backwards. We love God for a very specific reason:

We love him, because he first loved us. (1 John 4:19)

Our love for Christ comes in response to His amazing love for us. I don’t think we can actually wrap our minds around how much He loves us. He died on the cross for us. He knows about all of our wicked sin, and yet He still loves us and accepts us. When you truly recognize that kind of love for what it is, and the Spirit shows it to you, you will find yourself enraptured with love for Him. It’s not something that you have to manufacture on your own.

Just give it some thought. Pray it through. Ask God to make you willing to see, feel, taste, hear His love with all your senses. Close your eyes; vividly imagine you are in the crowd that day the Son of God bled and died.

Pete Briscoe’s Daily Devotional – ‘Experiencing LIFE Today’

You can safely assume that you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do. — Anne Lamott

Remember back in school how there was always one kid who asked the question that everyone was thinking, but everyone was too scared to ask because it sounded dumb? And remember how grateful you were for that person?

Well, the disciples were no different, and Philip was that kid. Jesus had just told the disciples something truly amazing in John 14:6: “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” It was a stunning truth, a paradigm shift in all of their brains.

But Philip pipes up and says, “Lord, show us the Father and that will be enough for us” (v. 8). You can almost hear the frustration in Jesus’ voice in His response:

Jesus answered: “Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Don’t you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me? The words I say to you I do not speak on my own authority. Rather, it is the Father, living in me, who is doing his work.” (John 14:9-10)

We similarly miss the message once in a while. We see Christ do amazing things in lives all around us, and yet we still tend to “miss the point” or fail to see the implications of this mystery. Jesus is the revelation of the Father to us. When we see the Son, we see the Father too—a supernatural unity with Jesus in the Father and the Father in Jesus.

Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

When my kids were little, they were totally dependent on me for everything: Food, shelter, love, all of it. They could do nothing without my provision. When we think of dependent people, Jesus probably isn’t even on the list. But He was. Big time.

The granddaddy of all the passages that teach that Jesus was dependent on the Father during His time on earth is John 14. It’s a beautiful picture of the dependence of a son on his father… of the Son on the Father, showing the intimacy Jesus and the Father share—an intimacy He invites us into. In verse six, we get a glimpse of something deeper:

Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you really know me, you will know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him.” (John 14:6)

Christ is our only access to the Father. By knowing Christ, we get to know the Father. Jesus was teaching His disciples that they shouldn’t just look to Him to get stuff, because there is no other way, no other path, to the presence of God.

It’s easy to lose track of why we worship. We tend to want to worship Jesus because of the stuff we think He’ll give us in return. It doesn’t work that way. He offers us not only salvation, but the Father. It’s that simple, and it’s enough.

Pete Briscoe’s Daily Devotional – ‘Experiencing LIFE Today’

A Christian is a perpetual miracle. — Charles Spurgeon

Miracles are, without question, cool. But the fact that Jesus performed miracles was not reason enough to believe that He was God. Elijah performed many miracles, but he never once laid claim to his own deity. Christ Himself was adamant that His miracles were not just evidence of His deity, but of His dependence on the Father:

But if I do them, even though you do not believe me, believe the works, that you may know and understand that the Father is in me, and I in the Father. (John 10:38)

He never downplayed the miracles He performed. He just wanted to make sure the people understood how and why He was doing them. Miracles do point to the fact that the Father was in Him, He was in the Father, and He was dependent on the Father. Jesus didn’t need to come to earth as a man just to do things in His own divine power. God had already been dealing with man in that matter. (Things like giant pillars of fire and floods covering the earth come to mind!)

Jesus is fully God, but on earth He wanted to demonstrate physically to the people what it was like to so totally depend on the Father for everything that all else would fade.

I have to admit that I’m one of those people that thinks the dishwasher is a miracle. — Clarence Thomas

There are two ways to split logs for a fire. One is the “character building” way (as countless fathers have told their sons), which is swinging an ax over your head until your arms fall off, slowly accumulating a small pile. It’s exhausting and back-breaking. The other is by using a motorized log splitter. You can do it four or five times faster and save yourself a lot of effort.

We forget that we have access to an amazing power in Christ through the Holy Spirit. It is miraculous, I daresay… easily the difference between an ax and a log splitter:

Very truly I tell you, whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father. (John 14:12)

Think about this! This is not the time to try to explain away the clear meaning of His words. Jesus promises us that, through the power of the Holy Spirit, we will be able to do anything and everything that the Father wants to accomplish through us. It’s not up to us to gird our loins and “git ’er done.” The key is to allow the power of the Spirit to do it through us.

If you are tired of swinging an ax for God, working your hardest for Him (and if you think you’ve already built enough character this way!), it’s time to give up. Quite frankly, He doesn’t need your help anyway. God’s design is a walk of faith, not works. Faith in Jesus opens up a new way of living, where we are empowered by His Spirit in us, as we allow Him to work through us.

I think Superman should go on the Larry King show and announce that he would come back to life if people in all 50 states wanted him to. — random quote by Dave Barry

The definitive comic book character is Superman. He has all of the amazing powers, but what makes him so intriguing to me is his disguise as Clark Kent. He would behave as Clark Kent as he went about normal human living, but when the need arose, he’d tear off the suit and fly off in his blue spandex to save the day.

We tend to think of Jesus in the same way. He walked around in His little human suit, and whenever He had to do human things—like some carpentry—He was human Jesus. But then when the supernatural was necessary, the buttons of His human suit popped off revealing the big “G” (for God) on His chest. The Super Jesus God would do all this amazing stuff, and then when that was all taken care of He went back into His carpenter clothes—just like Superman putting on his tie and suit to become Clark Kent again.

But that’s not what we get from Scripture:

So Jesus said, “When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am he and that I do nothing on my own but speak just what the Father has taught me.” (John 8:28)

Jesus is fully God, yet He chose to live a life of complete dependency on the Father. He could have chosen to assume His God powers at any time, but He chose instead to remain wholly dependent on the Father.

Faith is deliberate confidence in the character of God whose ways you may not understand at the time. — Oswald Chambers

Everyone is a person of faith. The reason I know this is because, around the world, people use chairs. (Stay with me a bit, this will make sense).

If you were to sit down in a chair and it crumbled beneath you into a thousand pieces, I would not run up to you and say, “Ha! You don’t have enough faith!” What I would say instead is that the object of your faith was inadequate and you need to choose better next time.

A lot of TV preachers will tell you that it’s okay to have faith in faith, but the apostle Paul would tell you to have faith in Jesus for salvation, and faith in Jesus for sanctification. In the same way you were saved by faith, live in faith.

Whoever claims to live in him must live as Jesus did. (1 John 2:6)

There’s proof as to whether or not we live by faith, and it’s demonstrated by how we are walking with Christ. I, for one, know I cannot walk as Jesus did on my own. I must have faith in Him to empower me to do so. Faith in myself is cute for the self-help section of the bookstore, but it will ultimately be my destruction.

Praise His name that we have a firm foundation to put our faith in.