The Influence After Our Obedience
"But Peter and the other apostles answered and said: We ought to obey God rather than men." (Acts 5:29) "And we are His witnesses to these things, and so also is the Holy Spirit whom God has given to those who obey Him.” (Acts 5:32)
To be a Christian is to be a follower of Jesus. We follow our Servant Leader, watching closely, listening carefully, and following obediently all that He says and models for us so that we know the way that we are to live our lives. Obedience is our daily bread and our simply way of life. But obedience always comes with a cost. Being obedient in a fallen and sinful world can end up being quite dangerous.
This is the context in Acts 5 when after the apostles were divinely freed from prison and then immediately went right back to the temple to stand up and start teaching the way of Christ to the people. They didn't go into HIDING...where they sought to avoid getting caught or HALTING...where they stopped preaching the Name of Christ...or HATING...where they would become embittered by those who unjustly threw them into prison. No, they did none of those things. Instead, they were HEEDING the Word of God to do His will as they persisted through every hardship and opposition.
BY DEFINITION, obedience means that someone else must speak or act first so that we are able to respond in an obedient and honorable way. The way of Jesus is to do the will of the Father even when others may not understand or agree or may even oppose us as we conform our lives to Christ. The person who ends up being a true leader in our world is the faithful follower of the ultimate leader, who is Jesus.
Our obedience actually leads to our influence. After we obey, the world is changed by our cooperation with God. Lives are healed and delivered when Christians obey but the enemy of our souls is angered and threatened by our steadfast stance of righteousness. The world doesn't like to make room for an authority that is higher than self. We are always under authority, whether it is Divine Authority or Demonic Authority.
But we are not being truly being obedient if we are needing others to confirm or respond to what we do. Obedience lives to please God alone and is willing to go against the principles and priorities of this fallen world. We must not allow someone else's disobedience to get in the way of our obedience.
This means that we must be willing to do the hard thing even if it causes some discomfort for ourselves or for others. Even Jesus "learned obedience by the things that He suffered" (Heb. 5:8). The Lord doesn't ever ask us to figure things out but to follow Him out of every mess and hardship that we face. We must take everything to the Lord in prayer and make sure that the Lord is not following us but that we are the ones following Him.
Therefore, let us learn to be weak in our own strength or will, and let us minister out of the strength and sufficiency of the Lord. For we are His witnesses in this world and it is when we are weak that we are actually strong.
"ACTS IN ACTION" CHALLENGE POINT:
- Be decided to do whatever God makes clear to you. - Resolve now to OBEY that which God has put on your heart to do until there is the completion of His Word.