It is never a minor thing to know God’s will and not do it. God calls this sin. We can make excuses for our lack of obedience: “I’m just not ready yet” or “I’ll do it later!” or “I don’t think it will make a difference” or “I can’t afford to!” We rationalize, we procrastinate; yet, in God’s eyes, rationalization and procrastination are nothing more than disobedience. At times we deceive ourselves into thinking that good intentions equal obedient actions. They do not. A good intention without corresponding activity is disobedience. When we encounter God and He gives us a direction, it is not enough to write down the date in our spiritual journal, or even to tell our friends and church of our “decision.”\u00a0 God’s call is not to “make a decision” but to obey! Deciding to obey is not equal to obeying! (Matt. 21:28-31). Loudly affirming the necessity of obedience is not the same as obeying (Luke 6:46). Making commitments, even publicly, is not the same as obeying our Lord. Substituting our own good works is not the same as obeying.<\/p>\n
God told King Saul to wait until the prophet Samuel arrived. Instead of waiting, Saul took matters into his own hands and offered a sacrifice. Saul discovered, to his deep dismay, that other acts of supposed piety do not take the place of obeying a clear command from God (1 Sam. 15:22). As with Saul, God expects you to obey everything exactly as He tells you. Only obedience satisfies God’s desire for obedience!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Therefore, to him who knows to do good and does not do it, to him it is sin. (James 4:17)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6938","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daily-2"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackabyleadership.org\/bmiapp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6938","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackabyleadership.org\/bmiapp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackabyleadership.org\/bmiapp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackabyleadership.org\/bmiapp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackabyleadership.org\/bmiapp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6938"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blackabyleadership.org\/bmiapp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6938\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14581,"href":"https:\/\/blackabyleadership.org\/bmiapp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6938\/revisions\/14581"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackabyleadership.org\/bmiapp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6938"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackabyleadership.org\/bmiapp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6938"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackabyleadership.org\/bmiapp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6938"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}