Obedience is an act of love……….

“ Jesus replied, “All who love me will do what I say.  My Father will love them, and we will come and make our home with each of them.   Anyone who doesn’t love me will not obey me.  And remember, my words are not my own.  What I am telling you is from the Father who sent me.”  John 14:23-24 NLT

In John 14:15-31, we see that Jesus taught that the proof of our love for Him is our obedience to what He says. We cannot ignore what He says and expect to keep walking in His blessings.  That is deception . . . self-deception!

It is tragic that we have become so passive in our believing and faith.......we just sit in church and absorb rather than “hear and do.”  Sadly, that has caused us to miss out on so much of the supernatural of God, because we do not have confidence to believe that we can hear from God for ourselves.  We cannot ignore the importance of “hearing and doing,” for if we do, then we fall into self-deception.

We hear very little about the perils of self-deception today. The tragedy of self-deception is that we do not know when we are self-deceived!  Self-deception, if not dealt with through personal obedience to God, will continue to deceive us and take us on a downward spiral of decay.

The word “deceiving” (as recorded in James 1:22) means: “to reckon wrong, misreckon, miscount; hence, to draw false conclusions; then to cheat or deceive by false reasoning, hence, to deceive” (Bullinger’s). When we are drawing or coming to false conclusions, we are cheating ourselves of the knowledge and the power of truth. That then causes us to live in a state of deception . . . self-deception.

Deception ~ whether it be self-deception or otherwise ~ always takes us away from the truth of the Holy Spirit’s revelation.  Without the Holy Spirit’s revelation working in our lives we will fall to the level to the dictation of our flesh-life.

Therefore, it is imperative that we follow the clear instructions of the Lord by developing the “art of listening” to the Holy Spirit. It is only through our ability to hear and discern the voice of the Holy Spirit that obedience can be activated. If we listen, we will hear what He has to say.  And when we hear what He has to say, we then need to follow through on what He says to us with a physical action. That physical act of obedience to the voice of God demonstrates that we believe the voice of God more than our own doubts, fears, and what others might say about us, if we do something out of the ordinary.