Blessing and Favour Through Obedience – Part 5

If Christians make a connection between obedience and blessings, there will often be a tendency to believe that they are not obedient enough because the blessings just don’t seem to be there. This approach can lead to obsessive rule-keeping and adherence to all sorts of principles – principles being a subtle form of rule-keeping.

The conclusion that I have come to on the subject of being guided by God, is that peace of mind is the most important thing. Peace and faith always go together – you cannot have one without the other. When you trust in God there is a peace about it. It is when a person’s mind is in turmoil, wracked with anxiety that they fail to hear from God and typically go off and do their own thing – just like Moses when he struck the rock with his staff; just like the twelve spies who spied out the promises land and gave a negative report.

I cannot help but feel that being exposed to all of these extravagant stories which are attributed to scripture can have a detrimental effect on Christians, especially if they are insecure and prone to worry. When it comes to being provided for materially, I think nothing beats not worrying.

³¹ "Therefore do not worry, saying, 'What shall we eat?' or 'What shall we drink?' or 'What shall we wear?' ³² "For after all these things the Gentiles seek. For your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. ³³ "But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you.

Matthew 6:31-33

I believe that “kingdom of God and His righteousness” has to include peace. In fact, Romans 14:17 tells us exactly what it is: the kingdom of God is not eating and drinking, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. How can you have the kingdom of God in you if you are not happy and you are always worrying about things?

I have always struggled with the “standard” preaching in church on taking action. The conclusion I have now come to is that life just does itself and things just tend to happen. We have both a conscious mind and a subconscious mind: it is the subconscious mind which forms our habits and it is the subconscious mind which leads us to do things spontaneously, often without hardly thinking about it. Why are Christians so pre-occupied with rules and principles, when a lot of the time they are not consciously aware of them most of the time and they often end-up doing something different anyway?

One of my favourite verses in the Bible is Philippians 2:13. I think that other versions of the Bible really help to bring out the meaning of this verse:

¹³ for it is God who works in you both to will and to do for His good pleasure.

Philippians 2:13 NKJV

¹³ For God is at work within you, helping you want to obey him, and then helping you do what he wants.

Philippians 2:13 TLB

¹³ For it is God who is the cause of your desires and of your acts, for his good pleasure.

Philippians 2:13 BBE

¹³ For it is God Himself whose power creates within you the desire to do His gracious will and also brings about the accomplishment of the desire.

Philippians 2:13 WNT

If it is God working in us to give us the desire to do what He wants and to actually perform it – why are we trying to anxiously control our own lives through rules and principles? Surely, a peaceful mind which trusts in God is the most conducive way in which to surrender to God and obey Him as He moves freely in our lives by the Holy Spirit? I suppose that Joel Osteen’s teaching on obedience leading to blessing is a move towards the concepts I’m trying to convey here – but the way he and other well-renowned Bible teachers go about it, leaves me feeling that they are not going about it the right way.

I would again like to re-iterate the need to find hope through the assurance of what Christ has already done for us; not finding hope through being give elaborate, unrealistic anecdotes and testimonies. It is about finding peace of mind through the assurance that we are right with God, through Christ by faith, not by our own works. It is not our obedience through our behaviour which attracts blessing and favour per se, it has a lot more to do with establishing peace of mind.