“I shall run the
way of Thy commandments, for Thou wilt enlarge my heart.” Psalm 119:32
God desires obedience.
“Be holy
as I am holy”
says God in Lev. 19:2 and again in I Peter 1:16. Holiness demands sinlessness, an adherence to
God’s commands. We need to “run in the way” of His commandments, understanding
and obeying them. Many of us work hard
to be obedient, believing that the key to obedience is self-discipline and
prayer. I am a fairly disciplined person, but when I think of being sinless, of
being holy, I am overwhelmed. There is not enough discipline in the world to
make me always obedient. The Psalmist suggests that the key is to be
found elsewhere.
Jesus said that the whole of the law could be summed up in
two phrases: love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and
strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.
He also said that He didn’t come to abolish the law but to fulfill
it. The
key to obedience to God is to embrace and live by the committed and
self-sacrificing love to which Jesus refers.
Love goes beyond the rules and straight to the
heart. Love tells us not only
to love our neighbor, but to love our enemy and to pray for him. Love tells us to go beyond human response and
to instead respond like Jesus would the same situation. Love does what the law could only hint at; it
changes us at the heart
level. Love remakes us in the image of
God because God is love and the author and originator of love. Love obeys the spirit of the law, and so
obedience is achieved. We can run in the
way of His commands because we reflect the image of Jesus, and fulfill the
commands.
The reason we struggle to
live in obedience is because our hearts are too small. To become more obedient, we need to become more
loving. To overcome temptation, we need
to see things through the eyes of the other, to love enough to do the right
thing, to live as Jesus would. We need
Him to enlarge our hearts.
Dear God, enlarge my
heart. Give me enough love, for You and
others, to be obedient. Make me holy.
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