A devotional study by bestselling novelist and devotional writer Michael Phillips, identifying 120 commands of Jesus from the gospels.
Jesus often introduces the subject of obedience with the tiny but eternally significant word "If". He recognizes that there are always two paths—obedience and disobedience. He commands obedience. But many will not obey. This obedience is a natural outgrowth of love:
-If you love me you will keep my commandments. (John 14:15)-He who has my commands and keeps them, he it is who loves me. (John 14:21)-If a man loves me, he will keep my word. (John 14:23)-You are my friends if you do what I command you.
Jesus is well aware of the games people play with spiritual things. He wants none to mistake what it means to be his followe. Many will claim to love him. Many will pretend to love him. Many will talk about loving him. Many will analyze what it means to love him. However, a Christian is distinguished and defined by one—and only one—thing: Obedience.
Obedience to the Commands of Jesus is a daily, moment-by-moment choice. We make it over and over. We are continually making it. It is a progressive and ongoing choice that defines what it means to love Jesus and be his follower.
A Sacrifice of Obedience was written through the years 2002 and 2003 as an intended sequel to Make Me Like Jesus. It was never published.
Fifteen years have now passed. As I look at the world around me, it seems less likely than ever that Christians in very large numbers will be drawn to a message about sacrifice or obedience. And I am no different. I resist both imperatives just like everyone else. I had hoped by this time in my life to be a little further along.
But obedience remains the bull’s eye of the Christian faith, and the very personal bull’s eye of my own life. Thus, the time at last seems right to revisit this manuscript and share it with whatever fellow pilgrims there may be on that isolated and occasionally lonely path.
You who read these words may be few. Even in Christendom, where the image of the cross looms large in the imaginations and theologies of its many churches and their members, the actual cross-life of sacrifice and obedience is not so well known.
Yet to such a life we are called. It is the only life to which we are called.
Let us, then, courageously explore together a few high points along the Lord’s earthly Calvary road to see what they have to reveal about that life.
