A recent Facebook (FB) post of a friend of mine caught my attention. It went something like this: “What matters is our Obedience to God, more than the posting of profound statements on FB.”
It caught my attention because the times I do check the “news feed” on my Facebook home page, I often am overwhelmingly flooded with posts of profound quotations or links to articles with profound titles. Sometimes they come as a long series of posts, like waves crashing down upon the shore again and again. What I usually end up doing is just to scroll through all that without really bothering to read them. And when I regularly experience this Facebook “assault” from some people, I sometimes wonder whether they do anything else other than post something on Facebook.
Yet here I am. Writing another article. Hoping that I have something profound to say; something others will consider worthy to read, and maybe even remember. I guess we all in some way want to sound or appear knowledgeable, intelligent, wise, and perhaps even witty.
But the Lord is not impressed by my profundity if it is nothing more than a mask that only makes me look good. Jesus makes it clear that the wise person isn’t the one who has all the right words, who has remarkable knowledge of his teachings, but never puts them into practice or applies them to self (see Matthew 7.24-27). “Anyone who loves me will obey my teaching” (John 14.23 NIV). And those who learn to follow Jesus must teach others not just to know but specifically “to obey all that I have commanded you” (Matthew 28.19). James, the brother of Jesus, also exhorts us: “But don’t just listen to God’s word. You must do what it says. Otherwise, you are only fooling yourselves” (James 1.22 NLT).
What really matters is not just profound knowledge but profound obedience. Many would agree to the idea that the Word of the Lord is a reliable guide for life. But it is a worthless guide if I do not do what it tells me to do (or not do). The Word is given not so that I can amass for myself great knowledge, but that the transforming Word would produce Christlikeness in me.
Let me end by, you guessed it, quoting some profound statements: “If I am going to know who Jesus is, I must obey Him. The majority of us don’t know Jesus because we have not the remotest intention of obeying Him.” Also “there is a tendency in all of us to appreciate the sayings of Jesus Christ with our intellects while we refuse to do them.” (Oswald Chambers)
—Keith Y. Jainga