What is faith? How does it relate to obedience? Can you be one without the other? One cannot live without one or the other. Obedience is keeping His commandments and faith is believing that He is true to keep them.
Our obedience does not cause God to keep His promises based on response. As many would teach, that if we do “x” God has to do “y”. There is nothing that we do that can force God to do something, anything, for us. It is simply because of grace that He does anything for us. He keeps His Word regardless of our faithfulness or faithless ness.
Can one break only one of His commandments and still be considered obedient. No!!! All one has to do is look to James 2:10, “For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it.” One part is all it takes. We are either obedient to all of the commands to be obedient or we are not.
Now one may say that it is hard, even impossible to keep all of God’s commandments. That may be true—for the unregenerate (lost) man. But for the believer we have a Helper who helps us in our weakness (Rom.8.26). Because of the Spirit we have no excuse to NOT be obedient. Only because we exchange the glory of God for our own desires do we fail to be able to keep His commands.
To often though the reason that we fail to choose His glory but ours instead is because we fail to have faith that He will keep His Word and be true to it. We would rather “take matters into our own hands” than to trust that He is truly sovereign.
With faith and trust that He will help us in our weaknesses to obey, then our faith becomes effective, not to move God, but to move us into the mould that He has designed us to be and the witness that He wants us to become—agents of His glory. Out of this we become less, less influenced by the world and more influenced by Him.
Being obedient is truly to love Him (1 Pet. 1.22). By being obedient we show how we love Him. To display true obedience is to anticipate in love what God’s wishes are. That is true faithfulness, to know what He desires from us through His word and obedience to it.
Faith and obedience go hand in hand. Faith spurs us on to obedience; faith fuels us to obey. They two must work together to be effective. Knowing His word is incredibly important to ignite and know what His commands are.
May our faith be encouraged and moved on by being obedient to Him prayerfully, and potently.
Soli Deo Gloria
Aaron "Tree" Landis
Psalm 1.3