Obedience is Freedom

King Zedekiah said to Jeremiah, “I am afraid of the Jews who have gone over to the Babylonians, for the Babylonians may hand me over to them and they will mistreat me.”

“They will not hand you over,” Jeremiah replied. “Obey the LORD by doing what I tell you. Then it will go well with you, and your life will be spared. – Jeremiah 38: 19-20

Today’s Reading: Jeremiah 37-39; Hebrews 3

Obedience is the path to freedom.

That even sounds kinda strange to me as I read it over and over again after I typed it. It sounds backwards, inside out; like an oxymoron to the highest degree.

But I am realizing that it is true.

The question is obedient to whom, to what? Is there anything that we can follow that would lead us to freedom? Definitely not anyone that I know… I love my friends and family but if I followed any of them I’d be walking their path, not my own. I could try to just follow myself… I could try to search within to find the truth of this life, this world and existence according to the freedom of my will. But even this cannot offer the freedom that I desire.

I know because I’ve tried. I’ve tried to look within to understand my motivations, my desires, my needs and wants, my purpose and I get nowhere. Of course I went places, here and there; searching for what I thought was the path toward happiness and truth. But I ended up like a dog chasing its tail. I did a whole lot of running to and fro but ended up in the same place. This is because I could only go where I had been before, or where others that I knew had been. None of these places were where I was meant to be.

I am meant to go where no one has ever gone before.

And I’d wager to say that you are too. There is a reason why you are here. Your life is a unique fingerprint on the human experience. No one has ever been you and no one will ever be you so why should you go where others have been?

What I see clearly now is that my vision is limited by my frame of mind. I can never see outside of the limits of my imagination. But God can. God can see paths that don’t exist and he can make a way for me to tread the first footprints upon them.

All we are asked to do is obey.

I used to think of obeying God as a sucker move or a cop out. It seemed to me that folks didn’t get anywhere by waiting and listening to hear from God so that they could move forward. They just stood in place and said that it was because God told them to stay there.

And maybe God did…

But I realize that following God requires us to take action. It requires us to do the things that we are afraid to do. We are required to live on the cutting edge of life, to take hold of God’s hand of grace as He navigates us on the path of purpose for our lives.

And on this path is anything and everything that we TRULY desire. It may not have the Bentley or the Ferrari… but it does have a lifetime of fulfillment. And it is when we are truly fulfilled that we are actually free because we are doing exactly what it is that we never knew we wanted to do.

But the only way to get there is to be obedient, like gangsta level obedience. We have to be relentless in our approach to living out God's word for our lives

That’s what it means to do our part.

It’s strange to think that the very thing that leads us to freedom is the thing that seems to be least like it. But you know what… I was skeptical for years too, but now I’m starting to believe and things are starting to change…

For real.