Absolute imperfection

Obedience. It's tough right? For sure. I have never met a person in my life who is completely obedient about everything little thing. That makes sense though...we are humans, we sin, we make mistakes every single day. Jesus is the only person ever in existence to be completely obedient. He was perfect. We aren't called to be Jesus, we are called to be like Jesus.

What I hope to encourage you with today is trying to be more obedient. I want to clarify to, I am not sitting here telling you to be a better person because you aren't one. I am writing this post so that you can recognize when you are being obedient and so that you can get on the path to being more obedient. When you are obedient, you please God. We all should want to please God more than anything. Therefore, we need to try our best to be as obedient as we can be.

As I was reading through Philippians 2 this morning there was one verse that stuck out to me that I really could not get out of my head.

And being found in human from, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on the cross. (Philippians 2:8) 

Jesus was obedient to the point of death. That is just mind blowing to me. The absolute perfection of Jesus is hard to wrap my mind around. As much as Jesus is absolutely perfect, we as humans are absolutely imperfect. Just like how I mentioned above, we make countless mistakes everyday. We make bad decisions one after another, we say things we aren't supposed to, we think how we shouldn't think. We are about as imperfect as it gets.

It says in that verse that Jesus humbled himself by becoming obedient. The key to obedience is humbling yourself. Chris't example of humility is perfect. The key to us having humility is to look at the interest of others over your own interests. We should never do anything out of selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourself.

When we begin to put others before ourselves it's easier to be obedient because you aren't worrying about our own wants and needs. When we worry about what we need and what we want our focus is doing whatever it takes to satisfy ourselves. We are simply to selfish minded. In other words, we are absolutely imperfect. We need to take the focus off of ourselves and begin to care and love other people. That in itself is obedience and will lead to further obedience in our lives.

That is what I want to leave you with today. When we humble ourselves and put others before ourselves, it's easier to live a more obedient life.

My hope is that we can all please God with our efforts to be obedient and to be like Jesus on a daily basis.

Honestly, you might be wondering, how do we know what being obedient looks like? Being obedient to me is doing the right thing. It's that little voice you hear in your head telling you to do something different than everybody else. It's being attentive and listening to what the Holy Spirit is calling you to do.