The video above will motivate you to choose to obey God and do what pleases Christ today!
Obedience from the heart is true worship. Now here’s an area where I see us get tripped up once in a while—
Obedience from the heart is true worship. Through faith in Christ we’re given a new heart. God’s Spirit is put in us. We suddenly desire to live in a way that glorifies God.
—And we have this issue in our life where we are choosing between obedience and disobedience and we find that our heart is divided. It wants to do the right thing but it also wants to do a bad thing. Can anybody relate to this? This is called the war between the flesh and the Spirit in Galatians chapter 5. This is Romans chapter 7: “I know the right thing to do. I keep doing the bad thing!” (See Romans 7:19).
True worship is obedience from the heart. What that doesn’t mean then, is that we just wait until God changes our heart on a particular issue. Right?
You often hear Christians say, “Well, you know, if God wants me to do that, he’s just going to have to change my heart.”
Wait a minute… God has already given you a new heart that is responsive to God’s truth, God’s Word, God’s law. And if you know the truth then the responsibility of the disciple—the follower of Jesus—is to go the way of the truth, is to go the way of the Spirit, in that battle between “I know the right thing, but I want to do the bad thing.”
Don’t wait and say, “Well, if God changes my heart on that issue, then I’ll go the right way.”
If you know the right way, go the right way! Go God’s way. Go the way of God’s Word.
We don’t have the excuse of just saying, “Well, I’ll wait until I feel like obeying it.” Rather, it means that we are currently, because of God’s Spirit in us and the new heart he has given us, determined to obey for the glory of God and to do so truly, inwardly, not merely externally.
Paul said that we are to live “as slaves of Christ doing the will of God from your heart” (Ephesians 6:6).
“What then? Shall we sin because we are not under the law but under grace? By no means! Don’t you know that when you offer yourselves to someone as obedient slaves you are slaves to the one you obey—whether you are slaves to sin which leads to death, or to obedience, which leads to righteousness. But thanks be to God, that though you used to be slaves to sin, you have come to obey from the heart the pattern of teaching that has now claimed your allegiance” (Romans 6:15-17 NIV).
There is a change that has happened to us internally. We were once slaves to sin. Now we have been changed, born again, made new creations, and we become slaves of Christ—or righteousness—for the glory of God.
And our main concern is no longer, “what pleases me” but, “what pleases Christ?” And that is real worship. And the good news is that we have the final authority on what pleases God. We have the full and final revelation and authority on how God feels about issues—the Word of God.