Obedience is a prerequisite for intimacy with Jesus
Obedience is a prerequisite for intimacy with Jesus. How important is intimacy with Jesus? Please read a previous article. In which I contrasted the intimacy I shared with my late husband with the intimacy I have with God. I believe I am doing much better in the intimacy with God department since then. God created us humans to have relationship with Him. And when that spectacularly failed He sent Jesus as our Saviour and Lord. To redeem us and to restore the relationship to what it should have been. So relationship with God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit is something that we should aspire to as followers of Christ.
The Prerequisite
In John Chapter ten it talks about Jesus as the Good Shepherd. How He interacts with His sheep and how the sheep should respond and what is expected of them. Now I suspect we are not as familiar with sheep as the crowd in Jesus’ day. But things to note is Jesus said His sheep know Him and they follow Him. They recognise His voice and they follow Him. When a parent calls out to a child and gives instructions and the child follows them we call that child obedient. The same applies to us as believers when we do what the Lord has told us to do. Then we are obedient and as His sheep this creates intimacy because the more we listen to Him the more we get to know Him.
The Promises
One of the things I love about God is that He has attached promises to many of the things He expects us as His children to do. And obedience is no different. In the same chapter ten in the book of John, it states that Jesus will protect us from all harm, He will give us abundant life. He will provide for all our needs, He will go before us and He has forgiven us all our sins. All we have to do to receive this marvellous free gift is to choose Him and to follow HIm.
As Parents
As parents one of the priceless gifts which we receive that we are usually blind to. Is that our children arrive in this world with the innate capacity to trust us. As a baby they are not suspicious of us, they believe all that we do for them is because we love and care about them. Even children who have been abused by their parents find it difficult to reject their parents. However, the opposite can be said of our relationship with Jesus, it is filled with suspicion and at every turn we expect Him to prove Himself. Well the good news is that He did this once and for all when He died on the cross for our sins!
