🌻🌻Are Works and Sacrifice the Same as Obeying God's Will?

Are Works and Sacrifice the Same as Obeying God's Will?

    "“If a man love me, he will keep my words....He that loves me not keeps not my sayings” (John 14:23-24).

    We all know of the Pharisees. On the outside they sacrificed, expended, and worked hard for God, compassing land and sea to spread the gospel of God, and often reading the scriptures and preaching to the Jewish people. But all their actions contained their own motives and intentions. When they were preaching, they taught people to hold the tradition of men and abandon the commandments of God. And their spreading the gospel of God was for the sake of their own status and income. In the end, when the Lord Jesus came to work, they not only didn’t lead the Jewish people to keep up with God’s new work, but did their utmost to resist and condemn God’s work. From this, we can see that although the Pharisees outwardly expended for God, they never followed God’s way or put God’s words into practice. They were not at all the people who followed the will of God.

    That is to say, God’s measure of whether man obeys the will of God is mainly based on whether man follows His way and practices His words. Just like the Lord Jesus required of us, ‘If a man love me, he will keep my words.… He that loves me not keeps not my sayings’ (John 14:23-24). ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and great commandment’ (Matthew 22:37-38). From these words of the Lord, we can see that God requires us to love Him with all our heart, soul and mind, that is, to seek to satisfy and love Him in everything without our own intentions. Only by behaving like this are we following the will of God, and only in this way can we obtain the Lord’s acceptance. Take Abraham in the Bible for example. When God asked him to offer up his only son, in spite of some reluctance in his heart, Abraham still obeyed and acted completely according to God’s demand without his own choice. Another example is Job. He had been pursuing to fear God and shun evil all his life. When all of his property was taken away by robbers and he lost all his children, Job still extolled the holy name of God, without any complaint. And he never thought that only if he obeyed would God double His blessings upon him. Peter is yet another example. He followed the Lord Jesus all his life and eventually managed to achieve an ultimate love for God and obedience unto death. These former saints practiced God’s words not for the sake of making a deal with God, but in order to satisfy the will of God and love and obey God. People like them are precisely the ones who love God with all their heart, soul and mind as required by God, that is, the ones who follow the will of God.

    “Many of those who follow God are only concerned with how to gain blessings or avoid disaster. At the mention of the work and management of God, they fall silent and lose all interest. They believe that knowing such tedious questions will not grow their lives or be of any benefit, and so although they have heard messages about the management of God, they treat them casually. And they do not see them as something precious to be accepted, much less do they receive them as part of their lives. Such people have one very simple aim in following God: to gain blessing, and they are too lazy to attend to anything that doesn’t involve this aim. For them, believing in God to gain blessings is the most legitimate of goals and the very value of their faith. They are unaffected by anything that cannot achieve this objective. … Apart from the benefits that are so closely associated with them, could there be any other reason for these people who never understand God to give so much to Him? In this, we discover a previously unidentified problem: Man’s relationship with God is merely one of naked self-interest. It is the relationship between the receiver and giver of blessings. To put it plainly, it is like the relationship between employee and employer. The employee works only to receive the rewards bestowed by the employer. In a relationship like this, there is no affection, only a deal; there is no loving and being loved, only charity and mercy; there is no understanding, only resignation and deception; there is no intimacy, only a gulf that cannot be bridged.”"

    Recommendation: The Eastern Lightning is the manifestation of the Lord and His work.