Obedience - Part 6: Learning Obedience Through Suffering

Obedience - Part 6: Learning Obedience Through Suffering

Sadly, obedience does not come quickly or easily to us human beings. 

Our natural sinful human tendency is NOT obedience, but DISobedience: determined willfulness and waywardness  - a constant choosing of our own will and our own ways over the will and ways of God.

Heartfelt obedience simply does not come naturally and automatically to us. We must “learn” obedience - be taught and be instructed by it - acquire it, absorb it, master it, be transformed by it. 

And, unfortunately, because it goes so contrary to our human nature, we most often need to learn it the difficult way: that is, through suffering, through hardship and adversity and pain. 

In the days of His flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to Him who was able to save Him from death, and He was heard because of His reverence. Although He was a Son, He learned obedience through what He suffered. And being made perfect, He became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey Him. ~Hebrews 5:7-9

Even Jesus, the great and exalted Jesus, in His days here on earth had to learn obedience through suffering: crying out loudly, weeping, praying and pleading to His Father in heaven to save Him from the agony of death. Scripture says that He was heard because of His godly fear and devotion - but even so, God’s will for Him was to die, and Jesus accepted it and obeyed. He, as the beloved Son of God, “learned obedience through what He suffered”. 

How much more we, then, will also need to suffer and go through hardship and adversity and pain in order to learn to be obedient, in order to put our natural willfulness and waywardness aside and to readily and gladly choose God’s will and ways over our own. 

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