Obey Without Delay!

By now, you might be feeling very different things. Maybe you’re hungry—like thinking-about-food-while-you-pray hungry. Maybe you’re tired and wondering why the days suddenly feel longer than they did before fasting. Or maybe—just maybe—you’re feeling energized, detoxed, spiritually focused, and thinking, “I could totally do this forever.” (If that’s you, please pray for the rest of us.)

No matter how your body is feeling today, my prayer is that your spirit is alive, refreshed, and aware of God’s presence in a deeper way.

By now, you’ve probably become very familiar with our theme Scripture for these 21 days, especially where King David says, “You satisfy me more than the richest feast.” Now, let’s be honest—when our bodies are being deprived of some things we really enjoy, that verse can sound a little… unrealistic. But those who have truly tasted and seen that the Lord is good know exactly what David meant. God satisfies us in ways food, comfort, and convenience never could.

For the next three days, I want to talk about something God has really been placing on my heart lately. It’s something I teach often in my first-grade Bible curriculum, and it’s also something I believe we will spend our entire lives refining. I’m not sure we’ll ever completely master it this side of heaven.

The topic is… obedience.

I know—just hearing that word might make you feel like you’re about to get sent to your room or have something taken away. Obedience tends to sound like a kid word. But it’s actually a God word, and it matters deeply to Him.

There are countless scriptures about obedience, and honestly, it should be standard operating procedure for anyone who follows Jesus. Today, I just want to set the table—no pun intended during a fast—with this verse from 1 Samuel 15:22:

“Does the Lord delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as much as in obeying the Lord? To obey is better than sacrifice, and to heed is better than the fat of rams.”

For the sake of time, I won’t tell you the whole story, but here are the cliff notes. King Saul was… not obedient. He disobeyed God, and then—bold move—tried to convince the prophet Samuel that he had done exactly what God asked. The problem? God had already told Samuel the truth. In fact, the Lord went so far as to say He regretted making Saul king. That should get our attention.

Saul’s issue was this: he thought he knew better OR he thought God was merely making a suggestion, not a command. He didn’t completely ignore God—he just mostly obeyed. And as we know, mostly obedient is still disobedient.

It’s easy to point fingers at Saul and think, “I would never do that.” But how many times have we done the same thing? God clearly tells us what to do, either through His Word or His prompting—and we obey… partially. On our timeline. In our way.

Here’s the bottom line: if we know God has told us to do something, or if His Word is clear about how we’re to live, then our response should be to obey without delay.

If God truly is Adonai, Jehovah, Yahweh—if Jesus is King of our lives—then obedience isn’t something we should resist. It’s something we should joyfully choose. And when we choose to obey him FULLY, it leads to being fully satisfied in Him, because His ways are so much higher than our ways.

So why is it still such a struggle to obey Him fully? That question, my friends, we’ll wrestle with tomorrow.

Let me pray for you…