From Dream to Destiny: The Ten Tests You Must Go Through to Fulfill God's Purpose for Your Life (8 page)

But instead of confessing his sin, Cain replied, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”—denying any responsibility for what he had done. So God said, “Your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground.” In this way God was telling Cain, “I knew what you did all along. I just wanted you to confess it and acknowledge it as wrong.” But Cain refused to confess it and repent; and the result was that Cain “went out from the presence
of the Lord.” Because of disobedience, the presence of God was no longer manifested in Cain’s life.

Disobedience cost Adam and Eve the presence of God as well. They had enjoyed the manifested presence of God in the Garden of Eden. The Bible says that God walked in the garden in the cool of the day. But after Adam and Eve sinned, they hid themselves from God’s presence. God came to Adam and gave him a chance to repent and God came to Eve and gave her a chance to repent. But sin caused them to hide from the presence of God.

King David understood the manifested presence of God. He knew what it was to have God’s presence rest upon him, and he knew what it was to lose God’s presence through disobedience. But David also knew that he could cry out to God in repentance for his sin, asking God to forgive him. In Psalm 51:11 David pleads: “Do not cast me away from Your presence, and do not take Your Holy Spirit from me.”

David had disobeyed God, and as a result he had lost God’s presence for a time. But when David repented from his heart, the Lord forgave him. When David returned to walking in God’s ways, to walking in obedience, the presence of God was restored to David’s life.

The presence of God is what makes you prosper in all you do. And obedience is the key to a life that is marked by the presence of God. This presents another question.

What is the key to obedience?

The Key to Obedience: Faith

Some people have actually said, “I know that obedience is important, but I just can’t seem to obey God in this certain area. I’ve tried and tried.” You must understand that working out of your own strength—trying hard—is not the answer. The key to a life of obedience is really just faith. Because if you truly
believe
that a life of obedience will produce the blessings of God, you won’t
try
to obey Him—you’ll
want
to!

Think about it. If you really believe the consequences of a certain action are going to be bad for you, you will decide not to do it. And if you really believe that God is going to reward you for doing the right thing,
then you will decide to do that. The critical phrase here is “if you believe,” because faith is what produces obedience in our lives.

If you truly believe in something, you will do it. And if you believe what God has said, you will do what He tells you to do. The key to obedience is faith.

Faith is the reason a farmer plants crops. A farmer works and sweats and tills the ground because he
believes
a crop will grow from the seed that he has planted. Faith is not as mysterious as we make it out to be.

Think about it—every day you place your faith in myriad inanimate objects all the time. When you get in your car and turn your key in the ignition, you have faith that it is going to start (rather than burst into flames, jump into the air or start singing “Feelings”). When you turn on the hot water faucet and the water feels cold, you don’t conclude that hot water heaters don’t work. You just wait—because you believe that eventually it is going to get hot.

But many Christians turn on the faucet of prayer, and if it feels cold at the start, they just turn it off. They have more faith in a hot water heater than they do in God. But when you turn the faucet of prayer on, and leave that faucet on, it is going to get hotter than you could imagine! That is what faith is—believing, even when the water is cold! It is leaving that faucet on, no matter what the circumstances say—because God has said that the hot water is coming, and you believe Him!

If we believe, we will obey. And if we obey, we will eat the “good of the land” (Isa. 1:19). In other words, faith ultimately brings prosperity and the presence of God. So let’s keep in mind these words from Exodus: “Now therefore, if you will indeed obey My voice and keep My covenant, then you shall be a special treasure to Me above all people; for all the earth is Mine” (Exod. 19:5). And if we
believe
that, we will want to obey Him. We will want to be a special treasure to our Father God.

Even children have a promise from God regarding obedience.

Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. “Honor your father and mother,” which is the first commandment with promise: “that it may be well with you and you may live long on the earth” (Eph. 6:1-3).

God says that if children honor their parents, they will live long on the earth—and what is even better, God says that it will be well with them (see v. 3). In other words, obedience to parents will bring the blessing of God.

By the way, if things seem as if they have never gone well for you in your life, you may want to ask yourself whether you have failed to honor your parents, because the Bible tells us this is “the first commandment with a promise” (v. 2). In other words, this is a good place to start applying the truths of obedience and blessings. This command does not say to honor your father and your mother if they are good people. It does not say to honor your father and mother if they are Christians. It simply says to honor your father and mother so that things “may be well with you” (v. 3).

I believe one of the reasons that God’s favor is on my life is because I’ve made that commitment to honor my parents. They are not perfect—no one is; but they are my parents. I’m not going to speak negatively about them. I’m going to honor them, as God says that I should. And if I honor them, things will go well with me.

How do children honor their parents? First and foremost by obeying them: “Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right” (Eph. 6:1). Do you know why children obey? Children obey because they believe that things will go well with them if they do. If a child believes that he or she will get a reward by obeying, that belief will definitely influence his or her behavior. And if a child believes that he or she will get a spanking for disobeying, that expectation will influence his or her behavior as well.

When our children were growing up, we rewarded good behavior and we disciplined for bad behavior through spankings. Our children believed that if they did right, I would reward them. And they also believed that if they disobeyed, they would get in trouble. Of course, I would much rather have rewarded them than spanked them—and I’m sure our heavenly Father feels the same way. I loved to reward them with special gifts, because I wanted them to understand that if you do a good thing, God will reward you. I wanted them to learn that obedience truly does result in blessings.

Some children disobey because they don’t believe. They don’t believe that disobedience will cause anything to not “be well with” them. But it is amazing how quickly that lack of faith can be corrected by a good, oldfashioned spanking! I realize that books have been written that contradict what the Bible has to say about disciplining children. We even have some friends who decided to follow the advice in one of those books, informing us that spanking was no longer necessary in their household. But six months later they let us know that spanking had been reinstated—because discipline doesn’t work any other way.

Remember, the key to obedience is faith, or believing. And a spanking helps a child
believe
that obedience brings good results—and that disobedience also brings painful ones!

We adults are not much different from children: We disobey God because we don’t
believe
we’re really going to suffer any consequences for that disobedience. And if we really
believed
that God rewards us when we obey Him, we would want to obey. The key to obedience is faith.

God swore that those who did not obey Him would not enter His rest. In other words, they would not enter that place in their destiny in which God would bless every aspect of their lives. “And to whom did He swear that they would not enter His rest, but to those who did not obey? So we see that they could not enter in because of unbelief” (Heb. 3:18-19).

And we often assume that they did not enter into their destiny because they did not walk in obedience. But if we read that last verse, we see that it was not really disobedience that prevented them from entering in—it was unbelief. If they had
believed
God’s Words, they would have obeyed Him. And if they had obeyed Him, they would have entered into His rest.

God wants every one of us to enter our promised land. Our promised land is a place where the blessing of God is on us, prospering us in everything we do. The key to having that blessing is to have His presence manifested in our lives. The key to His manifested presence is obedience to His commands. And in order to walk in obedience to His commands, we are going to have to believe. We are going to have to have faith.

So what is the key to having faith?

The Key to Faith: Hearing the Word

The key to our having faith is in hearing the Word of God. I want to emphasize this: The key to having faith is not in obeying the Word of God—the key to having faith is in
hearing
the Word of God. Now I believe in obeying the Word, and we must obey God if we want to have His blessing on our lives. But it is not obedience that produces faith. Rather, it is faith that produces obedience. And faith only comes by the Word of God.

This is not my idea. God made this very plain in Romans 10:17 when He said, “So then faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.” This Scripture passage says that if I hear the Word of God, “faith comes.” In other words, faith shows up. So all I have to do is hear the Word of God. So there is something about
hearing
the Word of God that produces faith.

Now I know the Bible says that I must be a doer of the Word as well. James 1:22 says, “But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves.” But it is
hearing
the Word that is the key to doing it! Because the more I hear the Word of God, the more faith I will have. And the more faith I have, the more I will want to obey God and live out the Word.

The reason that a lot of people are not doers of the Word is because they don’t really have faith. But the reason they don’t have faith is that they haven’t heard much of the Word. The Bible says the way that faith comes to us is by
hearing the Word of God.

So the more of the Word of God that you have in you, the more faith you will have. The more faith you have, the more you will obey. The more you obey, the more the presence of God will manifest in your life. And the more often you live in the presence of God, the more you will prosper and succeed.

Every one of us can prosper, and every one of us can be successful! And the way we begin is by hearing the Word of God. So start to make the Word of God part of your life. Listen to His Word whenever you can. Read the Bible daily. Memorize Scripture passages, meditate on them, and write verses on note cards to tape on your mirror. If you hear His Word consistently, faith will naturally come. God promised that it
would. And as your faith increases, you will find that you are walking in obedience. As you walk in obedience, you’re going to have the presence of God on your life. And if the presence of God is with you, you’re going to succeed!

There are no words to describe the blessing of having God’s presence in your life. Right now I can feel that the favor of God is on my life, and it is a wonderful thing. It is so wonderful that I don’t want to do one single thing to mess it up! The favor of God makes you feel that nothing is impossible. The favor of God makes you feel that anything you attempt to do for God will succeed. Because when you sense that God is with you, you know your efforts on His behalf will not fail.

What could possibly be worth losing that blessing, that favor, that manifested presence of God? I don’t want to walk in disobedience, because I know that if I disobey God, His presence will leave my life. And I don’t want to lose His presence or His favor!

So it really wasn’t a hard thing that day at the airport to leave a note on the car I had bumped. It really wasn’t hard to decide that we would miss our plane. It was easy to do the right thing—
when I remembered that God has called me to be faithful in small matters, as well as great, as I live out my destiny according to His will.

I want to walk in the destiny God has planned for me. And I know that if I am to be set over much, I must be found faithful in little things—even a crack in a piece of plastic on an old car.

Eventually I received a call from the lady whose vehicle had been damaged. I apologized for the accident and gave her our insurance information so that she could get her bumper repaired. But before we got off the phone, she said, “I just have to ask you a question. I have shown your note to everyone in my office, and no one can believe that you actually left a note. It would have been so easy to just drive away. We don’t know if you’re a saint, a space alien or what—but none of us can figure out why you would leave a note.”

This woman was an unbeliever. Yet, like Potiphar, she recognized that there was something different about my behavior. So I was able to explain to her the reason that I had left that note. I was able to share the gospel with her and tell her how Jesus Christ had changed my life—and
that He could change her life also. “You said that everyone in your office wants to know why I left that note,” I said to her. “Be sure that you tell them. Be sure to tell them that the reason I left that note is because Jesus Christ has changed my life—and He wants to do that for all of them, too.”

There is nothing on this earth that can compare to the joy of a moment like that. A moment when the presence of God rests upon you, a moment when you are able to do something very important for Him. But it all begins by being faithful in the smallest things—by being a faithful steward. If I had not been faithful to do the right thing about that accident, I would never have had the opportunity to be God’s messenger to the people in that office. And I would have risked losing the presence of God in my life—a blessing which is shared only with those who walk closely with Him in obedience.