This sermon explores the biblical theme that God delights more in obedience than in outward sacrifice. It examines the story of King Saul’s disobedience and delves into the Hebrew words ‘Shema’ (to hear and obey) and ‘Hesed’ (steadfast love and loyalty), applying these principles to both unbelievers and believers.
Transcript
Maybe seated. Well, today, I was thinking that we would look at a topic rather than just a single passage. We’re not in the middle of a series at the moment, so it’s a good opportunity to do that. I wanted to look at the topic today of obedience versus sacrifice. This is a theme that shows up throughout the Bible, throughout scripture. And that’s what I wanted to focus on this morning.
In the news lately, there’s been a lot of news about Popes and councils and cardinals. And if you have followed all of that, the previous Pope recently passed away, Pope Francis, and they had to pick a new one. And you know, they picked a cardinal, his name is Robert Prevost. He’s the new Pope, Pope Leo. He named himself. So, if you have seen any of this in the news, you’ve seen a lot of parades, a lot of priests doing interesting things.
I’ve seen a video a couple weeks ago or last week about these priests, they’re wearing white hoods. They were all chained together. And this was in a town in Tuscany, Italy. Well, not in the region of Tuscany, Italy. They were all chained together and they’re pulling these large timbers and they had to work together in order to make it down the street. And they were doing that as an act of sacrifice. They were pulling these chains, it kind of reminded me of Marley in Scrooge. These chains he forged in life, that’s what it reminded me of. But they were doing it as an act of penitence or an act of sacrifice because they wanted to either atone for some sin or make their place better in the next life.
I saw some other videos of some other devout Catholics crawling over stones in order to make their way up to a relic. I saw some others processing through the streets. They were whipping themselves with whips and some of them you could see the blood soaking through their shirts, their white shirts. These are all devout people, sacrificing their time, their lives, their bodies. They’re doing this in order to present themselves as loyal priests and servants. They’re sacrificing in that way.
But I wonder if they’ve heard the words of the Savior who says,
Sacrifice and offering you have not desired, but a body you have prepared for me.
Have they opened their Bibles not out of devotion to a ritual mass, but to know and love the Savior?
So, when you’re seeing videos like that, you see a lot of pomp, you see a lot of show. You see a lot of gold and satin and jeweled crowns. The statues they set up for themselves. But it’s all for the approval and applause of men. The question is, do you see obedience to the word of God? That’s the question.
The late Pope Francis, he had a quote. Pope Francis famously said, holiness means giving yourself in sacrifice every day. And in a sense that’s true. But we need to remember the words of the Lord.
Sacrifice and offering you have not desired.
And we’re going to look at that a little bit today and see what that means.
The Disobedience of King Saul
Probably one of the best examples of this is in 1 Samuel 15. I want to read this chapter to give us a little bit of a background of what’s going on. We just looked at this fairly recently in the morning Bible study when we were looking through 1 Samuel, the life of David. So you probably will remember what’s going on.
In 1 Samuel 15, Samuel says to Saul,
The Lord sent me to anoint you as king over his people, over Israel. Now therefore, listen to the words of the Lord. Thus says the Lord of hosts, I will punish Amalek for what he did to Israel, how he set himself against him on the way while he was coming up from Egypt. Now go and strike Amalek and utterly destroy all that he has, and do not spare him, but put to death both man and women, child and infant, oxen and sheep, camel and donkey.
And Saul summoned the people and numbered them. And so what happens is he comes against Amalek. He defeats them.
But in verse 9 it says,
But Saul and the people spared Agag and the best of the sheep, the oxen, the fatlings, the lambs, and all that was good, and were not willing to destroy them utterly. But everything despised and worthless they utterly destroyed.
And the word of the Lord came to Samuel saying,
I regret that I have made Saul king, for he has turned back from following me and has not carried out my commands.
Samuel then goes to Saul. Saul greets him. Samuel says, what is this bleeding of the sheep I hear? Saul was happy with what he had done. He thought that he had done a good thing. Samuel says, wait and let me tell you what the Lord said to me last night. And then he tells him.
Samuel says to him,
The Lord sent you on a mission to go and utterly destroy the Amalekites. Why then did you not obey the voice of the Lord, but rushed upon the spoil and did what was evil in the sight of the Lord.
And Saul said to Samuel,
I did obey the voice of the Lord and went on mission, on the mission on which the Lord sent me. I brought back Agag, the king of Amalek, and have utterly destroyed the Amalekites. But the people took some of the spoil, sheep and oxen, the choicest of the things devoted to destruction to sacrifice to the Lord your God at Gilgal.
And Samuel said,
Has the Lord as much delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as in obeying the voice of the Lord? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to heed than the fat of rams. For rebellion is as the sin of divination, and insubordination is as iniquity and idolatry. Because you have rejected the word of the Lord, he has also rejected you from being king.
And Saul said to Samuel,
I have sinned. I have indeed transgressed the command of the Lord and your words because I feared the people and listened to their voice.
One of the things that you see that he had done earlier was he had defeated the Amalekites, he had done these things. He even set up a statue to himself in verse 12. He set up a monument for himself. And turned and proceeded on down to Gilgal. He begged Samuel to go with him. I guess so that he doesn’t look a certain way in front of the people again, afraid of the people, fearing people.
Samuel says in verse 32,
Bring me Agag, the king of the Amalekites.
And Agag came to him cheerfully. Agag says,
Surely the bitterness of death is past.
But Samuel said,
As your sword has made women childless, so shall your mother be childless among women.
And Samuel hewed Agag to pieces before the Lord at Gilgal. And Samuel went to Rama, but Saul went up to his house at Gibeah of Saul. And Samuel did not see Saul again until the day of his death. But Samuel grieved over Saul and the Lord regretted that he had made Saul king over Israel.
So, I’m going to do just a few observations on this passage. And then but before that, let me pray for us. I that the Lord would bless our time together this morning.
Father, we do ask for your blessing. As we read your word, as we think about this important topic. Please illuminate our minds, our hearts, help us to hear your word, to obey it, that we would obey rather than offer sacrifice. that we would love you in ways that we have not before. So we ask for your help this morning in Christ’s name. Amen.
Lessons from Saul’s Failure
So, just a couple observations on this passage that we just read. The first is the heart of Saul was not inclined to do the will of God, but to do the will of men. He heard in a way the mission that God had for him to do, to destroy the Amalekites. This was a continuation of what God had told Joshua to do to rid the land of the Canaanites, the people who lived there. But he doesn’t quite do that. And what he does instead is instead of fearing God, he fears the people.
Another observation to make on this is about Saul’s intentions. When we look at that, we think, well, maybe Saul if his intentions were good, maybe that would have been better. We see that initially we see, well, he wanted to present these things as offerings to the Lord. Isn’t that a good thing to sacrifice to the Lord? That is a good thing. And then we see later on, well, he was really afraid of the people, so that kind of mars the good intentions he had before, or we thought that he had.
The interesting thing is, it doesn’t matter what his intentions were. Even if he had good intentions, he still disobeyed the word of the Lord, and that’s the important thing that Samuel points out here. He says, has the Lord as much delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as in obeying the voice of the Lord? So, the Lord had given him a directive, had given him a certain action to take, and he does not do it. He doesn’t do it fully.
When you think of the sacrifices, how you have to have, you know, perfect lambs, you have to have certain things that are in the requirements of the law. Maybe some of the people at least had good intentions. Maybe Saul did have a good intention at first. He’s seeing these choice animals. He’s thinking, maybe, the Lord would be pleased if we offered this to him. But that’s not what the Lord is pleased with. The Lord is pleased with obedience. Obedience first of all.
And then the third observation I want to make on this passage is that God’s will is not frustrated. Saul doesn’t obey. He doesn’t destroy the Amalekites completely. He spares the king, Agag the king. God’s will is not frustrated. He accomplishes his purposes regardless of the disobedience of his people or of Saul here. I think it’s interesting that Samuel is a prophet. He’s basically an embodiment of the voice of the Lord. And it’s Samuel who finishes that work that God had commanded Saul to do. He it says Samuel hewed Agag to pieces. He does what the Lord asks him. God is going to accomplish his work with or without us. And by disobeying the Lord, Saul forfeited the opportunity to do something great.
When we think about ourselves obeying the Lord. It’s not that we need to obey because otherwise this work isn’t going to get done. The idea is, we have the opportunity to obey. We have the opportunity to join with God in the great work that he’s doing throughout the world. And if we don’t obey, if we don’t do these things, we’re forfeiting that opportunity. God’s work will still get done with or without us. But he’s offering it to us. He’s offering us the opportunity to join with him and to participate in this great work.
As we find out later on in First Chronicles chapter 4, it’s the neighbor that’s better than Saul that Samuel says here. David, he’s the one who finishes the task that God gave to Saul. First Chronicles 4, it says they destroyed the remnant of the Amalekites who escaped. And so David finally accomplishes what Saul refused to do. So God’s work still gets done. But it’s not Saul who was able to do that.
So, that’s one of the things to keep in mind as we’re thinking about this idea of obedience versus sacrifice. Is that God is giving us the opportunity to obey. God is giving us the opportunity to participate in what he’s doing throughout the world. And so we’re to obey his commands. The question is, do we know what his commands are? And something that I want to talk about in a little bit later. But right now, let’s think about what obeying means. What does this mean when it says obey? Samuel says, has the Lord as much delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as in obeying the voice of the Lord?
Understanding True Obedience and Loyalty
So, there are two Hebrew words that I want to talk about today that I think will give us a really good idea of what the Lord is trying to teach us. And these are words that you’ve probably heard before. But when you put them together, each one of these words doesn’t exactly have a counterpart in English. There’s more meaning in the Hebrew word than our English language can communicate in a single translated word. That’s why sometimes you’ll see different translations use different words because they’re trying to convey different parts of the meaning.
So, this word for obey is the Hebrew word Shema. And you’ve heard this before probably. It means to hear. Literally, it means to hear. To really listen, to obey, to incline your heart to want to do this thing that’s being asked of you. And so the idea is that this isn’t just something that you hear. This isn’t something that you just do. You’re not just listening to words being spoken, but you’re hearing those words and you’re believing them so that they take root in your heart and it’s evidenced by not just obedience. Not just joyful obedience. But an obedience that comes out of a heart that loves God. And that’s the point.
So, in Deuteronomy 6, Deuteronomy 6:4, you have this passage that says,
Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.
The very first word of that passage is hear. Hear, O Israel. And that’s that word Shema. There it’s translated hear. Could be translated obey, as it is in First Samuel 15.
The point is, it’s not just these are some commands that you have to do because you have to do them. That’s not the point. And that’s why when you hear some atheist or agnostics talking about this passage, they say something like, how can the Lord command you to love him? Isn’t that completely the opposite of what love is? If you commanded someone to love you, how can that be true love? Well, because the point is, when he’s saying to obey or to hear, it’s premised on the fact that you do love God. And when you love him, when you obey him, you’re doing it not out of compulsion, but out of love. And that’s the point.
And so, in First Samuel 15, when it’s saying as in obeying or as in hearing, which may be even better because it says as in hearing the voice of the Lord. Do you hear the voice of the Lord? Are you really listening? Are you taking that? Are you internalizing it? Do you have this desire in the core of your being to want to obey him because you love him?
That’s the idea. And that’s something that Saul didn’t have. Saul didn’t obey the Lord because when it came down to it, he didn’t really love the Lord. And so that’s the point. The point is we do these things not because we want to demonstrate that we love God, but we do these things because we love God.
And so this passage in Deuteronomy 6, hear Israel, the Lord is God, the Lord is one. You may have heard the word Shema because this is the first part of what is called the great Shema. It’s a Jewish prayer that devout Jews will pray twice a day, once in the morning and once in the evening and then depending on the day, they have other prayers that they have to do in the middle. So devout Jews will recite this twice a day, as part of their devotion to their religion. It’s called a mitzvah or a religious command and there are hundreds and hundreds of religious commands that they’re supposed to do.
And it’s kind of ironic, isn’t it? That they are requiring themselves to say these words every single day, multiple times a day. When what would the Lord Jesus say to them? So, when you see something like that, you see a dead ritual, you see man-made rules. Are they actually hearing the voice of the Lord?
And so, where is the just like the example we looked at with the Popes and the parades and everything. The question is, where is the simple obedience to the word of God? That’s the question.
So, this idea of obeying or hearing, it’s not about ritual, it’s not about rules. It’s about listening to the voice of the Lord and you want to do his will because you love him. Jesus says, if you love me, keep my commands. And again, you don’t keep his commands in order to prove that you love God. That’s not the point at all. The point is if you love him, you’ll naturally want to do the things that he’s asked you to do. And that’s the point.
One other thing for this from this passage is he says, behold to obey is better than sacrifice and to heed than the fat of rams. He says, for rebellion is as the sin of divination. And so, you have certain sins that you rank as more horrible than others. So, if you think about witchcraft or Satanism or divination or consulting spirits. You think, well, that’s pretty out there. That’s pretty bad. But he says for rebellion is as the sin of divination. Why is that? So, you disobey God. God asked you to do something, but you don’t obey. Why is that just as bad as the sin of divination?
Well, it’s because you are not loving God, but you’re loving an idol. And 1st Corinthians 10, Paul says that if you sacrifice to idols, you’re what? Sacrificing to demons. So, if you make up an idol and you’re sacrificing to it, are you really loving God or are you loving some other spirit? So, that is something that we really need to think about.
This idea comes up in lots of passages and we don’t have time to look at them all. But I do want to take a look at Hosea chapter 6. We’ll turn to Hosea chapter 6.
So, verse 4 says,
What shall I do with you, O Ephraim? What shall I do with you, O Judah? For your loyalty is like a morning cloud and like the dew which goes away early. Therefore, I have hewn them in pieces by the prophets. I have slain them by the words of my mouth.
Does that sound familiar to a passage we just read? Agag was hewn in pieces by the prophet Samuel. And what’s he saying here? Ephraim, Judah, he’s talking about them everyone collectively. Their loyalty to the Lord is like a morning cloud which just disappears. Therefore, the Lord is judging them for that.
Verse 6,
For I delight in loyalty rather than sacrifice and in the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.
Here, you have the same idea, God delighting not in sacrifice, but in what? Here it says, my translation says loyalty from the New American Standard. If you have a King James or New King James, it should say mercy. You might have other words there. So why is it different? Why isn’t it just obedience like we read before? Why doesn’t it just say God delights in obedience rather than sacrifice?
Turn to Matthew chapter 9. Because Jesus references this passage.
Jesus says, so he’s talking to the Pharisees. Jesus is eating with tax gatherers and sinners. The Pharisees are questioning him about that and he says,
Go and learn what this means. I desire compassion or mercy and not sacrifice. For I did not come to call the righteous but sinners.
And so here again, he’s referencing this passage in Hosea. And he’s using the word mercy or compassion. Not necessarily obedience. So, why is there a difference here when if he’s trying to communicate the same idea or a very similar idea?
Well, this is where we get to the next Hebrew word that we talked about. This Hebrew word that shows up in this passage in Hosea, that’s translated loyalty or mercy or compassion, is the word hesed. It’s a word that we may have talked about before. You may remember that word as well. But hesed is a very difficult word to translate from Hebrew to English because there’s so much that it conveys. That’s why you see different words in different translations because they’re trying to emphasize a certain part of the meaning of that word that’s being translated.
So, when it says for I delight in loyalty, we’re emphasizing the loyalty to the covenant that God has made with his people. Or the loyalty that covenant members should have for God. When it’s talking about mercy, we’re talking more about the heart of the Lord. So many times you hear the Lord being described as one full of compassion or mercy or full of loving kindness or full of how is it usually translated in ESV? Steadfast love. That’s that word. That’s the word that we’re talking about. And so it’s emphasizing various different things, but when you think about it all together, that’s getting close to the meaning of this word.
And so it’s translated mercy, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, loyalty. And so it’s that whole range of meaning. And so when you’re thinking about it in terms of mercy, you’re thinking more of the heart, the heart of the person or the heart of God. When you’re thinking about loyalty, you’re thinking more of the action. And so when you look at various passages that use this word or this word shows up. Like for instance, Exodus chapter 20, the 10 Commandments. He’s saying, the Lord says,
You shall not make for yourself an idol or any likeness. He says, for the Lord your God, I’m a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, on the third and fourth generations of those who hate me, but showing loving kindness to thousands, or steadfast love to thousands.
And it’s talking about that hesed love, that special love that he has on people that he is connected to in a relational way. He says, showing loving kindness to thousands to those who love me and keep my commandments. It’s a very similar idea.
Or in Micah 6, the passage that Matthew read this earlier this morning. He says,
Does the Lord take delight in thousands of rams and 10,000 rivers of oil? He has told you, O man, what is good and what does the Lord require of you, but to do justice, to love kindness.
That’s that word, translated kindness or mercy.
And to walk humbly with your God. And so we’re starting to get a picture of this idea of obedience, Shema, that idea that we were talking about, and then this hesed, which is this special relational love that the Lord has for us, and then we also have for the Lord. It’s a love that displays in deep relationships with people and in a deep relationship with God.
Probably one of my favorite examples of this kind of love is in the life of David, David’s mighty men. It’s one of the best stories in the Bible of David wishing for a cool drink of water from the well in Bethlehem. And his some of his mighty men overhear him say that, and they fight their way into the city and get the water at the peril of their life and bring it back to David. It’s that kind of love. Something a love that has consequences to it. This kind of sacrificial love that the Lord has for us and is demonstrated in the work and action that we have for one another.
We just went through the book of Esther, and the word comes up there as well. It’s when Esther pleased the official, pleased him and found favor with him, so he quickly provided her with food, maids, transferred her and the maids to the best place. The idea of finding favor is that kind of deep relational love. And so you can then infer the kind of relationship that Esther had with this official. It’s not just the official thought that she was, the best one out of the lot and then just randomly decided. No, the idea is that there is some love and sacrifice that was on Esther’s part as well.
In Ruth chapter 1, Naomi said to her two daughters-in-law,
Go, return each of you to her mother’s house. May the Lord deal kindly.
It’s that word.
May the Lord deal kindly with you as you have dealt with the dead and with me.
And so she’s asking that the Lord would have that same kind of love that Ruth has shown to her family and to Naomi.
So, there are 240 some uses of this word. And so obviously we can’t talk about all of them, but that’s the idea. It’s this it’s more than just an action of loyalty or an action of mercy. It comes from a deep relationship with the Lord. A deep love for the Lord, and that’s how those two ideas connect.
And so when we look at what Jesus is saying to the Pharisees here, what exactly is he saying? Let’s take a look at it one more time. In fact, shows up again in Matthew chapter 12 in a very similar way. If you look at Matthew chapter 12, so Matthew 9 and then Matthew 12, the Pharisees are concerned that the disciples are picking grain on the Sabbath. Jesus says to you,
Something greater than the temple is here.
In verse 7,
But if you had known what this means, I desire compassion and not a sacrifice, you would not have condemned the innocent.
So what is he saying? What is the point? The point is that these people, the Pharisees, are more concerned with ritual. They’re more concerned with rule making, the rules that they have made for themselves, rather than obeying the voice of the Lord. Just like Saul. They’ve contrived all of these rules for themselves. They think themselves holy because they’re sacrificing in a way. They’re sacrificing each tenth leaf of their mint plant to the Lord, and they think that that makes them more holy. But what Jesus is telling them is, “I desire compassion and not sacrifice. I desire mercy and not a sacrifice.”
Mercy is and I think one of the reasons why he focuses on mercy is because mercy is one of those essential things that scripture marks out that is true of the righteous. Psalm 37 says,
The righteous showeth mercy.
An unrighteous person is not marked by the mercy that they show to people. Proverbs 14:31 says,
He that honoreth the Lord hath mercy on the poor.
And in the New Testament, Colossians 3 says,
Put ye on as the elect of God, holy and beloved, bowels of mercies.
This is something that should mark believers. Mercy is something that should mark believers.
Beyond Sacrifice: Simple Obedience and Love
So just as Jesus makes this pronouncement on the Pharisees, there are lots of examples of modern day Pharisees. And we don’t have to go very far in order to see this same thing taking place. How many times do you see in different religions, and sometimes even in our religion, in Protestant Christianity, do you see people attempting some great sacrifice in order to make themselves holy? We talked about the sacrifices that some of the Catholic ascetics were doing, whipping their backs with the whips until they bleed. But not listening to the word of the Lord.
Recently the on Google, you can search you can look and see how many times certain phrases are searched. And recently the phrase, “How to become Catholic” has surged 3 to 400%. Just because of the news and you’re seeing these things. And it’s natural for a human to see something like that and think, “I need to do some great thing. I need to do some great sacrifice in order to make myself acceptable to God. I need to do some great thing in order to win favor with God.” And it’s not just in Christianity, it’s in every world religious system. That’s the point of every world religious system.
Muslims follow their seven pillars, some even sacrifice their own lives in hopes that it would win them a better place in the next world. And there’s a man named Amar Barati. He’s an Indian holy man and he’s known for having kept his right arm raised in the air for 52 years. After two years of intense pain, his arm, all of his muscles atrophied and it’s basically stuck there now. And he did this starting in 1973. He did this as a symbol of his devotion to the Hindu deity Shiva. And that is a great sacrifice. And what is it going to earn him? A dead arm? And a dead heart.
You see it in Mormonism, baptizing for the dead, multiplying wives, going on mission, all in order to what? To win favor with God and a better place in one of their three levels of heaven.
And it’s not just other religions, it’s in our religion as well. In Protestant Christianity, you see men sacrificing. You see men spending their lives to build up their ministry so that they can create a bigger conference, so that they can create a broader website reach, to have more views and subscribers to their podcasts, to sell t-shirts and hats and special edition vinyl records. To build their brand in the name of Christianity, but it’s really for the applause of men. And so what’s the point of all of that? Wouldn’t it have been better to do simple obedience, simple Christianity?
So we have three minutes for application. And I think the application is there already. There’s two points of application. One is for unbelievers and one is for believers.
So the application for unbelievers is simple. The idea is you need to turn away from any idea of winning God’s favor by your sacrifices. You can’t do it. You can’t sacrifice something to win God’s favor and think that that’s going to earn you a better place. That’s not how it works. Matthew 7 says, Jesus says,
Many will say to me on that day, Lord, did we not do all of these things? And Jesus declares to them, I never knew you. Depart from me, you who practice lawlessness.
So, the point is to open the word of God, not just listen to it, not just read it, but really hear, to hear what the Lord has to say. Obey when it says, believe on the Lord Jesus Christ. Believe in his work for your salvation only, not looking to your own work or your own sacrifice in order to do something, but you’re looking to his work and his finished work for you.
The first command of Christ, the question I asked before, do we know what God commands us to do? Do we know what Christ commands are? The very first command of Christ in the gospels is in Matthew chapter 4, the first imperative. And it is repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. The very first command that the Lord has for us is to repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. And so that’s the application for someone who is thinking that their sacrifice, their great thing that they’re doing for the Lord is going to help them in any way win favor with God. It can’t. It can’t. And we need to obey when Jesus says to repent from that. To turn to him and to rest in the finished work of Christ because he’s the one who has already done the work for us.
The second application is for believers. And the application here is even as believers, we can still have a tendency to live in neglect of some of Christ’s commands. While justifying, and this is either consciously, a conscious justification or it can be subconscious as well. We justify it because we think that we’re doing some other thing or some bigger thing. We’re doing something for the Lord in other areas of our life. So we know that we need to work on this. We know we need to do better on this one thing. But we’re doing this bigger thing and that’s going to way outweigh. You see what I’m saying? And we don’t have to go through every single one of Jesus’ commands in order to identify what those things are because we know what those things are. Those areas of our life that we know that we need to work on. We know in actuality what it is is we know we need to be obedient to the Lord in. But we’re neglecting it because we think that we’re serving the Lord in these other better ways.
The reason why I wanted to talk about this topic is because I recognize that that’s true of myself. I believe all of us have areas in our life that we know that we need to improve in and we know that we need to do better in. And this topic came to me while I was on the plane to Spain for a week. I’m about to get off the plane and I’m thinking, I’m spending my I’m basically sacrificing a week of my life here for the Lord. And I was thinking, it is amazing that for one thing, it is amazing that people have opportunities to do things like that for the Lord and it is a blessing. But at the same time, the moment I thought of that, I was kind of hit with this verse. It came right to my mind that the Lord loves obedience rather than sacrifice. And then all of those things that I know I have neglected in the past rushed through my mind. I’m thinking, I’m doing this what I consider a sacrifice to the Lord. But have I really obeyed him in all of these other areas? And that’s really why I wanted to talk about this topic this morning because it’s a sermon to myself. And something that I need to hear.
So the point for believers is it’s simple. Obeying Christ’s commands is better than any special service or sacrifice that you may offer to him. Simple Christianity. If we’re not doing simple Christianity, we can’t expect our greater acts of service to be what God would delight in those.
So I’m going to ask one question and this is something that I want to do tonight when we come back together this evening. The question is, we all know the Great Commission, go into all the world and preach the gospel. To every creature. Then it says, teaching them all Jesus says,
Teaching them all that I have commanded you.
Now, the question is, if I were to ask you to list out all of Christ’s commands, how well could we do it? Isn’t that an important thing for us as Christians to know what Christ has commanded of us? And so that’s what I want to do tonight is start thinking about some of those things. What are the commands that Christ has for us? A few of them. And there are hundreds actually. It’s kind of a loaded question because it takes all of the New Testament to understand all of Christ’s commands. But it is something to think about.
A few of the commands of Jesus, last week we witnessed three baptisms. Baptism, it’s a wonderful thing that we were able to experience that last week. Baptism is sometimes called the first step of obedience because it is a command. It’s something that the Lord commands us to do. So last week we witnessed obedience to the Lord in a very real way. But with this idea of obedience over sacrifice, if you are attempting something great for God and you haven’t been obedient yet in baptism, we need to believe the Lord when he says to obey is better than sacrifice.
Another command of the Lord is to pray. Jesus instructs us to pray multiple times. In Matthew 6, he says,
When you pray, pray in this way.
So, prayer isn’t optional for the believer. It’s something that the Lord wants you to do and commands us to do. But if you’re planning on sacrificing something big for the Lord, and you’re not being obedient in prayer, we need to listen to the Lord when he says to obey is better than sacrifice.
We’re to read the scriptures. How many times did Jesus say to the Pharisees,
Have you not read?
How many times could he say that exact same phrase to us? Have you not read in the scriptures? There are many good Christian books out there. But if you’re thinking of dedicating yourself to reading a good book or learning something new about Christianity even, but you’ve neglected reading God’s word, we need to believe God when he says to obey is better than sacrifice.
Another command of the Lord is to fellowship together as a church. Jesus in Matthew 18 and chapter 28 gives instruction for how a church should act. And in the book of Hebrews, we have the command to not forsake the assembling of yourselves together. So, if you’re sacrificing your time and energy during the week for the Lord, but yet neglect fellowship in your local church, again, believe the Lord when he says to obey is better than sacrifice.
And so, we don’t need to go through every single command of the Lord in order for it to prick our hearts because I think that’s the job of the Holy Spirit to bring conviction when it needs. And so, I think all of us can recognize areas where we have neglected to be obedient. And we need to obey the Lord when he says to obey is better than sacrifice.
Charles Spurgeon wrote,
Noah’s sacrifice sent up a sweet savor before God, but in God’s sight, the obedience which led him to build the ark and enter in with his family was far more precious. And for this, his name is written among the champions of faith and handed down to us as a word of honor and renown.
And so, what I want to do tonight is think about the commands of the Lord and how we can be better obedient. And in the meantime, I would like to just conclude with one more passage from the book of Mark.
Because when we think about the Lord’s commands, we can be overwhelmed. And then we might think, what’s the greatest one? What’s the foremost? And of course, that’s the question this one scribe asked Jesus. And Jesus answered him in the book of Mark. Jesus answered and said,
The foremost is, ‘Hear, O Israel,‘ Shema. ‘The Lord our God is one Lord. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. And the second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.
The scribe said to him,
Right, teacher, you have truly stated that he is one and that there is no one else beside him. And to love him with all the heart and with all the understanding and with all the strength and to love one’s neighbor as himself is much more than all burnt offerings and sacrifices.
When Jesus saw that he had answered intelligently, he said to him,
You are not far from the kingdom of heaven.
That’s what I would like us to think about as we close this morning.
Father, we do come to you this morning as a people who are completely dependent on you. We know our own hearts. We know the tendencies that we have. The times that we have neglected your word, the times we have neglected fellowship with others, times we’ve neglected prayer or we ask that you would do a powerful work on us this morning. That we would believe you when you say to obey is better than sacrifice. Help us to see that. Help us to love you more. We recognize that this obedience is not a blind obedience out of compulsion, but it comes from a love that is deep within our very core, a love that you’ve placed there. So we ask for if there are anyone here today who don’t know you in that way, that don’t love you in that way, that you would change their heart. That you would give them a heart of flesh. That you would create joy in their heart. That they would see you and joyfully want to do the things that you have commanded us to do. Help us to obey you joyfully out of hearts of love. We do love you, Lord. We ask this in Christ’s name. Amen.
If you would please stand as we close our time with the doxology. Praise God from whom all blessings flow. Praise him all creatures here below. Praise him above ye heavenly host. Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Amen.