Trust and Obey

“I'm holding his shoe 

for ransom!” 

Whitney explains to me as she dangles Benny's tennis shoe before me. 

“You're what?” 
I asked. 

“I told him that he would get his shoe back, when his room was clean.”

In a moment, here comes Benjamin, with an embarrassing smirk on his face, hauling trash out, walking past me - with one shoe on!

       
I was impressed. It was working. Everyone that lives in this home knows of Benjamin's shoe fetish.  I would never have imagined that being used to promote obedience. My older children amaze me with their creative techniques to get their younger siblings to obey. 

But - wait, there is a problem with this picture!

    True obedience should come from a willing heart. There are no rewards in real life for doing what is required in our “up-side-down” world. If we teach our children by incentive alone, rather than relationship....they will miss seeing the root problem of disobedience....SELF LOVE.  And they will grow up looking for "what's in it for ME!"

Jesus' call for us to come, deny ourselves, and die was pointing toward a relationship, not just a reward. There will come a point in all of our lives where to “trust and obey” will not hold before our eyes “dangling rewards', but a relationship with Christ far more priceless than anything this world could offer as an incentive.

Many of my own ups and downs have come from this false expectation of having peace without pain, and missing the purpose of His calling for a deeper relationship with my Heavenly Father.

“Obedience to the call of Christ nearly always costs everything to two people- the one who is called, and the one who loves that one. ~Oswald Chambers

 "Trust and Obey, for there is no other way, to be happy in Jesus....But to trust and obey."

"Faith and obedience are bound up in the same bundle. He that obeys God trusts God; and he that trusts God obeys God. He that is without faith is without works; and he that is without works is without faith."~Charles H. Spurgeon

He is too big for her to WIN now. ;)
picture from 2010