Colossal Obedience

But we must be sure to obey the truth we have learned already. 
–Philippians 3:16 (NLT)

There’s a story that goes that years after the crucifixion of Jesus, the Apostle John was teaching his followers. Every time they gathered, for many weeks in a row, John would get up before them and preach to them the same message over and over. His followers grew confused and honestly quite bored hearing the same message preached over and over again and desired to hear something new and profound. Finally, his followers approached the Apostle and said, “Rabbi, you’ve taught us these many weeks but have been giving us the same instructions each time. Please, when will you teach us something new?” The Apostle responded to his followers, “When you start obeying the teaching I’ve already given you.”

In America, we thrive on hoarding information and entertainment. We’ve carried this to our Christian lives as well. It bores us to hear the same messages over and over again and we hunger for more teaching, more stories, more information. We fill up Christian bookstores with tons of information, commentaries, works of fiction, apologetics, self-help, and any kind of teaching you could want. My pastor, Pastor Furtick, likes to say that “we are educated far beyond the level of our obedience.”

Consider the church in Colosse, who received (as far as we know), exactly one letter from Paul, which consumes all of two pages in my Bible. They would have poured over that one letter, most likely memorizing it and being careful to do everything written in it. They didn’t have even the full Bible we have today, let alone bookstores worth of supplemental resources on which to overindulge.

We need to stop and consider all the teaching we’ve received already and act on that. Heck, if we just worked on obeying “Do to others as you would have them do to you,” our lives would look a little different? How about, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love others as yourself?”