Quotes about Obedience

In days long ago when there were no spiritual directors or brilliant commentaries on Scripture, fidelity to God's will was the whole of spirituality.

Jesus promises a life in which we increasingly have to stretch out our hands and be led into places where we would rather not go.

A spiritual life without discipline is impossible. Discipline is the other side of discipleship. The practice of a spiritual discipline makes us more sensitive to the small, gentle voice of God.

The world is evil only when you become its slave. The world has a lot to offer—just as Egypt did for the children of Jacob—as long as you don't feel bound to obey it. The great struggle facing you is not to leave the world, to reject your ambitions and aspirations, or to despise money, prestige, or success, but to claim your spiritual truth and to live in the world as someone who doesn't belong to it.

Our God is a God who cares, heals, guides, directs, challenges, confronts, corrects. To discern means first of all to listen to God, to pay attention to God's active presence, and to obey God's prompting, direction, leadings, and guidance.

Life in the Spirit of Jesus is therefore a life in which Jesus' coming into the world—his incarnation, his death, and resurrection—is lived out by those who have entered into the same obedient relationship to the Father which marked Jesus' own life. Having become sons and daughters as Jesus was Son, our lives become a continuation of Jesus' mission.

Community as discipline is the effort to create a free and empty space among people where together we can practice true obedience.

The core of all prayer is indeed listening, obediently standing in the presence of God.

Community thus is obedience practiced together. The question is not simply, "Where does God lead me as an individual person who tries to do his will?" More basic and more significant is the question, "Where does God lead us as a people?"

They ask only one question: what is pleasing to the Spirit of God? And as soon as they have heard the sound of the Spirit in the silence and solitude of their hearts, they follow its promptings even if it upsets their friends, disrupts their environment, and confuses their admirers.

Whether in solitude or community, whether alone or with others, we are called to live obedient lives, that is, lives of unceasing prayer — "unceasing" not because of the many prayers we say but because of our alertness to the unceasing prayer of God's Spirit within and among us.

Suffering is not the issue. Fellowship with Jesus Christ is not a commitment to suffer as much as possible, but a commitment to listen with him to God's love without fear. It is to obedience that we are called.