Quotes About Obedience

Remember, obedience is defiance.

Your mom said to say I could have just one peanut butter square but not til after they cool down.

The Australian National Secretariat of Catholic Action, then little more than an idea in the making, needed a deputy for the director, Frank Maher. Santamaria's words—'so I said…"Yes", because I would have said yes to anything he asked'—echo down the years.7

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.

The question had become not "What does Jesus say?" but "What does the Church say?" This question is still being asked today. Sad but true: Some Christians want to be slaves. It is easier to let others make decisions or to rely upon the letter of the law.

Unlike Tania, who was so slim, Rykoff looked as if he'd been given an order to get fat--an order he had been delighted to obey.

The word listen in Latin is audire. If we listen with full attention in which we are totally geared to listen, it's called ob-audire, and that's where the word obedience comes from. Jesus is the obedient one. That means he is total ear, totally open to the love of God. And if we are closed, and to the degree that we are closed, we are surdus. That is the Latin word for deaf. The more "deaf" we get, the more absurdus

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?" This

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.

The few times, however, that we do obey our severe masters and listen carefully to our restless hearts, we may start to sense that in the midst of our sadness there is joy, that in the midst of our fears there is peace, that in the midst of our greediness there is the possibility of compassion and that indeed in the midst of our irking loneliness we can find the beginnings of a quiet solitude.

God not only loves the obedient - He enlightens them.

We must choose with our agency to obey in faith that the promised blessing will come, that the promise is true because it comes from God.

Any fool can make a rule And any fool will mind it.

Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?

It is not for a man to put himself in such an attitude to society, but to maintain himself in whatever attitude he find himself through obedience to the laws of his being, which will never be one of opposition to a just government, if he should chance to meet with such.