Quotes About Obedience

There is one thing in the world more wicked than the desire to command and that is the will to obey.

All he knows is that he has done exactly what he was supposed to do.

if you just take the outward, literal words of scripture and try to be obedient to the letter without desiring to be obedient to the full spirit of the passage, then it harms you rather than helps you.

The law told people what to do but gave them no power to do it. It was given to reveal sin, not to be a savior.

The fact of the matter is that obedience to the Lord's command is the most sane and reasonable life and the one that yields the greatest joy. The witness of Scripture and of experience testifies that no one who lives sacrificially for Christ will ever suffer want. When a man obeys God, the Lord takes care of him.

Further, Take heed that you faithfully perform the business you have to do in the world, from a regard to the commands of God and not from an ambitious desire of being esteemed better than others.

I never met an authority figure I didn't like.

Keep saying no to her, Since she was a baby. Keep saying no to her, Not even maybe. from "Why?" by the Byrds

We are summoned to know him only on his terms. He is not known on our terms. This summons is heard in and through his Word. It is not heard through our intuitions.

God does not want obedience as the fruit of our willful determination. God wants surrender as the choice of the heart. For what we long for in our heart we will pursue with the totality of our being not simply with the resolve of our will.

Christian obedience should always be based on surrender to a person, not simply acceptance of an obligation. It is surrender to love, not submission to a duty.

The surrender Jesus invites from us—choosing his will and his life over our own—can never be motivated by anything but love. But we can and frequently do offer a substitute for surrender—something that looks superficially enough like it that we easily confuse it with surrender. We can offer obedience.

Far from being incompatible with obedience, surrender provides the motive for obedience. We should obey God because he has won our hearts in love. If he has not, our focus should not be so much on obedience as on knowing his love. For once we get that solidly in place, obedience begins to take care of itself.

Compliance with legitimate authority was also apparent in the strange case of the "rectal ear ache" (Cohen & Davis, 1981). A doctor ordered eardrops for a patient suffering infection in the right ear. On the prescription, the doctor abbreviated "place in right ear" as "place in R ear." Reading the order, the compliant nurse put the required drops in the compliant patient's rectum.

Fearing a court martial for disobedience, some of the soldiers at My Lai participated in the massacre. Normative influence leads to compliance, especially for people who have recently seen others ridiculed or who are seeking to climb a status ladder (Hollander, 1958; Janes & Olson, 2000).

Complexity, in turn, is still often used as a synonym for hierarchy. Hierarchy, in turn, is used as a euphemism for chains of command (the 'origins of the state'), which mean that as soon as large numbers of people decided to live in one place or join a common project, they must necessarily abandon the second freedom - to refuse orders - and replace it with legal mechanisms for, say, beating or locking up those who don't do as they're told.

The curse of the law" is not the curse of having to live within the framework of Torah for the Torah itself is good. Nor is it the curse of being required to obey the Torah but lacking the power to do so

the Tanakh itself requires genuine obedience to emerge from faith

A woman is not to wear men's clothing, and a man is not to put on women's clothing, for whoever does these things is detestable to ADONAI your God.

It's impossible to pick up a basset hound that doesn't want to be picked up, just as it's impossible to make one keep walking if it doesn't want to walk anymore. It'll just lie down and refuse to budge.

Strength was the virtue of paganism; obedience is the virtue of Christianity.

People are more easily led than driven.

The Holy Spirit does the supernatural as we obey and do the practical.

I]f subjects must never resist, it follows that every prince, without any effort, policy, or violence, is at once rendered absolute and uncontrollable;