HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, February 3, 2025 – Our most important decision, as children of God and brethren of Jesus, is to choose to do God’s will every day and in every circumstance, no exceptions. Choosing to do God’s will is more important than anything else we can choose to do during our time here. Jesus told us that he always did that which pleased the Father; he didn’t say he always loved; he didn’t say he always had mercy; he didn’t say he always fed everyone who came to him hungry or housed everyone who came to him homeless – he said he always did that which pleased the Father, which is the same as saying he always did God’s will and never rebelled against doing it. Since doing God’s will was Jesus’ number one priority during his time on Earth, it should be ours, too.

Unfortunately, the prioritizing of doing God’s will tends to get lost in the doctrinal shuffle of being a “good Christian”. Were he still here today, King Saul might have something to say about that. Saul was directed by God to completely obliterate a certain city and to leave nothing standing and no-one alive, but Saul thought it more expedient to take with him the choicest of the spoils, and to save the king alive for later slaughtering and some livestock for later sacrificing. This spur-of-the-moment decision, urged on by his soldiers, cost Saul not only his kingship but his soul. Why? Because God wants obedience, not expediency or creative compromise. Specifically, God demands the full obedience of his children who’ve been graced with his Spirit; anything less he considers rebellion.

Put this way, God may come across as rather heavy-handed, but there’s a reason why he both demands and expects obedience. God has a plan; the big picture of it is given in scripture, but the details are filled in by us day by day as we make our way from one point in the big picture to the next. But if we deviate by disobeying God’s explicit commands, he’ll have to find someone else to connect the dots. This is what happened to Saul, and much earlier also what happened to Satan and all the angels who followed (and fell with) him, and to Adam and Eve, and to Esau, and to many others. We don’t want this to happen to us.

Our obedience to God enables us to love whomever God directs to love, to have mercy on whomever God directs us to have mercy on, and to help whomever God directs us to help. Unlike doctrinal Christianity, which stipulates that we’re to love and have mercy on and help everyone with wild abandon and without exception, Jesus showed us to do those things only in accordance with God’s directives, that is, in accordance with God’s will. That means sometimes we have to burn it all down, if that’s what God directs us to do, and that sometimes we don’t extend love and don’t extend mercy and don’t extend help, if God directs us not to. This can look and sound decidedly unchristian to the world and to worldly Christians, but it doesn’t matter what the world thinks of us.

It only matters what God thinks.

(1 Samuel 15:22-23)