Years ago my daughter and her friend wanted to take their brothers to the park.  They were 16 and the brothers 8 and 9.  I thought this a bit strange since most of the time they acted like they didn’t even want to admit that they belonged in the same household!  Do your children sometimes seem that way?  If so, let me give you hope because time does change things.  As adults they are best of friends, and it is a joy to see them together.  Okay back to the story.

The last thing I said to my son was, “Stay away from the water”.  His response was, “I know, I know”.  I repeated my instructions, “Stay away from the water”.  Again his reply was, “I know, I know”.    There was something in my heart that told me this “child” was about to take an adventure.  I didn’t know what, and wasn’t sure it was going to be good.  (A mother just sometimes knows these things).  So I prayed, “God keep my children safe because You are with them all the time and I can’t be with them all the time”.   Now to put things in a perspective time frame: I was praying during the time they were gone.

When they got home several hours later, my son was all wet!  Scared and crying.  The boys had run ahead of their sisters and then decided to run out on the pier.  My son tripped and fell in the lake.  When I asked how he got out, he said, “A man pulled me out”.  I questioned “what man”?  My daughter said there wasn’t any man around!  I repeated the questioning again and got the same answers again.   My conclusion is that God answered my prayers by sending an angel to pull my son out of the water and saved him.  Thank you Lord for I am very grateful.

The moral to the story is that knowing the rules is not obeying the rules!  Not for children and not for adults.  God’s Word has rules we are to live by and just knowing them, just agreeing with them, is not an automatic guarantee that we will walk in them.  We have to decide to believe truth.  We have to decide to obey.  The flip side to that thought is that we also decide to not believe or to disobey.  There is no such thing as “falling into sin”.  It is a decision on our part.  Now we “can” be so deceived in our thinking that we make decisions that lead us into sin but it is still a decision and not a fall.  To be deceived means to believe an untruth.  The only way we can know truth is to know THE TRUTH-JESUS.  Jesus tells us in John 14:6, “I am the way, the truth and the life”.   He knows all things.  When we come to Him for advice, for understanding, for instruction, He is able to give us the truth we need for any situation.

Please understand that knowing the truth is not believing the truth; knowing the truth is not obeying the truth.   They are all decisions.  We decide to spend time to know something.  We decided whether to believe it, and we decide whether to obey it.  But God’s Word is still always THE TRUTH, whether we believe it (Him) or not.  

Three thing we must do; we must know, we must believe, and we must obey.  We can’t obey what we don’t believe, and we can’t believe what we do not know (Romans 10:14).  As we continue to learn and know the Word of God, we are to continue to adjust our steps (decisions) to live according to the Word.  Then and only then do we make our way prosperous and will have good success (Joshua 1:8).

Don’t just know the Word, believe the Word and obey the Word.  Decide to live your life to glorify God the Father and Jesus you Savior, Healer, and Redeemer.