New Life

As a new child of God, we receive the most precious gift imaginable. The very Holy Spirit of God now comes to make His abode in our bodies. The Bible refers to this Spirit as our teacher, guide, comforter and eternal companion. The Holy Spirit is always there to help us along the way in our walk in life.

God still requires us to obey Him in all the things His wonderful Word, the Bible, says. However, as we start to read and study the Bible, it now begins to become alive and totally illuminated to us through the spiritual enlightenment of the Holy Spirit. As a result, obedience to God now seems to make so much sense.

Picture for a moment the parent/child relationship. As a loving father or mother, we realize that our precious little children (especially from the ages of birth to three) almost exclusively depend upon us for every facet of their lives. They place their total trust in our hands. While we should always allow our children to voice their opinions and express their feelings, we must equally make it clear to them that we require complete obedience to us. We must have the final say on all matters.

So many times, they will pout, cry and throw temper tantrums, demanding to get their way. We in our knowledge and experience must deny these requests because, unlike our children, who have so little understanding, we know that it would be bad for them if we gave in to their demands. And when they do disobey us, many times a harsh word or a whack on the behind must be administered to them—not to hurt them, but because we love them.

Discipline hurts us as we see them cry; but the intent is always for their benefit. We require obedience and administer punishment to help our children grow up properly. Our superior wisdom, our knowledge of the harmful effects of bad decisions, and our insights into the future, coupled with our disciplinary love, are some of the best gifts we can ever give to our children.

This is exactly the same relationship our heavenly Father wants to share and have with us. God is all-knowing and He knows what is always best for us. The only way He can shower us with all the wonderful promises and blessings His Word says are now ours is to require us to obey Him. We saw earlier in several past devotions how our health declined and improved in direct proportion to our obedience to God’s eternal laws.

As we follow the precepts of the Bible we can rest assured that our lives will be full of abundant blessings. But if we choose to disobey God and His wonderful teachings from the Bible, we have only ourselves to blame if our lives don’t turn out the way we wished they could have. God has a wonderful plan for each of His children, for we read: “For I know the plans that I have for you, declares the LORD, “plans for welfare and not for calamity to give you a future and a hope.’” Jeremiah 29:11

During the last fifty years in America, we have increasingly gone astray from the biblical teachings our country was founded on. The dysfunctional, decaying society we see today is the result of this disobedience.

Since I have come to trust Jesus Christ as the Lord, Master and Savior of my life, I can speak from firsthand experience that His promises are magnificent and His blessings real!