A few years ago, I was driving back home from visiting Charleston, South Carolina. I was taking the back roads rather than the interstate. The road I was driving down was pretty straight, and had gone on for miles with almost nothing but farmland and trees, and I hadn’t seen another car for what seemed like forever. Suddenly, there were those slight bumps in the road that they often put there to wake you up, then there was 4 large stop signs (2 on each side of the road), and then there was a huge stop sign hanging on wires above the road with flashing red lights on either side. As I came to a stop I was at a crossing of a four-lane highway, which had several vehicles traveling up and down it. I said, “Wow, they must have had so many people who were lulled to sleep by the long straight road that they failed to see a single stop sign and drove out onto the four-lane road without even looking!” I wondered how many people had lost their lives by accidents at that intersection. It had to have been a few, because I’ve never seen so many stop signs and flashing red lights at a road intersection before. They wanted to make it crystal clear that you were supposed to stop!
You know, that is the way with God’s Word. Many times, people get lulled to sleep spiritually, and they fail to see the truths in God’s Word, or they just ignore them. And there are many places in the Bible where it is SO CRYSTAL CLEAR what the writer is saying and the truth that God wants us to pay attention to!
One of those passages is found in 1 John 2:3-6, “And by this we know that we have come to know him, if we keep his commandments. Whoever says ‘I know him’ but does not keep his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him, but whoever keeps his word, in him truly the love of God is perfected. By this we may know that we are in him: whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked.”
I see so many people who claim to follow Jesus Christ, claim to love Him, and claim to be Christians, yet they argue that we don’t have to obey God’s commandments, we don’t have to walk a certain way or live according to the Word of God. Yet, it couldn’t be more clear than these words “And by this we know that we have come to know him, if we keep his commandments.” We know we are truly followers of Him when we seek above all else to obey and please Him! Obviously, we will fail at times, because we are human – but it should be our heart’s deepest desire each day to OBEY GOD!
And like those multiple stop signs were obviously placed there because people kept ignoring the single stop sign, I think passages like this are found in God’s Word to make things Crystal Clear, so we cannot stand before God one day and argue, “Oh, I didn’t know You were serious about us obeying your commandments!”