day no. 15,393: sweating your disobedience or sweating in obedience?

"If you reject God's commanding word, you will not receive God's gracious word... the disobedient cannot believe; only the obedient believe." -- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship

Disobedience is the functional equivalent of disbelief. The Bible connects the two as being part and parcel, latch and key, bow and string. There is no belief without obedience. Wherever you find disobedience, you find unbelief. Not believing is a sin and Jesus frequently condemns and confronts people for their unbelief, i.e. their unwillingness to believe; or said another way, their willingness to ignore what God has done, is doing, and promises to do.

Hebrews 3:16-19
For who were those who heard and yet rebelled? Was it not all those who left Egypt led by Moses? And with whom was he provoked for forty years? Was it not with those who sinned, whose bodies fell in the wilderness? And to whom did he swear that they would not enter his rest, but to those who were disobedient? So we see that they were unable to enter because of unbelief. 

Those who were not permitted entrance into God's rest were forbidden, we're told, due to their disobedience. And in the very next verse, we see the case restated as saying it was a result of their unbelief. So disobedience and unbelief are different sides of the same coin. When we put that coin in the slot, nothing comes out regardless of which way the coin was facing. That kind of currency does not spend. Heads or tails, disobedience or unbelief, it all amounts to the same counterfeit coinage.

Hebrews 4:11
Let us therefore strive to enter that rest, so that no one may fall by the same sort of disobedience.

As a result, we discipline ourselves in obedience as a result of our belief. Our belief manifests itself in our behaviors, our theology comes out of our fingertips. Accordingly, let us work hard to be at rest in Jesus and sweating daily in obedience instead of sweating our eternity due to our unbelieving disobedience.

"Understanding is the reward of obedience. Obedience is the key to every door. I am perplexed at the stupidity of the ordinary religious being. In the most practical of all matters he will talk and speculate and try to feel, but he will not set himself to do.” -- George McDonald

If you want to know God, you need to obey. And the more you obey Him, the more you know Him. If you do not obey, you will not know Him. Some things cannot be understood outside of simple obedience. You do not understand what you have heard until you do it. And the more you do it, the more you understand what you've already heard.

James 1:22-25
But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror. For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like. But the one who looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and perseveres, being no hearer who forgets but a doer who acts, he will be blessed in his doing.