Quotes about Command

Sometimes people ask: should we pursue obedience to God or joy in God? Edwards would answer: The question involves a category confusion. It's like asking: should I pursue fruit or apples? Obedience is doing what we are told. And we are told to delight ourselves in the Lord. Therefore pursuing joy in God is obedience. In

Worship is nothing less than obedience to the command of God: "Delight yourself in the Lord"!

Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command. I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master's business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you.

Fight the good fight of the faith. Take hold of the eternal life to which you were called. . . . I charge you to keep this command without spot or blame until the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ, which God will bring about in his own time—God, the blessed and only Ruler, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone is immortal and who lives in unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or can see. To him be honor and might forever. —1 Timothy 6:12—16

This command, as Bonhoeffer routinely observes, is anchored in the cross that Jesus himself bore. This is why Bonhoeffer can also say, "Only those who there, in the cross of Jesus, find faith in the victory over evil can obey his command.

We are the masters at the moment, and not only at the moment, but for a very long time to come.

Thou shalt not commit adultry is a command which makes no distinction between the following persons. They are all required to obey it: children at birth. Children in the cradle. School children. Youths and maidens. Fresh adults. Older ones. Men and women of 40. Of 50. Of 60. Of 70. Of 80. Of 100. The command does not distribute its burden equally, and cannot. It is not hard upon the three sets of children.

Far from being the pious injunction of a Utopian dreamer, the command to love one's enemy is an absolute necessity for our survival. Love even for enemies is the key to the solution of the problems of our world. Jesus is not an impractical idealist: he is the practical realist.

Some have been tempted to revise Jesus' command to read, Go ye into all the world, keep your blood pressure down, and, lo, I will make you a well-adjusted personality.

I am convinced that if we succumb to the temptation to use violence in our struggle for freedom, unborn generations will be the recipients of a long and desolate night of bitterness, and our chief legacy to them will be a never-ending reign of chaos. A Voice, echoing through the corridors of time, says to every intemperate Peter, Put down thy sword. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations that failed to follow Christ's command.

He demanded of all people the one thing he had never granted anybody: obedience.

You don't command wind in the direction it blows, but you command a ship in the direction it sails.