Implicit Obedience

Fifth condition: Implicit obedience (John 7:17). Power goes with plan, obedience guarantees blessing. If you want spiritual power, you must discover the divine plan, conform to it and cooperate with it, but if you want spiritual blessing, be perfectly obedient to every divine suggestion and command, and blessedness shall be yours. Whenever we discover some new truth in Scripture, it has to be translated into conduct and incorporated into character. When a man gets his head crammed with knowledge, he is like a ship with all the cargo on the upper deck, a very dangerous and most unstable condition. It is liable at any moment to capsize and flounder. Truth must percolate from the head down into the heart. There must be the moral response and an attitude assumed that shall be correlated to the truth itself. If I draw back and refuse to obey the light that is given, God will give no further light until I live up to what I have and act upon the knowledge that is given. Many a case of spiritually arrested development may be explained by disobedience. I suppose nine-tenths of all intellectual difficulty has an ethical root and if men would do what they know to be right, their doubts would melt away in the doing.