What is More Pleasing?

Obedience is not a natural reaction to direction or instruction but rather a conscious decision must be made to follow instruction.

Take a look at 1 Samuel 15 where God commanded King Saul to kill the Amalekites and not spare anyone. Like some of us, King Saul partially obeyed God by killing everyone and everything but King Agag and the best of the livestock because he felt it would be best to sacrifice those to God—was that included in the command God gave him?

“What is more pleasing to the Lord? Your burnt offerings and sacrifices or your OBEDIENCE to his voice?” is the question Samuel confronted King Saul with. Obedience is a response that is pleasing to God compared to any sacrifice(including service to His Kingdom) we can offer Him. God is less interested in what we can do for him compared to whether we obey Him. King Saul was led by His feelings and thus, failed to please God and essentially, his partial obedience amounted to disobedience.

God’s directions and instructions do not always make sense to our human mind—that is where many of us fault because we want everything to make sense. However, there will be times when you don’t have all the details to understand, you may not feel like obeying, it may be painful, it may even make you look weird and stupid to the people around you but when God speaks, He expects us to trust and obey Him.

The enemy does not attack our ability to hear God, as much as he does with you obeying. We need to ask the Holy Spirit for help.

For it is [not your strength, but it is] God who is effectively at work in you, both to will and to work [that is, strengthening, energizing, and creating in you the longing and the ability to fulfill your purpose] for His good pleasure. Philippians 2:13

We will miss God’s purpose for our lives if we refuse to obey until we have all the details “we need”. None of us can foresee what God will do. Our responsibility is simply to obey Him, knowing that He holds tomorrow. (Read Heb. 11:8).