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“My son, do not forget my teaching, but let your heart keep my commandments.” – Proverbs 3:1
Have you ever heard the prodigal son story from Luke 15? You know, the one where the younger son asks his father for inheritance early and proceeds to go to a far-off country to squander it. Long story short, the son wastes his money and returns to his father to ask for forgiveness in hopes of survival. The father shows him amazing grace and restores him completely. I’m not that son. I was actually a pretty compliant kid growing up. I tend to be much more like the older brother in the story. When the father restores the younger son, the older brother is bitter because he thinks it’s unfair his younger brother should get a party after making so many stupid life choices. The story ends with the older brother outside the party and the younger son inside the party with the father. I’m the older son, outwardly obedient to the father but inwardly self-righteous and entitled. I battle that tendency all the time.
Proverbs 3:1 says, “My son, do not forget my teaching, but let your heart keep my commandments.” The father tells his son in this proverb to obey with the heart. There is a kind of obedience that is NOT from the heart. It may look like responsibility but the benefit of heartless obedience is grossly limited. There is a much deeper kind of soul work that must be done to truly be teachable. A teachable sprit is a relational issue not a task issue. The value of heartless obedience is limited, maybe even eliminated, because it’s divorced from the relationships around us.
Being teachable demands we believe our teacher knows the answer. It’s a trust issue, a relationship issue. If you have ever struggled to get your heart into following Jesus, it could simply mean you don’t trust where he’s leading you. A teachable spirit says to the teacher, I trust you to do the teaching and whatever you teach me is best. If we approach every situation believing we know best, we cannot truly be taught. Ask a close friend if you have a teachable spirit. Ask them to help you find blind spots where you may be doing your own thing and need to learn to trust your teacher again.[/vc_column_text][us_separator height=”25px” size=”custom”][vc_column_text 0=””]
By Aaron Bjorklund
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