Mike Focht 6/13/2025
Do we have a sincere intent to obey God? This is a crucial question. It is very easy for Christians to assume that their intent to understand, memorize, or comprehend God’s Word is the same as a sincere intention to obey. It is not. God does not call us only to know His Word. God calls us to know His Word with the intent to observe, keep, do, and obey. The intention to obey is essential.
We will never truly be interested or invested in something we do not intend to incorporate into our lives. The commands of Christ will always be boring to those who latently intend to ignore them. So many Christians have difficulty reading the Word of God for themselves for this very reason. They wonder why other believers talk about the Bible as living or interesting. It is as if magic has made them lovers of God’s Word.
Nothing could be further from the truth. The Christian who sits down and reads his Bible hoping to find something cool, interesting, or new is simply hoping for good feeling, inspiration, or nostalgia. They are reading for the vibe, but in all honesty, they have no intention of reading God’s Word to do something. They do not intend to obey what they read—by altering their life and priorities, repenting before others, loving enemies, sharing the gospel, praying in new ways or for new things, or observing God’s commands in any new way. They have no intention of changing. They will read their Bible, shut it, walk away, and live the same.
That type of Christian will never find the Bible interesting! Why? Because I will never be drawn to what I have no intention of obeying. But if I put myself before the Word of God and read the Bible like a disciple sitting at Jesus’ feet, who hears His Word and must go out and do what He says, I will find new life in His Word. Jesus made this formula very simple: If you know these things, blessed are you if you do them (John 13:17). Jesus promises the blessing to those who do and not to those who know.
Many believers have grown up in Christian circles and know a lot of biblical truth. They know the stories. They know the gospel. They know the verses. And yet, they don’t know the reality of where truth leads. Their Christian life lacks something, but they cannot put their finger on it. They know that other Christians have an experience of God and His truth and a love for His Word that they lack, but they cannot figure out why they are lacking. When they have sought counsel, they know everything their counselors tell them.
What is their problem? Their problem is that they have never intended to obey everything they know. They traffic in the intellectual knowledge of spiritual truth but not the experience of truth lived. We will never know the blessing of God’s commands until we do them. My counsel to my frustrated brothers and sisters in Christ would be to obey your Savior’s command: If you know these things, blessed are you if you do them.