We started this year determined to study and grasp our values so that we could hold them rightly and so that God could use them to function for His glory and His purpose through our lives. For most of the first three months of the year we talked about God’s Word. We learned that we read for relationship, we read to abide in that relationship and we read to respond within the relationship. One of the key topics that developed for us in that study was that there is only one response that is acceptable to and desired by God and that is obedience. The issue we then ran into was that our definition of obedience is far different than God’s. We define obedience as simply doing what we are told but then Jesus said things like “if you love me you will obey My commandments” and “if anyone loves Me he will keep My word”; this means that our definition of obedience is about winning someone’s favor or attention but God’s definition of obedience is about living out of a confidence of being loved and enjoyed. We have said “I need to do what God wants so that He will like Me” but God says “I love you and I like you, be so confident in that that you are free to trust Me enough to follow Me however and wherever I lead.” Obedience is more than compliance, it’s more than doing what we are told or even trying to do the right thing, obedience has to be a condition of our hearts; it has to be born out of love and it has to be lived in the midst of a relationship. We are children and God is our Father. We have seen that Deuteronomy gives us a great backdrop for living by the Word of God. God told Moses to command Joshua, meaning to tell Him everything that God had spoken, to encourage him and to strengthen him. Moses then taught the entire nation of Israel to let God’s Word take a deep place of rooting in their hearts and then, I believe he told them how to do that, he said: teach your children diligently, have conversations focused on and centered around God’s Word in your home, in your community, at your job, when you wake up in the morning and when you lie down for bed at night, talk to each other about God’s Word. Obedience begins when our conversations are filled with God’s Word. Today we will begin connecting Moses’ instructions to Israel in Deuteronomy 6 to Luke’s description of the first church in Jerusalem in Acts 2. Moses was telling Israel how to live in obedience Luke was reporting what obedience looked like; Moses was being used to build a community Luke was sharing the story of a community. Have you noticed yet the vehicle for God’s Word leading to obedience in our lives? There is a specific ingredient in every instruction given in Deuteronomy of how we should handle and use God’s Word, that ingredient is each other. God told Moses to command Joshua, to encourage and strengthen him, to build a relationship with God’s Word being the common thread. Moses told Israel to have conversations with each other about the Scriptures, again, to build relationships in which God’s Word was the common bond. In Acts 2 what we find is Luke writing the story of the first church and his first description of that group of people was that they devoted themselves to the teaching of the apostles (the Word of God) and to fellowship, which is their relationship to each other. We cannot be obedient to God and neglectful of each other. Today we are going to begin discussing obedience to God through fellowship with each other. We have studied at length what it means to devote ourselves to God’s Word now we have to study with the same zeal and open-mindedness what it means to devote ourselves to fellowship because if the first church displayed what God desired the church to be then we have to devote ourselves to the same things they devoted themselves to or else we will never walk in the obedience they walked in. We are learning to devote ourselves to the Word of God, now we must add to that a devotion to each other.