Over the last month we have been talking about the value and function of God’s Word. We have seen that we read the Scriptures for relationship, God’s Word is not about us it is for us, that the Bible is how God has chosen to reveal His character, His heart and His ways to His children. We have seen that we read to abide, that it is a devotion to the Scriptures that makes us rooted, unmoving and stable in our love relationship with God, and that as the words of Jesus abide in us we are enabled to abide in His love. Nothing reveals the love of God like the Word of God; God’s character is love, Jesus is the image of the invisible God, the living Word of God and so, through Jesus’ Words we encounter God’s character of love. I truly believe that when we struggle with believing and receiving the love of God it is often because we are attempting to abide in His love without having His words abide within us, we are attempting to find His love in the branches rather than going to the roots. The source of God’s love is never in His actions it is always in His heart, before we can ever see God’s movements as loving we have to know that God’s heart is loving and we find the heart and character of God in His Word. If we struggle with God’s love we have to be willing to experience Him through His Word, when God’s Word abides in us we are free to abide in His love. Today we move deeper into our study of God’s Word by beginning to talk about our response to the Word. We read for relationship, we read to abide and we read to respond. As I shared at the end of last week’s message we are going to use the book of Deuteronomy as our backdrop for the next few weeks and for our discussion of our response to God’s Word. That immediately raises an important question, why Deuteronomy? First of all Jesus quoted Deuteronomy often. In the book of Matthew alone, Jesus quoted the Old Testament 36 times, of those 36 quotations, 10 were from the book of Deuteronomy. Each time that Jesus was tempted by Satan in the wilderness He responded with a quote from the book of Deuteronomy and when Jesus was asked what the first and greatest commandment was He responded by quoting Deuteronomy 6:5, “You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your strength.” Deuteronomy has a large concentration on God’s Word to God’s people: what God says, why God says it and the response God wants from those who hear it. As one person shared in an email this week, Deuteronomy teaches us that “God just wants us to obey Him and He will fight our battles”. The required, acceptable and necessary response to God’s Word is obedience. Over the next three weeks we are going to talk about obedience and we are going to try to see what obedience looks like. For the most part we think obedience sounds easy, we simply do what we are told, but obedience has to be about more than compliance, the Pharisees obeyed details of the Law that were not even in the Law and yet Jesus referred to them as disobedient. If the Sermon on the Mount taught us anything it is that obedience comes from within us long before it ever is applied to our actions. The most startling thing about obedience is that it is completely about love. Jesus said “If you love Me you will obey My commandments” so that means that obedience can’t be about what we do until it is about who we are, obedience must be established in our hearts or else even our compliant actions can’t be credited as obedience. I believe that Deuteronomy shows us a path to obedience through God’s Word. In Deuteronomy 3:28 God told Moses to command, encourage and strengthen Joshua to prepare him to be obedient and possess the Promised Land. That is the same pattern we are going to use in learning what obedience truly looks like: We need to hear the commands of Scripture, we need more conversation that centers on the Scripture, we need to learn what it means to be encouraged by the Scripture and we need to find our strength in the Scripture.