Learning: To Obey God

Learning to Obey God

What does it mean to learn to obey God? The easiest way to answer this question is to answer it indirectly. When I say indirectly I understand it to mean not answering directly, yet still in a real relationship to the topic under consideration.
When we first begin our religious training thru Catechism, we must learn the commandments and other fundamental truths of faith. Our learning to obey God comes from within these first lessons of our faith. Do you remember when you first were instructed in Catechism? One of our first lessons was to “love God with our whole mind, heart, soul and strength.” Jesus perfected the Old Testament and gave us a new commandment. We are to “love our neighbor as ourself.” In those early years, we didn’t have the understanding of God as we do today. Our first attempts to respond to the grace of obedience to God were in those early desires to assent to the truth that we owed God our whole mind, heart, soul and strength. We may not have had a clear and full understanding of what it meant, but we knew it to be true and our will, moved by charity, desired to do just what God expected of us. Faith gave to us to the truth of God and charity moved us to surrender to this obedience. We had never seen God before, but we already believed in him. Part of our response may have been what our parents told us and the people we saw who were performing religious acts in public, and we found these people to be good and upright people.