The Call To Obey

Pastor Devon Ortiz continued his walk through Deuteronomy, reaching chapter 4 on the first Wednesday midweek service in the church's new Newark location. He opened by tracing the ground already covered. Deuteronomy is Moses recapping the journey, and in the earlier chapters God had led Israel past Edom, Moab, and Ammon, telling them to pass through without harm, while in other places they had to fight for the land themselves. The single thread running through all of it, Pastor Ortiz said, is that God is faithful, whether he provides in a land that was never theirs or whether they have to extend effort and battle for their own. The church had lived both, given two buildings in two months, and would yet have to fight for a place of its own.

Chapter 4 opens with Moses calling Israel to obedience, and Pastor Ortiz made obedience the foundation of the whole message. You cannot live the Christian life, he said, if you do not know how to obey. It is the first thing children are taught, and it is fundamental for believers. Where there is no obedience there is no growth, and where there is no growth a person should expect to always be scrounging for crumbs of blessing.

Do not add to or subtract from what God commands. From verse 2, ye shall not add unto the word which I commanded you, neither shall ye diminish ought from it, Pastor Ortiz warned that religion has a bad habit of adding and subtracting from God's directives. Add, and you heap an unnecessary burden on people. Subtract, and you lose the importance of obedience.

Keeping the commandments is your wisdom. From verses 6 to 8, keep therefore and do them, for this is your wisdom and your understanding, he drew a practical point that had taken him forty-five years to learn: most of our problems come from simply not doing what we already know to do. We know we should read the Bible, pray, and be in church. He pressed the questions home. When was the last time you read your Bible for yourself, not because someone nudged you? When did you last truly spend time in prayer? He said he is a firm believer that all failures are prayer failures. And there is a difference between wanting to be in church and being there because you feel you have to, because the one who wants to be there gets far more out of it.

The Danger Of Forgetting

From verse 9, only take heed to thyself, and keep thy soul diligently, lest thou forget the things which thine eyes have seen, Pastor Ortiz named the real threat: not ignorance, but forgetting. He illustrated it with a story from his own boyhood at North Valley Baptist School, when a friend promised to bring his clothes after basketball practice and simply forgot, leaving him to sit through an evening service in his stinky gym shorts. There is nothing worse, he said, than asking someone to do something, trusting it is handled, and then finding they forgot.

Applied to the Christian, this means we should never forget the day Jesus saved us. If someone asked how you got saved and you could not quite remember, that would be a frightening thing, because it was the greatest day of your life, the day your soul was lifted out of the miry clay and set on the rock. He noted that no one forgets the day they would win the lottery, yet believers are quick to forget the things God has given. The word keep in that verse, he explained, means to guard, so the charge is to guard these things with everything you have.

Keep It In Your Heart

Pastor Ortiz turned to Mary in Luke 1 as a model of remembering. She magnified the Lord, recognized that he had done great things for her, and spoke of his mercy on them that fear him. To fear God, he said, is to recognize his almighty power and his authority over all things. He illustrated it with a driver who sped past him on the way to church, then slammed on the brakes the moment a police officer came into view, and pulled over the instant the lights came on. Fear of the authority made the man obey, and in the same way, when we fear the Lord we slow down from doing our own thing and begin to do what God commands. Mary, having seen all God had done, kept these things and pondered them in her heart.

That became the pointed question of the evening. God has been working, corporately in the church and individually in each life. He has helped, pointed out areas to change, and shown the wisdom of following him. So what will you do with what you have seen God do? Pastor Ortiz warned that if you dismiss what God did corporately as coincidence, you will miss it individually. A church does not find a building by coincidence, he said, recalling a pastor who has searched three months while God provided the church its first building within a week and its second within a day. That was not their goodness or their staff, it was God. But if you forget what God has done, then when the bill is hard to pay you will start skipping church, trimming your Bible reading, and pushing aside obedience to do what you think you need to do, and so miss the wisdom God already showed you.

Teach The Next Generation

The end of verse 9, teach them thy sons and thy son's sons, carried the message into the home. Children will not follow the things of God if their parents only partially obey, Pastor Ortiz said, because they will take the easy route. When we make excuses about why we cannot go to church, listen to godly music, or live rightly, our children learn to make the same excuses. They reach an age where they make their own choices, but they will always know what was right. The command to teach means taking the very values that give you strength and wisdom and passing them to the next generation.

He shared his deepest desire for the church, greater than seeing a crowd fill the room: to watch the young people who grew up there rise into leadership, coming back to teach the classes, play the piano, and shepherd the next generation, carrying the church further than the current leaders ever could. What steals that joy of serving God, he said, is removing the key element of obedience.

Return, And Put Away The Idols

Reaching back to verse 1, now therefore hearken, O Israel, unto the statutes, Pastor Ortiz framed the whole message as a call to return. It is time to listen and obey, and if the next generation is to follow, the adults must listen and obey first, treating what God has given not as a passive thing but getting actively involved.

He closed by asking why Israel failed to obey, and answered from verses 15 to 19, where Moses warns against making a graven image or being driven to worship the sun, moon, and stars. The issue was idols. Applied today, Pastor Ortiz named the modern idols that crowd God out: the nine-to-five job that takes priority over everything, the bank account, the hours poured into television and streaming, video games, phones, and social media, and the pornography that grips so many. We let these corrupt us, he said, and then wonder why we do not obey, and the answer we so often give is simply, I forgot. Have you been reading your Bible? I forgot. Have you been praying? I forgot. Are you living for God, or just going through the motions? He prayed that God would shake the church in a real way so that its people would obey and reverence him for who he is, not because they have to, but because they want to.