Our last dog lived to be almost 12 years old.  When he was a pup of six months, we decided it was time for some obedience training.  We enrolled Gage in Puppy Obedience School with high hopes that the commands would sink in and he’d become a good hunting dog at some point.  Well, Gage proved to be a strong willed child – one who needed more than a drill sergeant to fill his brain with commands that seemed totally unnecessary to him.  Yes, Gage was a puppy school drop out.  I’m not proud of the fact, but it does help prove a point.

We’re a lot like Gage when it comes to being obedient.  Our natural tendency is to balk at rules and laws.  What good are they?  Why do we need to obey them?  What’s in it for us.  We’re often stubborn, insubordinate, rebellious, delinquent, unruly and willful when it comes to following rules.  However those very rules are the substance of creating order out of chaos.

When God sent His Ten Commandments to man, He didn’t do so as  a simple suggestion or guidelines for us to follow.  He meant them – every word.  In these words, every situation we face in life is addressed.  We see them as the basis for our own country’s founding.  God wrote the words with His mighty finger.  When we acknowledge that God is the creator of the universe, we have no reason to question even one portion of them.

It seems that those words, established so long ago, have been put to the test over the last hundred years or so.  They’ve been mocked, rewritten to fit man’s needs, disregarded and seen as a means of brainwashing people into submission.  God doesn’t work that way.  He is a God of love and mercy and because He wrote the blueprint for our lives, He knows all about us.  He deserves our honor and respect.  Therefore we should write the commandments in our hearts and keep them in the forefront of our daily lives.

Obedience requires submission and most of us don’t like to be lorded over.  We think of ourselves as free thinkers with minds that can determine our own destiny.  We don’t need someone telling us what to do, how to live and how to treat others.  We can do this thing called life on our own.

We’ve seen the results of that kind of thinking – a society that has increasingly lower morals; one who believes that we deserve everything we get;  that we can and should be accountable to no one, but ourselves and other people are insignificant unless they can advance our own agendas.  God has no place in it.  It has become out of control and disorderly to the point of chaos.

Maybe we need to look at God’s commandments again.  Now would be a great time, since many of us are still cloistered in our homes.  You might see comparisons to some of the laws of our land which have been under attack lately.  We should also remember Christ’s command to love God and our fellow man.  This would solve a lot of problems.

It took Gage almost seven years to get the hang of what obedience was all about and he was a dog and in dog years he was only one.