When I started attending the local college here for the second time, I had forgotten my original password from years ago. The tech people in charge of computers issued me a new password. They kept it easy to remember, and went with “changeme” as the password. Their intended purpose for the password was that I would quickly change it to something else. However, when I first entered the password, I stubbornly refused to actually change my password. My password could not tell me what to do. Out of pure spite I kept the password for a long period of time. As time went on, the spite left, but I never changed my password. Even though I was typing the password almost everyday, its message had been ignored for long enough that I no longer even payed attention to what it said. My password stayed that way for over a year, and only has been changed because it is now a public password.

Leaving that password on for so long was actually dangerous. People could have had access to a lot of very valuable files, as well as my email. All they would have had to do was put in my number and try the forgotten password code (that I assume they used for everyone in a similar situation) and I would have had large problems. Despite that danger, I went ahead and kept that same password. At times it was out of spite, other times it was out of laziness, but regardless, I left myself vulnerable. We can have the same attitude that I had about my password toward the word of God. When he gives us a command we have two choices: Obey it or ignore it.

We may ignore the word of God out of spite. We may decide that God has no right to tell us how to live, or to ask us to give up specific things. Who does He think He is anyway? We also may ignore the word of God out of laziness or hardness to it. It takes too much effort for us to actually obey the word of God. We read it everyday, it seems like good advice, but we make excuse after excuse for us not to do it. In the end, the commandments God gives us are for our benefit. When we refuse to obey them, we are not just hurting God and those around us, but we are hurting ourselves. We must be dilligent when we read the word of God that we purpose in our hearts to obey what He would have us do.