Now do not be stiffnecked, as your fathers were, but yield yourselves unto The LORD, and enter into His sanctuary, which He has sanctified for ever: and serve The LORD your God, that the fierceness of His wrath may turn away from you.
Stiffnecked: stubborn,hard
In other words, don't be hard-hearted towards The LORD God. Don't be stubborn and disobedient to The LORD your God.
Yield willingly our hearts and our minds and our lives to The LORD our God. Then we can enter His sacred place. Anyone can go to church, but unless we submit to God's Authority, and hear The Word of The Lord, and allow His Holy Spirit to apply The Word of The Lord to our hearts, nothing is going to change within us.
1 Peter 5:6
Humble yourselves, therefore, under God’s mighty hand, so that in due time He may exalt you.
It is the willing heart that works with God, accepting God's perfect will for their lives. As Jesus prayed in the garden, "Not My will, but Your be done," we, too, need to be willing to set aside what we want and accept what God wants.
Luke 22:42
“Father, if You are willing, take this cup from Me. Yet not My will, but Yours be done.”
We yield to God in Christ through The Holy Spirit. To yield is to give. To give personally to. To give willingly to. To give generously to. To knowingly and unconditionally designate an object or one's self to another.
It is better for ourselves to yield to God than it is to yield to the devil. For God is Creator and the devil is destroyer. Serving God is Life. Serving Satan is death. Choose Life. This word 'yield' occurs more than 2,000 times in Scripture in just the Old Testament alone. This tells us it is a vital characteristic in the heart of the ones who want to serve God.
Submissiveness in God's kingdom comes from a heart that knows Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. Lord of its life, Savior of its soul. It is not a submission that arises from terror and abject fear of repercussions. The fear of The Lord that the heart of the believer knows is reverent fear: awe and wonder at this Holy God Who came down from heaven to die on the cross for us, so we wouldn't have to die in our sins.
We are living in the age of grace. A time of repentance and forgiveness. A time of positive transformation through The Holy Spirit of God. A time of learning The Word of God and having this same Word growing within us. [Ephesians 2:1-10; 2 Corinthians 3:18].
Beware! for the days are shortened [Matthew 24:22] and the time is coming when this age of grace ends and the age of tribulation enters [1 Thessalonians 4:16,17]. Days like we have never seen before, and which many of us hope we never see. For, as persecuted as the church is now, the worst is not yet to come. Yet, we pray that the salvation of God would be in the hearts of every person we pray for, even if we never meet them on this side of heaven.
Choose now to Serve The Lord Your God. With gladness. With your whole heart (generously). With a perfect and willing heart. With fear and rejoicing. With humility.
Yielding our allegiance to God on this side of heaven has great rewards on the other side of heaven.
