Obedience: Sit Means Sit - Pray Means Pray

By Jim Martin

What if obedience isn't restriction, but the path to freedom?

A well-trained dog figures out something most of us spend a lifetime resisting. When he listens to his master, his world gets bigger, not smaller. He is safer. He is calmer. He gets to come along. The leash was never the enemy.

Jim Martin spent more than fifty years training retrievers, long enough to know that a command only counts if it means something. Sit means sit. Not sit when you feel like it. Not sit after you've checked out that interesting smell. Sit.

Somewhere in those fifty years it occurred to him that God had been saying something just as simple, for just as long, and he had been the one refusing to sit.

Obedience: Sit Means Sit, Pray Means Pray is a plainspoken book about a word most of us flinch at. Jim writes the way he talks, like a man who has trained a lot of dogs, made a lot of mistakes, and found grace waiting on the other side of both.

Two halves, one idea

Part One, Sit Means Sit, comes straight out of the field. E-collars and pinch collars, a whistle that carries across a cornfield, the Alpha that oozes out of every puppy, and the day he had to put his first Chesapeake down. Every lesson turns into a mirror.

Part Two, Pray Means Pray, turns that mirror around. Written with Rod Handley of Character That Counts, it digs into why prayer and obedience are twin sisters, and why ninety-nine percent obedience is really one hundred percent disobedience.

Inside you'll find
Forty short chapters, each one readable in a sitting
More than a hundred verses on obedience gathered in one place for slow reading
Honest talk about pride, appetite, and the things men don't bring up
Blank pages in the back to write down what God is asking of you

Written for men who want a faith with some spine to it, dog people who suspect their retriever understands something they don't, small groups looking for a study that won't put anybody to sleep, and anyone who has ever wondered whether the rules were worth following.

"To obey is better than sacrifice." 1 Samuel 15:22

Obedience brings blessings. Disobedience brings trouble. It's true with your dog. It's truer with God.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HGTQB5L7
• ISBN13: 9798194853342
• Release Date: September 2026
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 152 Pages
• Weight: 0.43 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.4" x 6.0"