Living to Please God
One of the highest and greatest goals for all Believers, especially those standing for marriage restoration, is living to please God. Unfortunately, most of us are guilty, or have been guilty of living to please just about anyone and everyone BUT God; ourselves for many of us and our spouses for most of us. And living to please anyone other than God can only bring frustration and disappointment when we have truly given our hearts and lives to Jesus. Yet, IF we please God by seeking FIRST His kingdom and His righteousness, delighting in Him, trusting Him with all of our hearts and obeying Him; He will bless us with all of the material things we need and give us the desires of our hearts as He makes our paths straight and our righteousness shine like the dawn, and the justice of our cause like the noon day sun! (Matthew 6:32-33, Psalm 37:4-6 and Proverbs 3:5-6)
When the Lord first put this on my heart earlier this week, I was a bit surprised by the verse He gave me, which was Luke 22:42, which says “Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done.” And then verses 43 and 44 say An angel from heaven appeared to him and strengthened him. And being in anguish, he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground. But that tells me that the only way to truly please God is to be like Jesus and to submit and surrender our own will and wishes to His, even when it requires great personal sacrifice. So that old saying that used to be a lot more popular than today really provides the simplest key to living to please God; which is to ask ourselves “What would Jesus do?”…AND THEN DOING IT.
And Romans 12:1-2 tells us Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship. Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will. But it’s not possible to know the will of God or what Jesus would do without spending a LOT of QUALITY time reading and studying His Word, which is the ONLY way to gain knowledge of God and “renew” our minds. And Colossians 1:9-12 reveals the importance of that, because it says For this reason, since the day we heard about you, we have not stopped praying for you and asking God to fill you with the knowledge of his will through all spiritual wisdom and understanding. And we pray this in order that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and may please him in every way: bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God, being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might so that you may have great endurance and patience, and joyfully giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the kingdom of light.
Psalm 146:3 clearly warns Do not put your trust in princes, in mortal men, who cannot save. Yet when we seek to please our spouses or anyone other than God, we are in effect putting our trust in them; why else are we seeking to please them? And in Galatians 1:10 Paul makes it just as clear that we can not truly serve God and seek to please men at the same time. He said Am I now trying to win the approval of men, or of God? Or am I trying to please men? If I were still trying to please men, I would not be a servant of Christ. And then 1 Thessalonians 2:4 saysOn the contrary, we speak as men approved by God to be entrusted with the gospel. We are not trying to please men but God, who tests our hearts. Unfortunately, it’s very easy for men and women standing for marriage restoration to get too caught up in pleasing their spouses or in being overly concerned with what they think or how they will react to this or that; when the most important thing to be concerned with is what pleases God; what does He think and how does He feel. God has the power to do anything He wants to and He WILL do what His Word promises, so when our focus is on pleasing Him and in delighting Him and in Him; HE will deal with ALL things concerning our spouses, including giving them undivided hearts and changing their hearts of stone to hearts of flesh, and turning their hearts back to us. ( Ezekiel 11:19Proverbs 21:1) When we live in fear of how our spouses will react when we do what we know the Lord wants us to do, we are not pleasing God. In fact, 1 Peter 3:5-6 very specifically tells women desiring to see their spouses won to the Lord not to give way to fear. It says For this is the way the holy women of the past who put their hope in God used to make themselves beautiful. They were submissive to their own husbands, like Sarah, who obeyed Abraham and called him her master. You are her daughters if you do what is right and do not give way to fear.
And a verse I’ve read many times before, which certainly took on a much greater meaning as I studied it this time is Ecclesiastes 2:26, which says To the man who pleases him, God gives wisdom, knowledge and happiness, but to the sinner he gives the task of gathering and storing up wealth to hand it over to the one who pleases God.… And putting that with 1 Peter 2:23 should give us great confidence that God will make EVERYTHING right for us if we just TRUST Him, because it says When they hurled their insults at him, he did not retaliate; when he suffered, he made no threats. Instead, he entrusted himself to him who judges justly.
Since the Bible is full of promises and blessings for those who please the Lord, we need to know HOW to please Him. Matthew 3:15-17 says Jesus replied, “Let it be so now; it is proper for us to do this to fulfill all righteousness.” Then John consented. As soon as Jesus was baptized, he went up out of the water. At that moment heaven was opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and lighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.” And Matthew 17:4 says While he was still speaking, a bright cloud enveloped them, and a voice from the cloud said, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased. Listen to him!” That’s why we know we will please God if we follow the example set before us by Jesus. And in Matthew 7:24-28, Jesus Himself told us how to please God and afford ourselves His blessings and protection. He said:
“Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock.
But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash.”
So the surest way to please God is to LISTEN to His Son and DO as He tells us to do. And a simple way to know what pleases God is to ask ourselves what Jesus would do and then do our best to do it. We can not live to please both man and God, but when we live to please God, God assures us that even though we might not think so, we will also be approved by men. Romans 14:17-18 says For the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking, but of righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit, because anyone who serves Christ in this way is pleasing to God and approved by men. So when we are not experiencing the righteousness, peace and joy Jesus told us we should have in the Holy Spirit, we are probably NOT living to please God, because we’re too focused on pleasing ourselves, our spouses or others. And when we do that, we are allowing the devil to do exactly what he always comes to do, which is to steal, kill and destroy. And we can not experience the abundant life Jesus came to give us according to John 10:10, which says The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full. So let’s all heed the warning in Hebrews 11:6, which says And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him. So when we dare to live for God, as the above passages of scripture promise, we WILL definitely please God and most assuredly be blessed and encouraged!