Pleasing God: Pt. 4 — A ‘Time With God’ Audio Devotion

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Transcript

Good morning. We’re talking all this week about pleasing God.

We started out by saying, if you want to walk with God, that is, to have a close relationship with God, you have to live a life that is pleasing to Him. Why do you walk with God? Because it’s pleasing to you. Well, are you also pleasing to God?

We saw that if you say yes to living in a way that is pleasing to God, you’re saying no to a bunch of other things, and often what is the most common way of living around you, you’re saying no to if you want to please God in your life.

We saw also that this is the great goal of the Christian life to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him.

This is what Paul prayed for the Colossians. We saw that Paul himself said that we make it our aim to please God.

And Jesus said, I always do the things that are pleasing to the Father, always, and it started to get a bit more personal because we started thinking about what it looks like in every situation to be pleasing to God. We want to go a bit deeper on that again thinking about this. What does it mean to always do the things that are pleasing to God.

Just this week I’ve been reading a book that was written back in the 1700s by a man named William Law.

A book titled A Serious Call to a devout and Holy Life.

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Well, it was a significant book and had a significant impact, and probably you or I would neither one agree with everything he says, but one thing comes through so loud and clear, and that was this man’s commitment to living a life that was pleasing to God.

He talks about being pious. Now, in our day, pious means looking down your nose at other people who aren’t as good as you. But back in the 1700s, pious meant just someone who is really committed to walking with God in their lives. He makes this statement in the book. He says, if you will stop here and ask yourselves why you are not as pious as the early Christians were in the Bible. Your own heart will tell you that it is neither through ignorance nor inability to be pious.

But purely because you never thoroughly intended it, let us realize that we lack the first and most fundamental principle of Christianity. We lack an intention to please God in all our actions.

Well, that’s a pretty heavy statement, isn’t it?

We immediately react to that and say, well, of course I want to please God, but we say that in a general sense, I want my life to be pleasing to God.

And in this book, he starts really digging down and making the reader quite uncomfortable as he talks about what it means to please God in all our actions. And I have to agree with him.

Paul Miller, a contemporary writer applies what William Law says to our lives today, and he made this statement. We cannot watch a movie that glorifies immorality, adultery, and profanity.

Do you think those things are pleasing to God?

We can’t watch a movie that glorifies immorality, adultery, and profanity and blame our watching it on our weak human nature, but rather the fault is that when we chose a movie to watch, it was not our intention to please God in watching it.

Mm, he’s right, isn’t he? It’s not that we are choosing to be unpleasing to God. So often when it comes to the everyday choices of life, we are just not even choosing, we’re not even considering: Can I do this in a way that is an expression of worship to God?

That expresses a desire to please God. Can I watch this movie and please God? Can I spend my money in this way and please God? Can I play this computer game and please God? What I do on my date, will it be pleasing to God? The clothes I wear to the gym, are they pleasing to God?

How I use God’s name in passing in my language – is that pleasing to God?

Well, it certainly gets very personal, doesn’t it? Law concludes, if it is your goal to please God in everything, you will be different from most professing Christians and certainly different from the world.

I’m John North.

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