Pleasing God: Pt. 5 — A ‘Time With God’ Audio Devotion

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Transcript

Good morning.

You know, if you have a relationship with God, you want to make a difference in your life, don’t you? I mean, what’s the point? Otherwise, it’s not just to soothe your conscience, to make you feel a little more like you’re ticking boxes in your life, you know, the spiritual boxes. No, it’s to change your life. The work of God in your life is not intended to just give you some good information on life from the Bible.

It’s to bring real transformation, and when you really get to know God in a way that you recognize His sacrificial love for you and you embrace Him and His love and you say, I want to love you back wholeheartedly as well, that is transforming.

We’re talking all this week about what it means to be pleasing to God, and it’s this relationship that’s reflected in a desire to be pleasing to God.

You know, there’s a part of you, even if you’re a born-again Christian, there’s still that sinful nature that you inherited when you were born.

That wants you to just live for yourself, wants you to think that pleasing God in everything would be legalism. The thought that, oh, there’s someone who just wants to force you to do what they want you to do in life. You know, what a drag. And maybe you even grew up in a legalistic church. It was all just about rules and regulations, and the idea of pleasing God just sounds like one of those. Rough expectation kind of lives.

No, that’s not it at all. Some people think pleasing God, you please him out of fear, like you don’t want to offend someone in your life who has some power in your life. And so out of this fear of offending them, you try to do what they want you to do. That’s not it either. It’s not that God wants to dominate you. God wants a deep love-relationship with you.

I want you to listen to what the psalmist writes in Psalm 104 as he talks about pleasing God. Starting in verse 33, the psalmist writes:

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I will sing to the Lord as long as I live. Well, that doesn’t sound like a legalistic relationship, does it? It doesn’t sound like. Obeying God out of fear, it doesn’t sound like God is dominating him.

I will sing to the Lord as long as I live. I will sing praise to my God while I have being. May my meditation be pleasing to Him, for I rejoice in the Lord. Let sinners be consumed from the earth. Let the wicked be no more. Bless the Lord, O my soul. Praise the Lord.

Well, this is the attitude of a life that is pleasing to God. May my meditation be pleasing to Him, for I rejoice in the Lord, and you can add any other thing in there. May the way I spend my money be pleasing to him. For I rejoice in the Lord. I want my financial life to be pleasing to the Lord.

May my prayer life be pleasing to Him. I want to pray things in line with His will in this world. May my clothing be pleasing to him, for I rejoice in the Lord.

You know, this is what it means, how I spend my time on Netflix. May it be pleasing to him because I rejoice in the Lord. The first thing I want is to be pleasing to him.

When you bring this attitude even into the everyday mundane issues of life, how you behave at work, how you treat people who even don’t treat you well, how you love the people in your life, how you react to the world around you, what you do, the priorities you set, all of that is an expression of your love for God.

When you bring God into those things, you become pleasing to God, and God gets so close to you, so involved in your life, you will never regret choosing to please God in the everyday issues of your life.

I’m John North.

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