Pleasing God

Can we, then, please God? Is it now possible, if we are united to Christ by the Holy Spirit, if we are justified and adopted into the very family of God – to delight the Father, as the Son delights him? There is a sense in which we have been so careful to assert that you can’t earn your salvation through meriting it that we have forgotten the way the New Testament writers talk about the Christian life, not as a mere moral duty, but as a way of seeking to please God. The good works of the New Testament are not good in and of themselves but because of who they please and praise.

We know, as Paul puts in Romans 8:8, that those controlled by the flesh cannot please God. But that is not what we are now, if the Spirit lives in us. And so Christians ought to make their goal to please God, just like Paul did (2 Cor 5:9) – not because they win their salvation this way, but because is what they were saved to do. It is then, not only possible, but imperative that we live to please God!

We please God in two ways: by exalting his name in praise, and by sacrificing ourselves for the God of others. Have a look at Hebrews 13:15-16:
15 Through Jesus, therefore, let us continually offer to God a sacrifice of praise-- the fruit of lips that confess his name. 16 And do not forget to do good and to share with others, for with such sacrifices God is pleased.

Firstly, God delights in the praises of his people. It is a sacrifice we are now, in Jesus, free to give him – ‘through Jesus’. This praise is a verbal activity, emanating from the mouth, and involving confession of his name. Whose name? Making great the name of Jesus makes great the name of God. Exalt Jesus, and God is pleased.

Praise is not just evangelism, though it surely includes the proclamation of the good news in the world. I think God is genuinely delighted by the words and songs and prayers we address to him - not just because others are overhearing them but because they are directed to him. He is not needy for it, but he revels in it. When we praise him we offer him a sacrifice which delights him, because it is directed to him (see Ephesians 5:19). When we sing in church, for example, we are not merely singing to each other – we are singing to God, for the pleasure of God. SO: praise him with your lips, with a sincere heart, because it delights your Father when you do.

Secondly, in Jesus we are finally free to do what we are made to do as creatures: to please God in our acts of self-sacrifice for the good of others. We offer our bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God – and it is hard not to think that Paul has in mind here the possibility of our suffering on behalf of others in an echo of Jesus’s death. Not of course that our self-sacrifice atones for sin, but it does serve others and it does please God. We bear with one another, carrying each other’s burdens, as he did. It is a sacrifice that delights God’s heart, not because it wins his acceptance but because it hallows his name. Through Christ, our self-sacrifices makes a sweet smell in God’s nose. SO: make an offering of your whole self to God, because it pleases God when you do.

When I run, I feel His pleasure. What kind of a statement is that? God was pleased by the running of Eric Liddell; and pleased, too, by his decision not to run in honour of God; and pleased by his laying down his life in the service of others. But he was pleased because it was the Son of God who pleased him, and who made a sacrifice for his sins.

With him I am well pleased

Our problem is still there: how can we please God? We know the answer to the question. What he wants from his creatures is their true worship - their heartfelt praise and their obedience to him. But we are unsure if anyone is clean-hearted enough to be placed to offer him this praise.

As Israel found, you couldn't stroke him under the chin to get him purring. He sees past all that, straight into the heart. And the human heart is where it all gets complicated. The naive dream that we humans have of feeling God's pleasure as we do what we are created to do seems very distant.

But there is one with whom he is well pleased indeed. That was what was declared from heaven when Jesus was baptised, and the Spirit of God descended on him like a dove. The Father is well pleased with the Son - he is pure in heart and obedient, submitting his will always to the will of the Father. Here finally we can see a human being turned and tuned to its true purpose.

And in Jesus we finally see a worthy sacrifice offered to God - an atoning one, that takes away the sins the world, sent to us from the loving heart of God. He was the worthy sacrifice and the worthy sacrificer, appearing once for all at the end of the ages to do away with sin by the sacrifice of himself. We have in him a fragrant offering and sacrifice (Eph 5:2); finally and decisively an offering from the creature to the creator that is truly acceptable to him.

To obey is better than sacrifice

As if that wasn't enough, the sacrifices themselves became a point of further complication for Israel. Merely performing acts of sacrifice as outward actions misunderstands who Yhwh is. It treats him as a simpleton. Cheating on sacrifice by offering defective animals was not like you or I fudging our tax returns. You can't cheat a God who sees into the human heart - he is pretty much unimpressed by outward performances - in fact they are a matter of deep offence. In the first place, it treats God as if he can be conned or manipulated, as if the right gift is an item in an exchange with God that he guarantees to honour, like some bank cheque.

What's more: it acts as if God is not already the owner and giver of all things. If all things already are God's by right in any case, then the point of offering sacrifice to him is not to give him something he hasn't already got, but to really please him by offering him the praise that is his due. It isn't the aroma of burning meat that he enjoys; it is the sweet scent of the worship and obedience of his people. That's what Cain did not grasp; nor many in Israel, either. Samuel says to Saul:

Has the LORD as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the LORD? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to listen than the fat of rams. (1 Sam 15:22)

It's that sin problem again: the sacrifice is only pleasing to God if it is a true reflection of the heart. And yet the human heart is so wayward and devious - who could ever hope to please God? Not because God is too hard to please, after all, but because we incapable of turning our hearts to the business of worshipping him as he deserves.

It is interesting to see what David wrote when he fell into that terrible spiral of sin - in Psalm 51:

15 O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth will declare your praise. 16 You do not delight in sacrifice, or I would bring it; you do not take pleasure in burnt offerings. 17 The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise. 18 In your good pleasure make Zion prosper; build up the walls of Jerusalem. 19 Then there will be righteous sacrifices, whole burnt offerings to delight you; then bulls will be offered on your altar.

David can see that he is even incapable of praising God without God's help. If only it was as easy as offering a sacrifice; if only God's pleasure was a calculable thing. If only he could be bought off. But he takes no pleasure in material sacrifices. It is the broken spirit, the contrition of the humbled man, brought to his knees by the awful shock of seeing his own sin and by the realisation of his own helplessness - this which God himself worked in David, we remember - that God will answer. Only then (v 18), within a restored city, will God allow righteous sacrifices to begin againfor his own delight.

What pleases God?

But does the running of the runner please God, really? Does the playing of the saxophone please God, or is it just blowing his own trumpet? Does the art of the artist, or the work of the worker please him? Does what you do bring pleasure to God - do you know his delight?

What can we offer to God that will please him, after all? Some people are very hard to please, and God appears very much to be one of those. It isn't like he hasn't got everything already. What does he lack that I could presume to give him?

It's an ancient problem; and its why human beings have always offered sacrifices in the hope that God would be pleased - that he would look favourably on the offerer of the gift. The sacrifice is proof of the offerer's devotion - and pretty much all human cultures have had them. To offer sacrifices is an almost instinctual human action.

The story of Cain and Abel in Genesis 4 revolves around two competing sacrifices - and the meat that Abel brought pleased God, whereas Cain's fruit and veg did not. It seems so unfair, and the text of the Bible doesn't give us much of a clue as to why God approved of Abel and not of Cain. What did Cain do wrong? Do we not have some sympathy for the first murderer?

Later of course Israel would be given a whole elaborate system of sacrifices by God himself, a system which was to govern their whole lives. But these sacrifices were reminders that the human problem was not only a matter of not knowing how to please God - it was knowing how to placate him. Human sinfulness meant that atonement needed to be made, not to please God but to appease him. So far are human beings from delighting the creator.

'When I run, I feel his pleasure'

I believe that God made me for a purpose, but He also made me fast. When I run, I feel His pleasure.

The movie Chariots of Fire had the Scottish Olympian athlete and rugby international Eric Liddell say these words. Whether he did or not - and an evening using Google has been unable to clarify this for me - these words are so powerful that they have stuck with Liddell's name ever since.

They are not flippant or self-justifying words - not at all. Neither were they just the result of his endorphins kicking in.

Liddell was the man who refused to run on a Sunday at the Olympics in the 100 metres, an event he stood an even chance of winning; and was to give himself for missionary service in China where he would die in a labour camp. When he said 'I feel his pleasure' - if indeed these were his words! - he was expressing what we would all like to believe are true: that the creator is deeply delighted when his creatures do what they are made to do, and do so in honour of him.

Christ, our wisdom

We began by observing that we live in a knowledge economy. Knowledge is power - and because of this it is worth a great deal. Feeling increasingly bewildered and drowning under avalanches of information, we seek salvation from experts. Where else have we poor ignorant beings to go? Who else can we trust? Unable to judge rightly, we trust the expertise of the legal system.

But though it may appear wise to trust the experts with our money, our health and our careers, these are ultimately nothing compared to the wisdom of God. These experts are only reading from a script that God has already written. And when we turn to God, what we don't get is more expertise, or more overwhelming facts. What we get from him is the wisdom that begins with the fear of the Lord. It's a wisdom, a craft, that is expressed most consummately, most beautifully in the cross of Christ. That is how he has patterned and order things - around this centre, the cross, the death for sin.

Which means it is not a power-knowledge that seeks to control or abuse: it is a wisdom that is for us. The wisdom of the cross, which is embedded deep into the fabric of the universe - not that human beings in their wisdom get it - the wisdom of the cross is the secret of life itself.

And the only right response to the wisdom of God is to trust it. There is no need to be dismayed or to feel defeated by the technical mastery of others, just as there is no grounds to be impressed by it; there is no need to fear the courts of men, which judge imperfectly because they will only ever know imperfectly.

Wise Guy

In a sense this could have remained for us just a nice piece of poetry. But the New Testament adds something extraordinary to this idea of God's wisdom - by claiming that Jesus Christ, a human being, embodied this wisdom of God that was with him before everything began.

He is, as John says, the Word who was with God in the beginning; and, as Paul says, he is the one through whom, and by whom, and for whom all things were made. In him is summed up the purpose of the whole cosmos - he is the bottom line of the whole lot. He is both its beginning and its end.

It seems like an impossibly grand vision is boiled down to one figure, one person, one individual, who becomes the hinge around which it all turns. But what does this mean?

It means that in his life and death - in all his work - Jesus was living out that same wisdom that called things into being and ordered them and rules them. And that's what Paul wants to say in 1 Corinthians. Now the Corinthians were in the sway of some know-it-all fancy preachers, self-proclaimed experts, who boasted in their possession of a secret knowledge of divine things. Either they were puffed up with superior knowledge, or they were feeling dumb. Certainly they were claiming that Paul's message was neither clever or powerful. At least, that is how it seemed:

1 Corinthians 1 21 For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. 22 Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom, 23 but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, 24 but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.

The cross is great subversive surprise for the world, whose wisdom is a self-serving powergrab. As it turns out, God has enough power in his little finger to expose it for what it is. The wisdom of God, it turns out, means the sacrifice of the Son, for sin, on the cross. It exposes the pride of human wisdom by overturning it.