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.