Aiming To Please
- Ken Ramey
- Sep 1, 2008
If you’re like me, you experience a certain sense of exhilaration every Fall. It’s a new beginning. It’s a fresh start. It’s a time to reevaluate and refocus. It’s a time to set goals. It’s a good time to remember and refocus on our greatest goal that we as Christians should always be aiming at in our lives; namely, pleasing God. In 2 Corinthians 5:9, Paul writes, “Therefore also we have as our ambition...to be pleasing to Him.” Paul’s priority passion was to live a life that was pleasing to God. His ultimate desire was that every word, every action, every thought, every emotion, every decision, every interaction with others would bring God pleasure. More than anything else, he wanted to know that God was pleased with his life.
This profound principle of pleasing God is weaved throughout the New Testament. In an attempt to personally apply the key verses and passages that talk about pleasing God, I organized them in what seems to me to be a natural flow of thought. The following is a simple outline that I came up with to regularly remind myself that pleasing God needs to be the primary focus of my life.
MY DAILY PASSION:
“to be pleasing to the Lord”
“I seek not to please myself but Him who sent me.” (John 5:30)
“I always do the things that are pleasing to Him.” (John 8:29)
“One who is unmarried is concerned about the things of the Lord, how he may please the Lord.” (1 Cor. 7:32)
“Finally then, brethren, we request and exhort you in the Lord Jesus, that, as you received from us instruction as to how you ought to walk and please God….” (1 Thes. 4:1)
“No soldier in active service entangles himself in the affairs of everyday life, so that he may please the one who enlisted him....” (2 Tim. 2:4)
MY DAILY PURSUIT:
“to find out what is pleasing to the Lord”
“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.” (Rom. 12:1-2)
“For you were formerly darkness, but now you are light in the Lord; walk as children of light…trying to learn what is pleasing to the Lord.” (Eph. 5:8-10)
“Whatever we ask we receive from Him, because we keep His commandments and do the things that are pleasing in His sight.” (1 John 3:22)
MY DAILY PRAYER:
“that the Lord would work in me that which is pleasing to Him”
“May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer.” (Psalm 19:14)
“For it is God who is at work in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure.” (Phil. 2:13)
“For this reason also…we have not ceased to pray for you and to ask that you may be filled with the knowledge of His will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding so that you may walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, to please Him in all respects….” (Col. 1:9-10)
“Now the God of peace, who brought up from the dead the great Shepherd of the sheep through the blood of the eternal covenant, even Jesus our Lord, equip you in every good thing to do His will, working in us that which is pleasing in His sight, through Jesus Christ, to whom be the glory forever and ever, Amen” (Heb. 13:20-21)
Given our sinful tendency to seek to please others (Gal. 1:10; 1 Thes. 2:4) and ourselves (2 Tim. 3:4; Heb. 11:25; James 4:1-3; Rom. 15:1-3) rather than seeking to please God, we need to cry out to God, “Oh God, I can’t please you and I won’t please you unless you help me.” We must plead with God to turn His face toward us and grant us the grace and strength to be pleasing to Him. To maximize the effectiveness of our plea to be pleasing to the Lord, we must honestly confess to Him the specific areas in our life that are not pleasing to Him. For starters, zero in on one area that you know is not pleasing to the Lord and beg Him to make you pleasing to Him.
My favorite scene in the classic movie Chariots of Fire is set on a Scottish moor where the famous runner Eric Liddell is talking with his sister Jenny about the timing of his return to missionary work. She was concerned that his commitment to running was taking priority over his commitment to serving the Lord. He took hold of her and said, “Jenny, I believe God made me for a purpose; for China. But He also made me fast. And when I run I feel His pleasure.” It pleased God to use Liddell as a powerful testimony for Christ at the 1924 Olympic Games in Paris. When he found out that the trials for the 100 meter race which he had trained for would be held on Sunday, he refused to compromise his conviction to not run on the Sabbath, and so he ran in the 400 meter instead and stunned the world by winning the gold medal. He ended up returning to China and died in a Japanese internment camp a few months before the end of WWII. May his life inspire us. God made us all for a purpose; for His pleasure. Let us live our lives in such a way that we can say with Eric Liddell, “I feel His pleasure.”
