Pleasing To God

May 31, 2017

Devotions:

      How are pleasing to God? Through our right living, keeping the law? No because in ourselves we can never keep the law perfectly and our efforts compared with what God demands is no even close, even for the most moral person. So how can we be acceptable to God much less pleasing to Him? Only by His work in salvation for us. Jesus did a perfect work and we can add nothing to it and take nothing away from it. It is Jesus' good works that make us pleasing to God and by that good work He imparted His life to us so we are in Him and He is in us.

        Our work is to find out who He has made us. John says that we look just like Jesus is now.  The more time we spend meditating on who we are in Jesus, the more we will believe it and act accordingly not because it is law but because it is who we are.  Part of who we are is that we are the forgiven, past, present and future.

        “And I will give them an heart to know me, that I am the Lord: and they shall be my people, and I will be their God: for they shall return unto me with their whole heart.”

‭‭Jeremiah‬ ‭24:7‬ ‭KJV‬‬

        A part of who we are is when we were born again, God gave us a heart to know Him and walk with Him with our whole heart.  That is why when we sin our heart condemns us because we are acting contrary to who we are.  But even when our heart condemns us God has still forgiven us. Our behavior always comes out of our belief.  God tells us to believe in what Jesus has done, His finished work. Fixing out eyes on Jesus, that is who we are. We are pleasing to God because we are in Jesus, by the new birth.