All creation, including you, was made for the sole purpose of bringing pleasure to God. Pleasing God must be the goal of our lives; it should be the greatest, if not the only ambition of our existence. For that to happen, we must be so yielded to Him that His thoughts become our thoughts, and His will our will. Yet this cannot happen without His help. As Evan Roberts, the leader of the Welsh Revival of 1904-5 said,we must pray to God saying, “Bend me! Bend me!” That means we should ask God to make our hearts pliable and tender towards Him.
Paul the Apostle was cognizant of God’s will for his life and ours. Paul knew for sure that pleasing God is all there is in this earthly journey. That is why he said, “Therefore we make it our aim, whether present or absent, to be well pleasing to Him,” (2 Corinthians 5:9). To Paul, pleasing God was not something to be taken lightly, that is why he made it his AIM.
Question: What is your aim in life? Why are you doing whatever you are doing? If you are living simply to bring pleasure to yourself or to please people, I am sorry to say, your life is a waste. If you know what you should be doing to put a smile on God’s face, but have instead chosen what excites your flesh, please know that you are grieving God. That goes even for those who do “half-half” things for God instead of serving Him wholeheartedly.
One reason Paul took this issue of pleasing God very seriously was because he knew that life does not end here. It occurred to Paul (and I hope it occurs to you), that pleasing or not pleasing God has eternal consequences. Immediately after saying, “Therefore we make it our aim, whether present or absent, to be well pleasing to Him,” (2 Corinthians 5:9), Paul further stated, “For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, that each one may receive the things done in the body, according to what he has done, whether good or bad,” (2 Corinthians 5:10). Simply put, those who live to please God will receive eternal rewards which are far more glorious than what the mind can imagine. However, if you live to please yourself and people, with no regard for fulfilling the will of God upon your life, you will go to heaven but with no rewards, and you will eternally regret not having lived a life well pleasing to the One who loves you so much.
As I stated in the opening paragraph, we cannot be pleasing to God if we are not yielded to Him. In the beginning, before the fall of Adam and all creation, bringing the Creator pleasure was the default mode of all things that existed. The Fall corrupted man and the rest of the creation. Since then, everything is inclined towards disobedience and rebellion. The new-birth experience in Christ brings with it the opportunity for us to start walking in the will of God, pleasing Him; but that is not automatic because the flesh wars against the spirit. What is the solution then? We must pray and ask God to “bend us,” to make us pliable, to make our hearts tender and willing to perform His pleasure. Yes, we must sincerely pray saying, “All of you and none of self.” If we are serious about that, we shall reach a level where we shall be able to say, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me,” (Galatians 2:20). That Galatians 2:20 level translates into the greatest heavenly reward for those committed to pleasing God.
Let us make it our aim to please God, seeing that we shall be rewarded for it. Go ahead and live for God; a crown of great glory awaits you. Become an A+ disciple and servant of Jesus, and thereby attain the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus (Philippians 3:14).
God bless you.