Today we’ll just get right into it at this point. We are continuing with the series, Walk by Faith, and we’re working through 2 Corinthians 5 where Paul says, for we walk by faith and not by sight. That was included in our text last week.
Now we will move on to verse 8, 2 Corinthians 5 verse 8 through verse 10. I’ll tell you in advance, this is one of those texts that when I read, it just kind of stopped me in my tracks. I’d seen it before, but if I was really going to dig into this, it was going to be interesting.
I found myself praying about it, thinking about it, studying it, trying to understand the concept of pleasing God. Sometimes it just doesn’t seem like there’s anything we can do to please God, but if we are walking by faith and not by sight, that pleases God. And so it’s a pretty amazing concept to think of how we can praise God.
Let me just read the text. Oh yeah, if you haven’t done it, open your Bible apps or get out your Bible. We are going to, we’re in 2 Corinthians 5 verses 8 through 10, but we’re also going to rely heavily on Psalm 16, Psalm 34, and Psalm 103 that I think feed really well into our theme today of pleasing God.
We’re also going to look at 1 Thessalonians 5 and it informs quite a bit. And actually, 2 Corinthians 5 probably enlivens 1 Thessalonians, which might even be more well known to you. Our text in 2 Corinthians 5 says this, we are of good courage, I say, and prefer rather to be absent from the body and to be at home in the Lord.
Therefore we also have as our ambition, whether at home or absent, to be pleasing to Him. For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may be recompensed for his deeds in the body, according to what he has done, whether good or bad. Now what’s really amazing about this to me is that we can please God.
Now the truth is, we normally trust our own senses and we live to please ourselves. We might even live to please others, but when we learn to walk by our seventh sense, faith offers the only road to please God. Now, if you think about these verses pretty carefully, it should jump out very, immediately should jump out what is false religion and what is true religion.
False religion says God’s goal is to do what we want, to pleasure our earthly deeds. There is a lot in pop Christianity today that says that’s God’s goal. He wants to make your dreams come true.
He wants to do whatever you want. And then there’s another one that I think is false religion that says we can’t please God, but we can only appease God. Now that appeasing is actually some sort of a pagan influence to appease God.
Like there were sacrifices that used to be offered, but through Jesus, we have the perfect sacrifice. You see, Jesus is the only one who could actually appease God. Only the son, the perfect son could appease the perfect father.
So the appeasement of God, which means to satisfy or to quench the wrath of God, the work’s already done there. We think, we still tend to think and fall back on that we need to appease God, that we need to do just enough for God to love us. But the truth is the work’s already been done through Jesus.
So anything that is false religion strays from the fact that Jesus has already done this for us. So what do we do with Jesus? It means we repent and we turn to God and we trust in God and we receive Jesus as our Lord and Savior. And then we’re on this amazing path where our goal or our aim is to please God.
Now I looked up in several, the New King James, the ESV, the NRSV, the NASB versions of the Bible all say aim in verse 8. The NASB says ambition is whether we are home or absent is pleasing him. The NIV says it’s our goal. John Wesley’s notes on 2 Corinthians 5-9 say the only ambition which has a place in a Christian, this is it.
The only ambition we should have is to please God, whether present in the body or absent from it. So in other words, we live as if we are at heaven. We live as we are standing in the throne room right now before God wanting to please him, knowing Jesus is the one who appeased him, but we please him.
And how do we do this? We have been talking in all our Hope Builders groups, which if you didn’t know now we have four different Hope Builders groups. We have been really digging into the transformational questions on how is your soul, how are your spiritual disciplines, and what have you done for Jesus since we last met? And then working on setting spiritual goals. And the question came up, what are spiritual goals? Now according to this, our only goal, our main goal, and we fill it in with how, is to please God.
So what you can do if you have something to write on, I have an acronym with the G-O-A-L, and it’s going to build to show how biblically we can please God. Now in the notes to the Reform Study Bible on a section on pleasing God, the authors say, it is a familiar truth that every Christian’s overriding purpose must be to glorify God. Every Christian has a personal calling to please God.
Faith, generosity, obedience, single-mindedness, and Christian service. So pleasing God is also very connected to blessing God. So that’s one of the things my mind has just been going over, how the Psalms talk about blessing God.
And I remember reading when David talks about blessing God, it just seems the opposite, that we usually ask God to bless us, that God is the blesser. But according to the Bible, we can bless God too. And what is this blessing? How does this blessing occur? The G of the goal is grace.
It’s a feeling I get, and I’m saying feeling because this is a life experience, like living in God’s good graces, or sometimes I think of it as living in the grace zone, where you are walking with God, where you’re walking by faith and not by sight, where his will is more clear and you want nothing more than to please God, where you have repented, you believed, and now you want to follow Jesus. That grace, that amazing grace he has, it’s kind of foundational to Wesleyan theology, that it’s all by God’s grace. It’s not by our doing.
It’s God’s grace through provenience, that his grace is working out there, be honest, and convicting us to come to God, through justification, that when we receive Christ, when we repent, that we are justified, and we are reconciled back to God. And then it’s sanctification, where we grow in grace and love of God. Psalm 16, 1 and 2, if you have that, take a look at this.
I take refuge in you. I have no part, no good apart from you. Preserve me, O God, for I take refuge in you.
I say to the Lord, you are my Lord, and I have no good apart from you. You see, Jesus said this pretty similarly in John 15, 5. He said, I am the vine and you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, it is that bears much fruit.
For apart from me you can do nothing. This grace zone that has to do with pleasing God means you have a personal connection with God. This connection is amazing, that we recognize that our power comes from God, and our hope comes from God, and the grace of God is what draws us in and sends us out to do whatever God has called us to do.
The presence is kind of like whether you are a golfer or you play baseball, on the bat or on the club, there is a spot that you hit it called the sweet spot, that you get the most difference. My heart is for you to live in the sweet spot of God, of God’s grace. Psalm 16, 11 says this, you make known to me the path of life.
In your presence there is fullness of joy. At your right hand are the pleasures forevermore. The path of life says we live in God’s presence, that each day we are in God’s presence.
Not just that provenient presence where God is omnipresent, God is everywhere, but that we are connected to God through Jesus Christ, and it drives everything in our lives. It’s personal. There’s redemption involved, there’s reconciliation involved, and there’s repentance.
Growing in grace, the ultimate goal is full sanctification or perfection in love, that with this full sanctification we not only are saved by grace, but we have grown in grace, and we have Christ in us. First Thessalonians 5, 23 and 24 says, now may the God of peace himself sanctify you completely, and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, He who calls you is faithful. He will surely do it.
Full sanctification, walking by faith and not by sight, in every moment is not of us, it’s of us trusting in God and knowing how good God is. And that takes us to the O, which means obey. Obey is not a word that Americans often love.
Obey seems like it takes our independence away, but actually through obedience in God, we find freedom in Christ, freedom from sin, freedom from the snares of this world, freedom from the things that hold us back from that full sanctification, that wonderful relationship with God where we walk by faith and we trust in God. That we trust, we follow, we revere or fear. Jesus said to the disciples, simply follow me.
That’s the obedience we have as we follow Jesus and we trust in God’s word. Psalm 103, 20 through 22 says, bless the Lord. Now, when you go back, if you go back, please go back and read all of Psalm 16, all of Psalm 34, and all of Psalm 103.
I picked these because they say, all of them say, bless the Lord, O my soul. May your soul bless the Lord. And they each show different ways in which our souls can bless the Lord, that we can bring joy to the Lord, that we can please God.
Psalm 103, 20 through 22 again says, bless the Lord, O you his angels, you mighty ones who do his word, obeying the voice of his word. Bless the Lord, all his hosts, his ministers who do his will. Bless the Lord, all his works in all places of his dominion.
Bless the Lord, O my soul. Obedience is something that is kind of just means we give in to God. We learn who God is and we trust him more fully and completely.
Psalm 16, 7 and 8 says, I bless the Lord who gives me counsel. In the night also my heart instructs me. I have set the Lord always before me because he is at my right hand.
He is my power. I shall not be shaken. We trust in the power of God, not in the power of ourselves, not in our own might, not in our own will, not in our own knowledge or wisdom, but in the wisdom of God, which is poured in our heart through walking with Christ every day.
That’s the obedience we have that blesses the Lord. Psalm 34, 11 says, come, O children, listen to me. I will teach you the fear of the Lord, the reverence of the Lord, the looking at God and saying, you are my king.
I am your servant. Whatever you have for me, I will do. I will trust in you more every day because we learn to trust in a perfect God whose will is perfect, who gives us the ability when we fully surrender to God that God’s will becomes our own personal will and he has so much better for us in store than we could even ask or imagine.
The more we trust, the more we obey. The more we obey, the more we surrender. The more we surrender, the more we please God.
We obey God’s word. We’re in God’s word. God’s word is on our hearts.
God speaks to us through his word. God speaks to us through prayer. That it’s not about growing in grace and growing in faith and walking by faith isn’t by trying harder.
It’s by letting God be God. It’s by trusting in God and knowing that God is so amazing that we could trust him with every detail of our lives. Everything is of God.
And thinking of that, the A of the goal is acknowledge. That we acknowledge God. How many times in our lives have we experienced stress or hurt or anger or pain and it eats us up and we don’t just stop to acknowledge God.
Matthew 10, 31, Jesus says, whoever acknowledges me before others, I will also acknowledge before my father in heaven. In other words, as Paul is talking in 2 Corinthians about whether we’re in the body as in on the earth or out of the body, which is in heaven, in the presence of God all the time, that if we acknowledge God, Jesus acknowledges us before the father. You want to please God.
You want to hear that well done, good and faithful servant. One of the ways we do that is to acknowledge God. Psalm 103, the first two verses tell us about how we need to remember, to call upon, and God alone, to God alone and to others, that we remember God before others, that we acknowledge God in our own hearts and we acknowledge God before others, even when it’s uncomfortable.
Bless the Lord, oh my soul, and all that is within me. Bless his holy name. Bless the Lord, oh my soul, and forget not all his benefits.
And then the psalm does what the psalms do as they go on to list all the wonderful things of God. When it seems tough to acknowledge God, take a time to stop when you feel like it’s overwhelming and recognize God. Let God remind you of all the great things he has done and how good he is.
And then we have the strength to acknowledge God before others. In fact, biblically, where it’s okay to boast is to boast in God. Psalm 34 too says, my soul makes its boast in God.
Let the humble hear and be glad. That’s where we say, hey, it’s not me. It’s Jesus.
Where someone says, thank you for doing that, or how did you do this, or why would you care about me? We say, it’s all God. God even takes us and turns us into people who can boast for God and let others know how amazing God is. Now, if we go to 1 Thessalonians 5, 17 through 19, these verses are going to be familiar.
Pray without ceasing. Give thanks in all circumstances, for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. Do not quench the spirit.
Wherever you catch yourself during the day, some people call it a breath prayer, like you just say, thank you, Jesus. Thank you, God. Help me.
Guide me. Help me to please you. Stop and just say those breath prayers.
Praying without ceasing, it doesn’t mean you’re always alone and praying. It means you acknowledge God at every point. Whether things are good, whether things are tough, whether things are hard, we stop and we acknowledge God.
And it pleases him, especially because when we acknowledge God in our lives and to others, Jesus himself acknowledges us before the Father. Can you imagine how amazing it is that we can please God? Finally, the L. No big surprise. The L is love.
Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. Our ambition is to love God because that pleases God. Our goal is to please God and that comes through loving God with all that we are, all that we have, and all that we do.
We do things out of love for the Father that are so amazing. Love means something similar to please. If you love someone, you want to please them.
Not just appease them so they’re not mad at you, but please them so you can walk together. It’s our ambition. Mary talks about how my soul magnifies the Lord, which means my soul recognizes that God is big.
I magnify God. I see how much bigger God is than me. I praise God.
I worship God. Now, if you take love to the full extreme and you think of desire or to love or to devotion, love is connected to devotion. So love is worship also means devotion.
In love of God, we worship God. We don’t just go through the motions in worship. We don’t just sing the words precisely.
We sing to an audience of one for God because of love. Psalm 34 9 says, the result tells us that the result of obedience is love. Now in Psalm 34, when we were talking about obedience, we, here it is, when we were talking about obeying God, the O, it says, bless the Lord who gives me counsel in the night.
Also, my heart instructs me. I’ve set the Lord always before me because he is at my right hand. I shall not be shaken.
Then in nine, it says, therefore, meaning the result of blessing the Lord is therefore my heart will be glad and my whole being rejoices. My flesh also dwells secure that when we love God, our whole being, all our heart, mind, soul, and strength rejoices in God, praises God, worships God, gives God everything. And through that worship, we have transformation and it gives us the strength to live and walk by faith and not by sight.
Psalm 34 1 also says, I will bless the Lord at all times. His praise shall continually be in my mouth. Do we just love God when we see God doing something or when God does what we want God to do? Or do we love God through everything, knowing that he will walk with us when we walk by faith and not by sight? We know he’s present with us.
We know he cares about us and loves us. First John says he first loved us, so we love him. Psalm 34 8 says, oh, taste and see that the Lord is good.
Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him. Now, when I see that word refuge, I also think of being in that grace zone, being there present with God, whether here on earth or in heaven, being right there with God, that God gives us strength. God gives us what we talked about last week in good courage.
Taste and see that the Lord is good. Then we can trust him, that we can not only trust him, but we love him. We love him with all that we are.
Basically, it means let God be God. Trust that whatever you face, God has a plan. God will guide you through it.
That in the end, for everyone who loves God, he’ll work it out for the good, because God is good. In other words, when we live in that grace zone, when we live by grace, we live by the grace of God, we learn to obey God, we acknowledge God in all circumstances, and we love God, and we please him. It makes the Psalms come alive to know when we say, blessed the Lord, O my soul, that you, as a follower of Jesus Christ, as an imperfect person, you can please God.
You can be God’s children who please their heavenly Father here on earth. Paul’s words in 2 Corinthians just take my breath away, to be pleasing to him. That’s our ambition.
That’s our aim. That’s our goal. Here on earth, whether we stand before him in judgment, we can hear the words, well done, good and faithful servant.
You please me. Let’s pray. Almighty God, thank you so much that you love us.
Thank you so much that somehow, despite all the things we trip and fall and mess up and hurt others, and as many times as we’ve been hurt, that seems to separate us from you, that you can be blessed by us, that we can please you put it on our hearts as we grow in faith, God, to walk by faith. Our only aim, our greatest goal, our hope in all that we do is to please you. I pray that today you have been pleased by our worship and that you will give us the grace and the strength we need to please you in all circumstances.
It’s so amazing to be in love with the Almighty God who is so amazing. We thank you for the church. We thank you for keeping us safe.
And we thank you for keeping us warm. Bless those who need warmth right now. Bless those who need shelter right now.
Help us, God, to please you by acknowledging you before alone and before other people in all things. You’re so amazing. Thank you, God, for loving us through everything.
In Jesus’ name, amen. I just pray that you can take some time and meditate.