Click Here to Download the Audio Version
Something I hate doing is shopping. Normally, I never enter a store unless I know exactly what I want. I go straight to the item, purchase it, and leave. That’s easy to do if you know what you want. However, what if you’re buying something for someone else, and that someone else hasn’t told you what to get? That means you have to make a decision yourself and choose something on your own.
When it comes to pleasing the Lord, it’s fortunately much easier to provide what He wants, because He has told us everything He expects. For example, at the sixth chapter of Romans, Paul noted at verse seventeen that men were sinner until they obeyed from the heart the form of doctrine delivered unto them. If you pay attention, you can learn a great deal from this passage about what God expects of us.
First of all, He expects us to be obedient. Jesus had already pointed out the futility involved with calling upon Him as Lord while not doing as He said. Obviously, it’s quite hypocritical to call Him Lord while in rebellion against Him.
Also, not everything practiced in the name of religion is pleasing to the Lord; that is, all obedience to the Lord’s will is religious, but not everything religious is the Lord’s will. Denominational doctrines contain traditions and the will of mortals, all of which are foreign to Biblical truth. Therefore, Paul noted that one must obey the form of doctrine delivered by the inspired men of his day, which doctrine is now recorded for us in the form of scripture.
That alone can make a man pleasing to God, but, as Paul continued, it must be obeyed from the heart. It’s quite possible to go through the motions of mechanical obedience. However, until that obedience comes from the heart, God is still not pleased. Man is not likely to obey from the heart until he gives to the Lord something else He expects of us; our love.
At Matthew chapter twenty-two, we’re taught beginning at verse thirty-seven that we’re to love God with all the heart, soul, and mind. Obedience without love is not obedience from the heart. On the other hand, to obey with both the heart and love is to give one’s self indeed to God. After all, that is something else the Lord expects of us; ourselves.
At First Corinthians chapter six, Paul writes at verses nineteen and twenty that we are the temple of God through the spirit, and that we do not belong to ourselves for the reason that we are bought with the price of the Blood of the Son of God. Since redeemed ones rightfully belong to God, it’s fitting that what is rightfully God’s be delivered unto Him with dispatch.
If you want to offer the Lord something He really wants, give Him those things for which He has asked; obedience, your heart, your love, yourself.