Pleasing God

DEVOTION

HEBREWS

PLEASING GOD

Heb 13:15-16

15 Through Jesus, therefore, let us continually offer to God a sacrifice of praise — the fruit of lips that confess his name. 16 And do not forget to do good and to share with others, for with such sacrifices God is pleased.

NIV

Although there is no longer any need to kill animals in order to sacrifice their blood to God, as we see here, we still need to offer God a sacrifice of praise. It would seem only natural that within a worship service at church we sing songs of praise to God. Yet it also seems that in the postmodern era many songs are not about praising God. So how do we offer him a sacrifice of praise? Is it in our daily lives? When something goes right, are the first words from our lips, “Praise God” or “Thank you Jesus”? It appears that word continually would imply that is want it means, continually. So if we do offer sacrifices of praise in church and then go about grumbling about things, or life in general, our boss, our job, our house, our car, our clothes, our lack of money, or whatever else we seem to be a tad bit dissatisfied with during the week, we are in deep trouble, for we are being disobedient to God. We need to continually have His name upon our lips, and that only occurs with His name is continually upon our thoughts. If we are always thinking about ourselves, we cannot be thinking about Him, and therefore we will not praise His name at all times. This will also bring about our actions to be less self-orientated and then we just might be able to do some good and to share with others. Sometimes just keeping quiet and actually listening to others is doing this good. How many times are we hoping someone will stop talking about themselves so we can interject something about us? Are we thinking about us, or about bringing God a sacrifice of praise in doing good and sharing with others? Than do we stand up and tell how much good we have done, and how much we have shared with others? Do we lift ourselves up for our actions or do we keep silent or give praise to God? Do we tell others how good they will feel by doing good and sharing with others? By doing that we only feed their self-oriented greed for self-praise. It would appear we need to get us out of the way, and simply praise God in and for all things we have and do, and do that all day long every day of our lives. This will be pleasing God.