Pleasing God

 

DEVOTION

THE 1^ST LETTER OF JOHN

PLEASING TO GOD

1 John 3:21-24

21 Dear friends, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have confidence before God 22 and receive from him anything we ask, because we obey his commands and do what pleases him. 23 And this is his command: to believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and to love one another as he commanded us. 24 Those who obey his commands live in him, and he in them. And this is how we know that he lives in us: We know it by the Spirit he gave us.

NIV

The only reason our hearts would condemn us is if we truly did not believe in Jesus. Even when we do fail at times, and yield to some temptation, we are not condemning ourselves. We have to always remember that there is, therefore, no condemnation for those who are Christ Jesus, because through Jesus the law of the Spirit and life has set us free from the law of sin and death. It is always our desire to have this confidence before God. We do not want to sin. However, just as Paul also confessed, we do what we do not want to do, and we do not do what we want to do, all of the time. There are times we do restrain ourselves, and there are times we do that which is right, but neither of those is one hundred percent of the time. However, the fact still remains we are in Christ Jesus and He is in us, therefore we have been set free from the law of sin and death and we live in Christ and by the law of the Spirit and life. Because we have this confidence, John is reminding us that we receive from God anything we ask, because we obey his commands and do want pleases him. Here is where the plain and simple truth is. The first and foremost thing that pleases God is that we believe in his Son, Jesus. The second is that we love one another. Those are the two commands that Jesus gave us. To love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength and to love our neighbor as ourselves. Here John sort of reverses that in the sense that God wants us to love Jesus, but that still is the same. We have looked at and are always aware of how God defines love. First, by sending his Son to lay down his life for us. Second, he defines how our love is expressed as he inspired Paul to write in his letter to the Corinthians. So then as we continue to live in Jesus, as we continue to trust in Him for our life, we desire to fulfill that which God desires in us. First, we believe in Jesus Christ with our whole heart. We trust in Jesus, first for our salvation. There is no other way for us to attain eternal life. We trust in Jesus, second for our very life itself. We cannot ever go back to that life of sin and death since we crossed over to the life of love and light, having the Spirit live within us. Once we lived in ignorance of the life in Jesus. In that ignorance, we were condemning ourselves to a life of sin and death. But praise be to God and to our Lord Jesus Christ, that he shone his light into our hearts and we were awakened to the truth and through his power, we put to death that old self and we were born again, a new creature in Christ Jesus, full of love and life and we have all the confidence we would ever need because the Spirit, we were given, bears witness to our life in Jesus and that we are pleasing to God.