Faith – in Other Words - Part 3

Faith is the way, the means, by which we please God.  Pleasing someone you love, and respect is normal and healthy.  This kind of pleasing is not to be confused with ingratiating yourself or hoping for favours.  These forms of pleasing run dangerously close to appeasement, gaining the favour of the gods in hope of better days - pagan through and through. 

Pleasing God is something altogether different.  Pleasing God is agreeing with God, believing God by taking his word, his promises and perspective as truth - trust, in other words.  And this doesn’t have the volitivity of an emotive state, agreeing one day, and not the next – tossed by every wind.  James warns us this is an unstable person, incapable of receiving much anything from God. 

The writer of Hebrews states “without faith it is impossible to please him.”  ‘Impossible’ doesn’t give much breathing room.  This in essence means that nothing you initiate makes you pleasing to God.  Your best efforts are just that – your best efforts.  And the gap between our best efforts and his majesty, holiness, and love is as vast as the distances of the universe, which are incomprehensible, except as mathematical equations – that’s right, they are incomprehensible.

If we trust God, we will do his word, his will, so that our pleasing God is accompanied by action.  In fact, it could be argued and has, that it is the doing that declares the trusting, the believing, which pleases God - in other words.