The Purpose Driven Life(19)

DAY NINE: WHAT MAKES GOD SMILE?



You don’t bring glory or pleasure to God by hiding your abilities or by trying to be someone else. You only bring him enjoyment by being you. Anytime you reject any part of yourself, you are rejecting God’s wisdom and sovereignty in creating you. God says, “You have no right to argue with your Creator. You are merely a clay pot shaped by a potter. The clay doesn’t ask, ‘Why did you make me this way?’”23

In the film Chariots of Fire, Olympic runner Eric Liddell says, “I believe God made me for a purpose, but he also made me fast, and when I run, I feel God’s pleasure.” Later he says, “To give up running would be to hold him in contempt.” There are no unspiritual abilities, just misused ones. Start using yours for God’s pleasure.

God also gains pleasure in watching you enjoy his creation. He gave you eyes to enjoy beauty, ears to enjoy sounds, your nose and taste buds to enjoy smells and tastes, and the nerves under your skin to enjoy touch. Every act of enjoyment becomes an act of worship when you thank God for it. In fact, the Bible says, “God…generously gives us everything for our enjoyment.”24

God even enjoys watching you sleep! When my children were small, I remember the deep satisfaction of watching them sleep. Sometimes the day had been filled with problems and disobedience, but asleep they looked contented, secure, and peaceful, and I was reminded of how much I love them.

My children didn’t have to do anything for me to enjoy them. I was happy to just watch them breathing, because I loved them so much. As their little chests would rise and fall, I’d smile, and sometimes tears of joy filled my eyes. When you are sleeping, God gazes at you with love, because you were his idea. He loves you as if you were the only person on earth.

Parents do not require their children to be perfect, or even mature, in order to enjoy them. They enjoy them at every stage of development. In the same way, God doesn’t wait for you to reach maturity before he starts liking you. He loves and enjoys you at every stage of your spiritual development.

You may have had unpleasable teachers or parents as you were growing up. Please don’t assume God feels that way about you. He knows you are incapable of being perfect or sinless. The Bible says, “He certainly knows what we are made of. He bears in mind that we are dust.”25

What God looks at is the attitude of your heart: Is pleasing him your deepest desire? This was Paul’s life goal: “More than anything else, however, we want to please him, whether in our home here or there.”26 When you live in light of eternity, your focus changes from “How much pleasure am I getting out of life?” to “How much pleasure is God getting out of my life?”

God is looking for people like Noah in the twenty-first century—people willing to live for the pleasure of God. The Bible says, “The Lord looks down from heaven on all mankind to see if there are any who are wise, who want to please God.”27

Will you make pleasing God the goal of your life? There is nothing that God won’t do for the person totally absorbed with this goal.


DAY NINE

THINKING ABOUT MY PURPOSE





Point to Ponder: God smiles when I trust him.





Verse to Remember: “The Lord is pleased with those who worship him and trust his love.” Psalm 147:11 (CEV)





Question to Consider: Since God knows what is best, in what areas of my life do I need to trust him most?





10

The Heart of Worship


Give yourselves to God…Surrender your whole being to him to be used for righteous purposes.

Romans 6:13 (TEV)





The heart of worship is surrender.

Surrender is an unpopular word, disliked almost as much as the word submission. It implies losing, and no one wants to be a loser. Surrender evokes the unpleasant images of admitting defeat in battle, forfeiting a game, or yielding to a stronger opponent. The word is almost always used in a negative context. Captured criminals surrender to authorities.

In today’s competitive culture we are taught to never give up and never give in—so we don’t hear much about surrendering. If winning is everything, surrendering is unthinkable. We would rather talk about winning, succeeding, overcoming, and conquering than yielding, submitting, obeying, and surrendering. But surrendering to God is the heart of worship. It is the natural response to God’s amazing love and mercy. We give ourselves to him, not out of fear or duty, but in love, “because he first loved us.”1

After spending eleven chapters of the book of Romans explaining God’s incredible grace to us, Paul urges us to fully surrender our lives to God in worship: “So then, my friends, because of God’s great mercy to us…offer yourselves as a living sacrifice to God, dedicated to his service and pleasing to him. This is the true worship that you should offer.”2