Seeking To Please Jesus

Daily Bread

Daily Bread Devotions by Chuck Myer Daily Bread Archive | Sign up for our resources

From the book of Ephesians we read,

“. . . for you were formerly darkness, but now you are light in the Lord; walk as children of light (for the fruit of the light consists in all goodness and righteousness and truth), trying to learn what is pleasing to the Lord.” (Ephesians 5:8-10 – NASB)

What is your ambition? What is it you seek after to accomplish? Who is it you desire to please? These are very legitimate questions that become very real to us when we come to the Scriptures.

The Bible paints a very vivid picture of those who are not saved verses those who are saved . . . . . a picture that portrays one group as “darkness” and the other as “light in the Lord.” And to those who are “light,” those who are “in the Lord,” God commands them to “walk as children of light.” And so, this is to be our ambition, our desire . . .

“Therefore also we have as our ambition, whether at home or absent, to be pleasing to Him” (II Corinthians 5:9 – NASB)

When one considers all that God has done for us in Christ, all that Jesus has accomplished for us who were “formerly . . . by nature children of wrath” (Ephesians 2:1-5), a new will sets into the heart, a new desire, a new ambition. It is to be “pleasing to Him,” to Christ. And this desire, this ambition, is “whether” we are “at home” (heaven) “or “absent” (still here on the earth, in the flesh).

And such we pursue our desire for “we have as our ambition,” as those who are disciples of Christ, to always be “trying to learn what is pleasing to the Lord.”

How do we learn what is “pleasing” to Jesus? We get into His Word! We read it and we study it so that it becomes that which transforms our mind (Romans 12:1-2), our thinking, and teaches us what is “pleasing to Him.”

Take note that from our text Paul writes that the “fruit of the light consists in all goodness and righteousness and truth.” Ahhhhhh . . . and thus we know the substance of what we desire after so that, as we pursue our ambition to “learn what is pleasing to the Lord,” from His Word (note John 17:17), we know what the “light . . . consists” of and the distinguishing characteristics of it.

Brethren, when you examine yourself against the call of the Word of God, to now “walk as children of light,” what do you find your heart’s ambition to be? Those of the new birth, who “were formerly darkness but now are light,” they are commanded to “walk as children of light,” to order their behavior in such a way as to be seeking to please Jesus. Is that what you find in self-examination to be your desire, your ambition?

Have a good day brethren . . . and as you walk, may your ambition be that the fruit of the light of a life lived for Christ be evident in you.

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