Can I please God? Am I and my works ever worthy enough for God to say, “I am well pleased with you?”
There was a time in my life that I would have answered that question, “Absolutely not. I am a sinner and can never walk worthy of the Lord in a way that pleases him. It is impossible for me to please him because he is perfectly holy and tolerates no sin. My righteousness is only and exclusively alien. Christ’s righteousness is all that God the Father sees. Christ pleases God. Christ is worthy, but nothing about me is worthy.”
But then I came across Scriptures such as Paul’s petition for the Colossians to be filled with the knowledge of God’s will in all spiritual wisdom and insight so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord fully pleasing to him (Col 1:9-10). The same inspired Paul, who speaks in Romans about the sinfulness of man and God’s provision of righteousness in Christ, also writes that we can walk worthy of the Lord and be fully pleasing to him. There are things that we can do—works—that please God.
Paul is not confused or contradicting himself. While it is true that apart from union with Christ, none of our works is pleasing to God, it is equally true that in Christ, works done in loving, obedient faith are pleasing to God. I even discovered that this is not “un-Calvinistic.” The Westminster Confession of Faith explains how Christians’ works are good works:
Yet notwithstanding, the persons of believers being accepted through Christ, their good works also are accepted in Him, not as though they were in this life wholly unblameable and unreprovable in God’s sight; but that He, looking upon them in His Son, is pleased to accept and reward that which is sincere, although accompanied with many weaknesses and imperfections.
(Westminster Confession of Faith, 16.6)
Salvation is not only from the consequences of sin, as if God provides Christ’s righteousness only to protect us from the fires of hell. Salvation is restorative, putting us back in the position to fulfill God’s original purpose for us. We are saved by grace and enabled to do the good works for which God created us. Paul says this in his letter to the Ephesians: “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast. For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.” (Eph 2:8-10) Good works are not the foundation of your salvation but the purpose and product of salvation in Christ.
This means such things as “good works” exist in a Christian’s life. Your works done in faith are pleasing to your heavenly Father. You are his child. He has gone to great lengths in love to redeem you. He loves you and delights in you and what you do.
“But my works aren’t perfect.” Correct. But think about how a good parent loves his child. Let’s say that your seven-year-old is learning pottery, woodburning, painting, or some other form of art. He is no master at his craft. But when he makes you something because he loves you and wants to give it to you as an expression of love, you accept it, not because it compares to the work of Michelangelo, Monet, or DaVinci, but because it expresses your child’s love.
Some of us see God becoming angry over what we present to him in our immaturity and weakness and destroying it because it isn’t perfect in every respect. That is not the God revealed in Christ. That God is a figment of your imagination or the product of wrong information. Your God and Father, who loves you infinitely more than you love your child, takes what you have done in love and displays it in his cosmic house to show the world, “See what my son/daughter did for me. I’m so proud of him/her. I will put this up in my cosmic house as a part of the new world I am building.” God can make cathedrals out of imperfect clay pots and stick-figure drawings. None of your work is in vain in the Lord (1 Cor 15:58).
Some of us have had fathers (and mothers) who were impossible to please. Since our parents are the first and primary living image of God in our lives, we think that God is like our parents. If you couple that with the teaching that God is implacable towards us, we always think, “I will never measure up. I can never do anything right. God is always standing there, ready to tell me what a bad job I’m doing so that he can punish me.” It is discouraging, to say the least. Some give up entirely and apostatize. Others, wanting to avoid hell, try to hang in there and live miserable lives of depression and anxiety.
You don’t need to live that way. Because you are united to Christ, God declares over you what he declared over Jesus, “This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased,” and “This is my beloved son in whom my soul delights.” Yes, you are still a sinner. Yes, your works are incomplete. But God, your Father, is pleased with your works and counts them worthy when you do them in loving obedience to him. God is pleased with you.
