1If God has given me a new nature and a new heart that is already righteous (Ephesians 4:24) - then my new nature is already pleasing to God. Now my flesh is not, but I am stuck with it until the day I die - and it is not going to be transformed. God is not in the business of transforming it, and neither should I. Romans 8:7 tells how the flesh cannot submit to God and it will not. The more I focus on living out of my new nature, the less the desires of the flesh will characterize my behavior.
So I have a new nature that is righteous and pleasing to God...so doing obedient things does not increase God's love or His pleasure. What pleases God is when I trust that what He says about me is true...and I then live accordingly. It is my trust that pleases God! This is Hebrews 11:6, "And without faith (I like to insert "trust" here - it is the verb form of "faith")...without trust it is impossible to please God."
So why do I obey? What causes it to be a reality in my life? It is because I trust...it is the result of my trust. Here is the principle: Obedience is always the evidence of my trust. It is not my effort to please Him.
Next post: How does this change my time with God in the Scriptures? Saturday, October 23.
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Hey Dad, theology police here again. I like almost all of this post, but I admit, I'm not sure about the sentence "God is not in the business of transforming it, and neither should I." I suppose it is true that he does not transform the old nature, he replaces it. But he IS in the business of transforming ME! And I am transformed as I obey through the power of the Spirit, and the old nature is mortified more and more, and the new nature takes over more and more. right?
ReplyDelete-jeff
Oh, one more thing... that last line says, "Obedience is always the evidence of my trust. It is not my effort to please him."
ReplyDeleteWhat if we said instead, "obedience is the result of the fact that I trust God, and therefore I desire to please him." ?
Jeff and Aubrey - Your first comment I can agree with - He is in the business of transforming me - it started with Him giving us a new nature and in a sense it continues as I live out of that new nature and mature. As I do that, I find I live out of the flesh less and less.
ReplyDeleteJeff and Aubrey - Pleasing God is a great longing. It is a great desire. It just can't be our primary motivation. It will trap me into a life of self-effort rather than trusting what He has already done. Make sense???
ReplyDeleteDad - (all these comments are from me, even though Aubrey was signed in as commenter the other day)
ReplyDeleteI was pondering this issue today (while I should have been pondering something else, no doubt), and I realized that there are two different ways of seeking to please God.
One is born out of a slavish fear that god is never really quite satisfied with us, but if we are good enough, then he will warm up to us.
But there is another way of trying to please God, a way that is born out of a childlike desire to please our loving father by doing those things which he desires for us. This is the way, no doubt, that the NT has in mind when it regularly tells us to obey in order to please God.
I think this distinction illuminates our disagreement. You have had some experience with the first option in the past, and realized that it is a dead end. But I'm sure that you would agree that if we have the second option in mind, then it is quite biblical to say that we ought to obey in order to please God (remembering, of course, that he is already pleased with us because of Jesus).
What do you think?
I would say it this way - My aim is always to please Him by trusting Him. Now I have pleasing in its proper place. And when I trust I wind up obeying. The trust in God that is pleasing to Him creates in us an opportunity, with faith as our basis, to then do those things that please Him.
ReplyDelete(The first way you mention is what so many are trapped in - it is the second way that I think we are trying to articulate in a way that doesn't loop people back to the first...and gives them a different biblical theology to build on. I sense you are working on the same thing.)
This may be putting too fine a point on it, but, in terms of logic, how do these compare...
ReplyDelete"Soap cleans the truck."
"I need the soap to clean the truck."
Hebrews says, "without faith/trust, it is impossible to please God." The double negative of that is "faith is necessary to please God."
This differs from saying "faith pleases God"
So, where I'm going is that Hebrews says faith is a necessary condition for pleasing God, which is different than saying it is a necessary and sufficient condition for pleasing God. I don't believe it says faith is the same thing as pleasing God.
Back to the analogy, I cannot clean the truck without soap, but cleaning the truck involves more than soap. Similarly, pleasing God involves more than trust or faith. There is no pleasing God without it, but it is insufficient in and of itself.
(??)