Jeff Adams

That’s a question Lee asked in reply to my most recent post. I thought it was a great question and worthy to be considered. In fact, it reminded me of something that happened when I first arrived back in Kansas City as senior pastor.

A young man then on our staff had a wonderful wit, and one day he commented that he heard many people in church exclaim, “Well, bless God!” He thought that expression was hilarious.  God is the one who blesses us, he remarked. How could we possibly think that we could bless him?

I’m not sure how well this young pastor had read his Bible at that time in his life.  If you would just take your favorite Bible software and look only in the Psalms for where the words Lord and bless appear together, you will be amazed at how many times the psalmist exclaims something like Bless the Lord, o my soul! (Psalm 103:2).

Back to the point – exactly how do we bless God? Or, how do we give God joy? I think this is a wonderfully insightful question because all too often our image of God is of a stern, austere, inaccessible,  even angry God sitting on his throne in Heaven just waiting to zap into oblivion anyone who dares to sin. Rather than focus on how to stay out of trouble, wouldn’t it be better to concentrate on how we can bring joy to God? If we spent more energy aiming to please God and give him joy, we probably wouldn’t find as many opportunities to sin.

Basically, I believe we could all begin to explore the answer to this question by simply asking ourselves how a child brings joy to a parent. Sure, parents love for their kids to obey. But it is much more than that, isn’t it?

Let me list just a few of many scriptures that could be mentioned as examples of ways that we can give God joy.  You can look up the verses for yourself, and I am sure you can give many more examples in addition to these.

• God loves it when we obey him not just because we have to, or because we are afraid what will happen if we don’t, but simply because we have given ourselves to him, heart, mind and soul. Deuteronomy 30:8-10
• The intimacy of our relationship with God fills him with unspeakable joy, just like the intimacy of bride and bridegroom. Isaiah 62:5
• God rejoices to save us, solve our problems, fix things for us, and make us feel secure. Zephaniah 3:17
• God loves it when we genuinely respect and trust him so completely that we always hope in his mercy toward us. No matter what, we know that he ultimately loves us. Psalm 147:11
• What gives God joy is to see that we are filled with joy. Isaiah 65:19
• It gives God joy when we do good. Jeremiah 32:41

Could we not say the same thing about how our children give us joy? Or, is this not how we gave joy to our own parents?

This entry was posted on Monday, September 14th, 2009 at 10:16 pm and is filed under Scriptural Application for Everyday Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.