Make God Smile - July 22, 2013

Numbers 6:25
25 May the Lord smile on you and be gracious to you.

Ephesians 5:10
10 Carefully determine what pleases the Lord.

Genesis 6:8
8 But Noah found favor with the Lord.

Since pleasing God is the first purpose of your life, your most important task is to discover how to do that. The Bible says, "Figure out what will please Christ, and then do it." (Ephesians 5:10 MSG)

Fortunately, the Bible gives us a clear example of a life that gives pleasure to God. The man's name was Noah.

In Noah's day, the entire world had become morally bankrupt. Everyone lived for his or her own pleasure, not God's. God couldn't find anyone on earth interested in pleasing him, so he was grieved and regretted making man. God became so disgusted with the human race that he considered wiping it out.

But there was one man who made God smile. The Bible says, "Noah was a pleasure to the Lord." (Genesis 6:8 LB)

God, in a sense, said, "This guy brings me pleasure. He makes me smile. I'll start over with his family." Because Noah brought pleasure to God, you and I are alive today.

The time that we spend with God is really important, the undivided attention goes to Him as we try to speak with Him through prayer or meditation. Living in the western civilization, we're so easily distracted by our surroundings to a point where it can lead us away from our time with God. It's always dependant on our schedule, as He's always waiting for a small portion of our day for us to talk to Him.

He can only be happy because He gave us the free will to choose. Simply, I think God is pleased when He sees us making Christ-like decisions and having a similar mentality. He leaves us out on the open road to make our own choices for a reason, hoping we'll turn the right direction.

Firstly, I had to laugh because of the analogy between pleasuring God and Noah pleasuring God and surviving the flood because of that.

I guess one thing to NOT get from the devotional is that we're going to die if we don't pleasure God.

But really; if God spent so much time to give us this wonderful life on Earth and all these extravagant luxuries, I think we have to spend time trying to make him happy to the best of our abilities. Instead of giving God pleasure, more akin to THANKING God and therefore making him happy.

We have all of our choices and paths laid out in front of us, but I think that through choosing the walk of Jesus Christ, God becomes ecstatic, which is kind of a nice way to give back to the one who gave everybody life.

Not long ago I was talkling to someone about how we are decendants of the same person if we go back in time far enough. Most will say that adam and eve started the human race but then when you think about it, Noah and his family we're the ones who restarted the human race again.

But anyways, I felt that this devo had a general topic on pleasing God. He is our father so shouldn't we be constantly having a good relationship with him? There are many distractions in this world but we need to remember our priorities and the importance in our relationship with our father.
God has done so much for us and we should be grateful and at least spend some time with him everyday.