Do you want to please Jesus?
Do you really want to be pleasing onto God? Then you’re going to have to learn what it means to be in faith, because that’s what the Bible tells us pleases God:
“But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him.”
Hebrews 11:6, KJV
Many times when we hear this, we think of faith to move mountains or raise the dead, but in reality, we overlook many other areas where God wants us to get in faith. Do you struggle with forgiving yourself? If so, do you realize that by failing to forgive yourself, you are denying what Christ has done for you? If God has forgiven you, but you fail to forgive yourself, then you don’t really believe what Jesus did. You don’t see yourself as a forgiven person who Christ has paid the debt for. Such a position dishonors what Jesus did for you, it almost mocks the great and terrible price that He paid for you on the Cross! When working with people who struggle with self-unforgiveness, I like to look them in the eyes and ask them, “If it pleased Jesus for you to forgive yourself, would you do it for Him?”
The reality is that when you look at the mirror at yourself, and see yourself as a less than amazing person, you are failing to see who God made you to be. You would never walk into God’s art gallery and point at the picture that Jesus Himself painted, and exclaim “Gosh that’s ugly! Who painted that?” But yet that’s exactly what we do when we put ourselves down after God Himself made us the person we are.
I will tell you what pleases Jesus, it is when we recognize what He did for us, and see how it applies to us personally. It pleases Him when we see ourselves as that new creation that He had paid a steep price so that we might be. It pleases Him when we recognize and honor the payment that He made on our behalf on the Cross by forgiving ourselves because it honors what He did for us. It honors what He did when we see ourselves as worthy to receive all the benefits of the New Covenant that He made with us such as our physical healing, blessings in our finances, deliverance, and so forth. What is this business about God’s own children not being worthy to receive the benefits of the Cross? What kind of self-image do we carry around when we feel like we aren’t worthy to receive those things?
It pleases God when we see ourselves as we are in Christ, just as if we’ve never sinned, or that person who should have no more conscienceness of sin (see Hebrews 10:2), who has been made worthy to receive all the benefits of the New Covenant!
Blessings in Christ,
Robert