And find out what pleases the Lord!

I have been reading the book of Ephesians over the last few days. It isn't the first time I have read through this epistle, but I came upon a verse that hit me as if it I had never seen it before. I have no doubt it will not be an immense "wow" to many reading this. This is my lesson from God today and may not be yours. But at least let me invite you to hear what He is teaching me:

Ephesians 5:10 and find out what pleases the Lord.

Put into context, Paul has just finished telling us in verse 9 that we are children of the light, so we should live as such, in kindness, truth and righteousness. That is joined to verse 10 with an "and": live as children of the light AND learn what pleases God!

That is filled with such a sense of welcoming adventure to me. Because I am a child of the light, I am invited, no, directed to learn what pleases my Lord.
I am not very skilled at digging into word studies, other than to look them up in the concordance and compare other uses of similar words. Thankfully, "pleases" isn't a difficult word to understand. It ranks right up there with "agreeable" and "acceptable". Our God isn't a God who hides these things from our understanding. He wants us to get it, so no hidden idioms here.

I believe that He brought me through Ephesians right after Romans to tie another bit into this growing time for me. I had another moment of reading verses I have memorized, yet perhaps never saw before. In particular, Romans 12:1.
"Therefore I urge you brothers,in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to the Lord-this is your spiritual act of worship."

So tonight I share this with you: we are directed to learn what pleases our God, and to offer ourselves, our very lives as our act of worship, thus pleasing Him. What a realization: our lives and the way we live them as we learn what pleases Him, is our act of worship! Astounding!

What please our God? I think Jesus summed it up very succinctly when He told us that the two greatest commandments are these: to love the Lord our God with all our hearts, all our minds, all our bodies and all our souls; and to love our neighbor as ourself (and He was plenty clear about who our neighbor is, so no wiggle room for us).

But the commandments don't please the Lord, it is our obedience to Him that pleases Him! Those commandments are words in a book until we take them to heart and live them from a place of obeying Him. A life lived in obedience will reflect consideration of the following:

~to care for the orphans and widows in their distress
~to delight ourselves in the Lord
~to become like little children (humble, trusting, obedient)
~to be transformed to His image, not conformed to this world

And hundreds of other ways.

I am struck by the choice of words in the Bible: Delight, Desire, Learn. These are words of participation, of accepting the invitation to enter into a relational adventure with God. I am so excited about being one of His kids. He is an awesome God, this Father of mine! Not only does He own all the cattle on a thousand hillsides, He also owns my heart.