Are you at the pleasing place in your life?  There is such a place, where full rest is found no matter what the circumstances.

    Often we are in rebellion against the Lord’s will.  We may be searching for His will, but we are not willing to do it even if we find it.  Sometimes we know what His will is in a given situation, but we still are not willing to do it.  Whenever we are in rebellion we lose our joy, and we experience the correction of the Lord as He seeks to lead us back to the pathway of His will.  We may blame our problems on others, but they have come because of our own rebellious hearts.  The only way to fix things is to begin to do what God wants us to do.

    But even then we may not have joy and peace, because there may be resistance to His will.  We are where we should be, doing what we should do, but we don’t want to.  We are like the little boy who, when his daddy told him to sit down and be quiet, obeyed, but muttered under his breath, “I’m still standing up inside.”  Doing God’s will while “standing up inside” doesn’t produce the effects in our lives that will be there when our hearts are right.

    Sometimes we go beyond rebellion and resistance to resignation.  This is what actually happens on occasion when we say we have “surrendered” to God’s will.  We are no longer fighting God’s will either actively by rebellion or passively by resistance.  We are engaged in the doing of God’s will day by day, but we are not very happy about it.  We have concluded this is God’s will for us, and we have given ourselves to it unreservedly, but there is a deadness in our lives and in our service.  We are simply surrendered, or resigned to doing God’s will, as if we had no choice.

    What we need is to go a step beyond to release.  We find that at “The Pleasing Place.”  In Colossians 1:9-12, Paul prays that we will have a knowledge of God’s will that will produce a walk that is worthy of the Lord: a fruitful life, characterized by an increasing knowledge of God, a growing power to find joy in patience and longsuffering, and a continual spirit of thankfulness to God.

    But how do we get to this pleasing place?  The secret is found in the words, “unto all pleasing.”  This is a reference not simply to surrender, but to preference.  It is not that our doing of God’s will pleases God, but that it pleases us.  In fact, it is a matter of preferring God’s will to our own.  It was said concerning Jesus, “I delight to do thy will, O my God.”  (Psalm 40:8).  That is where Jesus found joy and peace.  It pleased Him to do God’s will.

    When we deliberately choose the will of God over our own will, then go beyond that act of free choice to actually preferring God’s will, believing it to be for our good and God’s glory, we find release.

    We are at “The Pleasing Place.”