How to Please God Everyday!

It seems easy to answer this question: How can we please God everyday? The easy answer is: You can please God simply by obeying him, loving him and serving him everyday.

The cynic may ask: Why do you still want to please God, when he is already God? He is perfect, he does not need anything. He does not need us in order to be himself. He does not need to be pleased.

On the other hand there are people everywhere, Christians and non-Christians, who desire to please God everyday. The proof of this is the daily attendance in church or temple services, whether Mass or other prayer services, or Bible study groups or prayer meetings, or rituals and sacrifices. Thousands upon thousands of people do want to please God.

To those who sincerely want to please God everyday, this article is addressed.

To those who think that pleasing God is a simple matter of obeying him I have this observation to give. Deep within himself/herself the human being knows that simply obeying God even in all his commandments does not really satisfy him/her, his/her desires and expectations in life. There is something more that he/she wants to do besides obeying God.

That is why we have that story of a man who approached Jesus and said that he has obeyed God's commandments since his youth but he wants something more in his life. He expected Jesus to give this to him, what seemed lacking in his life.

The reply of Jesus was that he was to sell all he had, give the proceeds to the poor, and follow him. At this point this man was torn between following God all the way or clinging to his earthly possessions. He chose the latter. He decided not to please God.

Thus pleasing God is not as simple as obeying his commandments. There is something more required. Pleasing God everyday is not so easy and simple. When the man was given the chance to please God, he chose to please himself by clinging to his possessions. It was most difficult for him to please God.

How then do we please God everyday? Obviously it starts with obeying him, his laws and rules as revealed to us in books written under his inspiration, like the Bible, and as made known to our mind during prayer time and outside of prayer time. This is the minimum requirement in pleasing God but it is not the full requirement.

There is a fuller, deeper way of pleasing God, a way that he desires all of us to have because it is a way which also most satisfies our yearning to please God. Stated simply it is this: We please God everyday by enjoying him everyday. Or to put it in another way, God is most pleased with us everyday if we enjoy him more and more everyday.

The idea of enjoying God may seem new to most people but it is a dimension of our life which most of us lack. We were taught to obey God, to fear him, to love him, to serve him. But to enjoy God was not taught or given emphasis during our early years in learning about God.

We enjoy good food, a warm relationship, a beautiful sight, but to say that we enjoy God seems not heard of or not proper. But if we come to think of it seriously, the reason why God wants us to fear him, to obey him, love him and serve him, is in order that we may come to enjoy him. This can be proved by looking at the nature of things.

If we reflect on the nature of things around us, we can conclude sooner or later that they are there for us to enjoy: the taste of good food, the comfort of our clothing, the safety of our homes, our good health, our educational attainment, our successes in life. If this is so, if these things are enjoyable, shall we not conclude that the one who ultimately created all these things is also an enjoyable being? For where did these things get their quality of being enjoyable if not from their source, their creator?

Therefore God is the supremely enjoyable being. When Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo, realized this, he exclaimed, "O Beauty, so ancient and so new, too late have I loved you!" But how can we enjoy God everyday when we have so many things to do? We have work at home, in the field, in the offices, in the institutions we work. The answer to this question is: In the very things that we do we enjoy God, even in the very pots and pans in the kitchen, as Teresa of Avila once wrote.

There is a prayer in the book called The Book of Privy Counseling which expresses this truth clearly and yet very briefly. The prayer runs this way: "That which I am and have, I offer to you, O Lord, for you are it entirely." In other words God is what I am and have. (But do not reverse the subject and predicate, saying, what I am and have is God. This would be pantheism, the belief that everything is God.) God is in me and in everything I see, think, say and do.

When we realize this, that God is in everything, then we can enjoy God in everything. And enjoying him we please him. We enjoy God every day and we shall please him every day. For this is what he desires of us to do, that we simply enjoy him. And in enjoying him we please him most.