The Attainable Ambition of Pleasing God

The week's discussion explores what it means to pursue a life wholly devoted to God, without compromise or comparison, even in moments of discouragement, distraction, or difficulty. Drawing on biblical passages and practical examples, the episode unpacks how pleasing God is not an unreachable goal but a daily, Spirit-empowered pursuit that shapes every aspect of a believer’s life.

Key Topics

• The Nature of Godly Ambition: Understanding ambitions, personal and spiritual, and the unique attainability of pleasing God.
• Whole Life Worship: Recap of the season’s focus on worshiping God in all areas of life.
• Barriers to Whole Life Worship: Distractions, disobedience, and discouragement that divide devotion.
• Scriptural Foundation: Psalm 86:11, Romans 12:1–2, 2 Corinthians 5:6–9, and how these passages undergird our ambition to please God.
• Courage to Please God: Drawing strength from the promises of eternal life and the presence of the Holy Spirit.
• Life’s Arena for Worship: Pleasing God wherever we are, earth and heaven, and living presently with eternity in view.
• Centrality and Exclusivity of Pleasing God: Why pleasing God, not people, is the believer’s sole governing pursuit.
• Practical Change: Overcoming conformity to the world, renewing the mind, and orienting daily decisions to God’s pleasure.

Takeaways

• Pleasing God is not about achieving sinless perfection, but about the trajectory and ambition of your life.
• Every believer has both the desire and ability to please God, given by the Spirit.
• The pursuit of pleasing others and pleasing God are mutually exclusive ambitions.
• The hope of eternity transforms present living, motivating worship in daily choices.
• God places each person in a unique context to serve and honor Him “without compromise, without comparison, in every circumstance”.
• The most important activity in life is to offer oneself as a hymn of praise to God.

Resources Mentioned

• Book: "All of Me: Pursuing a Life Wholly Devoted to God" by Cheryl Marshall. Available through major booksellers and a link in the show notes.
• Key Bible Verses:
• Psalm 86:11
• Romans 12:1-2
• 2 Corinthians 5:6-9
• 2 Corinthians 5:1-5
• Philippians 1:21-23
• 1 John 3:2-3
• Romans 8:7-8

Next Steps

1. Reflect: Identify a specific area of your life where you can intentionally pursue pleasing the Lord this week.
2. Apply: Practice renewing your mind through God’s word and transform your ambitions toward God's glory.
3. Share: Leave a review, subscribe, and share this podcast with others seeking to live wholly devoted to God.
4. Explore Further: Consider reading "All of Me: Pursuing a Life Wholly Devoted to God" by Cheryl Marshall for more on wholehearted devotion.

Additional Ways to Connect

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Join: Cheryl’s Newsletter

Thank you for joining this season of Whole Life Worship. Keep pursuing a life wholly devoted to God in every circumstance.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:11

Welcome to Whole Life Worship. This is Cheryl Marshall, and I'm so glad you're with us today as we pursue lives wholly devoted to God, without compromise, without comparison, in every circumstance. This is Whole Life Worship. Today I'm going to be talking about the attainable ambition of pleasing God. We all have ambitions. Maybe we have an ambition to earn a degree, to start a business, to paint the dining room, to lose those stubborn five to ten pounds, maybe to have a vegetable garden, or to teach a struggling six-year-old how to read. Some of our ambitions are achievable and some aren't because we lack sufficient desire, ability, or opportunity. But as new creatures in Christ, pleasing the Lord with our lives is an attainable ambition. That doesn't mean that on this side of heaven we'll be perfect or sinless, but the Bible does make it clear that we can live in such a way that glorifies and pleases the Lord. By his grace and his power, glorifying Him with our lives is an attainable ambition. In this first season of Whole Life Worship Podcast, we've talked about many things. For one, we've talked about what is whole life worship. It's devoting to God the whole of our lives, all that we are and do, as the ultimate expression of our worship. We've also had discussions about how our whole life worship can become divided, first by distractions and their underlying motives, second by our disobedience, and third by discouragement that we face in the circumstances of life. We've looked at each of these through the lens of Scripture, and we've also seen the goodness and the grace and the gospel of God that enables us to address and overcome those things that divide our devotion to God. You might remember Psalm 86, 11, where David prays, Teach me your way, O Lord, I will walk in your truth. Unite my heart to fear your name. From the day the Lord saves us, this is what he's doing in us. He's uniting our hearts to fear him, to glorify him, to honor and revere his name. And so the Lord is changing us, he's sanctifying us, he's making us more like Jesus, and he's teaching us to worship him with the whole of our lives. As it says in Romans 12, 1 through 2, by his mercies, we are now living sacrifices to him, being transformed by him so that we will please him by living out his will for us. Now you might look at your life and you might think, you know, I want to be a faithful living sacrifice. I want to grow as a whole life worshiper, but the distractions in my life are many and they're strong and they lead my heart away so easily. Or you might be thinking, you know, my battle with sin and disobedience is a long and constant battle, and I feel like I'm playing whack-a-mole. I see my failures, I confess them, and I repent of them time and time again. Or you may be thinking, my discouragement runs so deep, I have a lot of sorrow, and sometimes it still leads me to doubt and to despair. Today I want to encourage you that the God-given ambition you have to please Him with your life in this life is attainable. Again, I'm not speaking of sinlessness. Rather, I'm talking about the trajectory, the orientation, the pattern of your life being one that bears the fruit of honoring the Lord. And so we're going to take a look at a passage of Scripture where Paul speaks of his life ambition to please the Lord, so that we can also learn how to make that ambition the priority in our lives as well. So I'll read that passage, and it's 2 Corinthians 5, verses 6 through 9, and it says, So we are always of good courage. We know that while we are at home in the body, we are away from the Lord, for we walk by faith, not by sight. Yes, we are of good courage, and we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord. So whether we are at home or away, we make it our aim, our ambition to please him. The first thing I want us to see is the courage for our ambition to please God. Paul's courage or his confidence to pursue a life pleasing to the Lord isn't found in himself. It's not rooted in his own efforts, his abilities, or his strength. Paul faced much opposition and many obstacles in his life of ministry. But here we see that he found courage to persevere because of God's promise of eternal life and the giving of the Holy Spirit. So how do we know that? Well, in the verses that come right before this passage, in 2 Corinthians 5, verses 1 through 5, Paul is writing about our assurance of eternal life and our resurrected bodies in heaven. And he says in verse 5, quote, He who has prepared us for this very thing is God, who has given us the Spirit as a guarantee, end quote. And then in verse 6 he says, So we are always of good courage. Like Paul, we encounter trials as we walk with the Lord, but we must not let them daunt our ambition to please the Lord in all things. And like Paul, we have two reasons for that. First of all, we know the bigger picture. We know this life isn't all there is. Like Paul says in 2 Corinthians 4 17, we know that what we go through here is momentary light affliction that's producing for us an eternal weight of glory far beyond all comparison. We live this life in view of eternal life. And second, we continue with courage and pleasing the Lord because we've been given the Spirit of God. He indwells us, he teaches us, guides us, he seals us, and he is the guarantee that we have eternal life. Have you ever given thought to the fact that your eternal life has already begun? In Christ you've been brought from spiritual death to life, and the Spirit of God now lives within you. And one day our souls will be perfected and we'll have perfected, resurrected bodies to match. We will live forever with the Lord. And his spirit living in us is a guarantee of that today. And because of our resurrection to come, and because we have the Spirit to help us walk with the Lord until then, we can now have courage to persevere in pleasing the Lord. It's like a woman who's pregnant and will soon be in labor and she's dreading the pain, but she enters labor with a resolve, with courage, because she knows that a midwife or a nurse or a family member will be by her side and that soon she will be holding her child. The courage to please the Lord in all sorts of circumstances arises by keeping the end in view. The next thing I want us to see in this passage is our arena for the ambition to please God. Where is this ambition to be put on display? Where is it to be lived out? Well, it's clear from this passage that Paul preferred to be in heaven than to remain on earth. He says in verse 8, quote, we'd rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord, end quote. He's saying, I'd rather be with Christ than to be here. Paul's not saying that because he's despairing of his life or ministry, but because he longs to be with the Savior he loves. We see his passion to live for the Lord here on earth, but how much sweeter, how much better it would be to live with Jesus face to face. There will be no more trials, no more tears, no more sin. Instead, there will be perfect, joyful fellowship with the Savior. Being with Christ is what Paul desires. In Philippians 1, verses 21 and 23, he says, For to me to live is Christ and to die is gain. I am hard pressed between the two. My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better. And yet, Paul does not diminish the importance of glorifying God here in this life, in this body. He says, Whether we are at home, meaning here on earth, or absent, meaning in heaven with Christ, our aim, our ambition is to please the Lord. The ambition to please God has a very large arena. It's the whole of your existence here on earth and the whole of your existence in the life to come. There should be no difference in our ambition to please him, whether it be here or there. Here on earth we fellowship with Christ, we commune with him through prayer and his word and by his spirit, and as we walk with him in faith and obedience. But there will be a day when we are bodily with him, to live with him forever in our resurrected, glorified bodies. And that reality informs how we live for him now. Because we will be with him there, we now want to glorify him here. First John 3 2 through 3 puts it this way. And everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure. In other words, because we have the hope of eternal life with Christ, that changes how we live with the ambition to please him here and now. If you want to grow as a whole life worshiper, my new book, All of Me, Pursuing a Life Wholly Devoted to God, was written especially for you. It's available through major booksellers and the link in the show notes. It's like when I was in graduate school and studying piano with one of the top piano pedagogues of the time, and I had such a deep respect for him. His name was Maurice Henson, and I knew I'd be seeing him for my lesson once a week, and so I was careful to do all my practicing during the week, applying to my playing what he taught me and being careful to get in my hours of practice. Why? It was because I wanted to please him and I wanted to play the piano like him. I practiced the piano in such a way during the week so that I would be prepared to see Dr. Henson at the lesson. My arena, you could say, for honoring my professor was not only in our lesson together, but also my time alone in the practice room. Our arena for pleasing the Lord is both at home in the body and when we will be at home with him. Next, let's think about the centrality of our ambition to please God. As followers of Christ, the central ambition of our lives is to please the Lord. We don't seek to please God to be forgiven for our sins and to receive eternal life. That was fully accomplished by Christ on the cross. We don't seek to please God so that He will continue to love us and continue to keep us. We have been sealed by the Spirit, and there is nothing, there's nothing that can separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus. But we do seek to please God because as our creator and our Savior, He deserves all glory and honor and praise and thanksgiving. He deserves both our adoration and our allegiance. We seek to please God because that is the new desire that He has placed in our hearts. We were once dead to sin, but He has made us alive to Himself. In verse 9 of our passage, Paul says, we make it our aim to please him. That's how it's translated in the English Standard Version. In the New International Version, it says we make it our goal to please him. And in the New American Standard Bible, it says we have as our ambition to be pleasing to God. Whether we use the word aim or goal or ambition, the meaning is the same. As believers, pleasing God is now to be our aspiration. It's to be the target of our lives, you could say. Pleasing God is to be our one governing pursuit. But a common temptation is to live our lives to please other people instead of the Lord. We're tempted to make choices of what we do or don't do, say or don't say in order to gain the approval of other people, to be liked by them, to be accepted by them, to be honored. But Paul draws a line in the sand. He says you can't do both at the same time. You can't be living to please God and at the same time live to win the approval of others. Those two ambitions will eventually clash. When writing about holding to the true gospel, Paul says in Galatians 1, 10, for am I now seeking the approval of man or of God? Or am I trying to please man? If I were still trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ. If you're listening to this podcast, it's very likely that you desire to be a faithful servant of Christ as well. But maybe you've never really thought that deeply about it, and now you're realizing, you know, I'm not my own. I belong to the Lord, and I want to truly honor Him with my life. Maybe you're realizing that you've been living for your own pleasure or to please others, and you know this needs to change, but you're not sure exactly what that looks like. Romans 12.2 teaches us how to keep this ambition central in our lives. First of all, do not be conformed to this world. Turn away from the world's way of thinking and the world's way of living. Be transformed by the renewal of your mind. Be learning the word of God so that his thoughts become your thoughts. And then from what you learn from his word, apply it to your life, that which is good and acceptable and perfect before God. And you know what that word acceptable means? It means pleasing. This is the life that is well pleasing to God. The ambition to please God with your life is attainable. Romans 8, 7 through 8 says, Those who are in the flesh cannot please God, but you, however, are not in the flesh, but in the spirit. As new creatures in Christ, God has given us the desire to please him. He's given us the ability by his spirit living in us, and every moment of our day is another opportunity to please him. He gives us courage to persevere in pleasing him as we keep the long view, knowing that one day we will be absent from this body and yet present with the Lord. He gives each of us an arena in which to please him. Your life looks different than mine. Our lives look different than the next person. But God in his wise providence has placed each of us right where he wants us to be, to serve him there. And we will one day serve him in heaven as well. And then God gives us the ultimate ambition for life, to live pleasing to him. As I say at the top of the program, without compromise, without comparison, in every circumstance. And yes, that is whole life worship. So this week, how can you live as a whole life worshiper? In what specific way can you honor the Lord? Is there a part of your life, a conversation, a task, a decision that must be made in which you will say, My ambition is to please the Lord here? I'll leave you with a beautiful quote from Sinclair Ferguson that ties this ambition to worship. He said, The single most important activity of your life is to worship God. You were made for this, to offer your whole life in all its parts as a hymn of praise to the Lord. And friend, that offering of yourself pleases Him. Thank you for listening to this episode. I invite you to please review, subscribe, and share, and keep pursuing a life wholly devoted to God without compromise, without comparison, in every circumstance. This is Whole Life Worship.