Sure, you know God loves you, but do you wonder if He is pleased with you? Maybe you try to please him but you feel you fail more than anything. You confess every sin you can think of, but you still sin occasionally. You’re never everything you ought to be. You’re never enough. God must be so disappointed in you. If you feel like that, I can relate.
At one point long ago, when our ministry seemed to be failing, I was desperate to know if God was smiling on my part of our work. We felt God had called us to our work there in Taiwan. We had worked hard, doing what we felt He wanted us to do. Our hearts are deceitful by nature and we can never completely know them, but we felt we were doing our best out of love for the Lord. God wasn’t showing us any major thing we were doing wrong, but, as far as we could see, the work was not moving forward. As I studied the Word and asked God to guide me, however, I came to the place that I could feel God’s smile on me, even when the visible results of our ministry were few.
Whether you’re a pastor’s wife, employed at a secular job, or a stay-at-home mom, it can be helpful to evaluate your work from time to time. Especially when you come to a break in your work or studies, the start or end of a major project, or a move to a different job, home, or location. The Lord can use this time of reflection to guide you on your path ahead.
But Satan can also use evaluation to discourage you and make you feel like a failure. That’s what I want to talk about today.
Let’s get one thing out of the way first. Sin is always sin. When I talk about “sin,” I’m not talking about mistakes you make or jobs you forget to do or things you could do better. I’m talking about known sin in your life that you know is wrong, but you do it anyway. Maybe you struggle with a certain sin on a regular basis. You’re hiding it because it could ruin your testimony if people found out about it. You should feel guilty about it because you are guilty. You’re not going to make much progress in your spiritual life until you, by God’s grace and with his help, deal with the sin. Confronting this should be the highest priority in your life.
But there’s another kind of guilt that can also cripple your spiritual life. That’s false guilt. Feeling that you are constantly failing and you can never be good enough to please God, no matter how hard you try. No one is perfect and sometimes our downfalls are honest mistakes rather than moral failure. So maybe you don’t feel guilty of sinning, you just feel like you’re failing and you don’t know why. The work you do seems like it’s not producing the results you want to see. How do you deal with that?
My husband Art and I worked on two different mission fields, Taiwan and New Zealand, for over forty years. We had some good years in Taiwan, but compared to results from many mission fields, we saw little visible fruit. During a low point in my Taiwan ministry, I felt like I was pouring my life down the drain for nothing. I agonized over whether or not God was pleased with me. “If I’m not even pleasing God,” I thought, “Why am I even here? I might as well go back to America and live a more comfortable life.” On the other hand, if I knew I was pleasing him, I could continue to joyfully serve on this field as long as He kept me there. So, in the spirit of Psalm 139:23-24, I asked God to examine my life and either let me know what I needed to change or help me feel his smile of approval.
Psalm 139:23-24 Search me, O God, and know my heart; Try me, and know my anxieties; And see if there is any wicked way in me, And lead me in the way everlasting.
Whether or not you’re in ministry, you also need to know if God is basically pleased with your life. Yes, you will sin and make mistakes. We all see areas in which we need to learn and grow. But we need to know if we’re basically in the right place, doing the right things or if we’re way off course. Partly because expectations that are unrealistically high may leave you constantly depressed and keep you focused on yourself way more than others.
At that low point in my ministry so long ago, I felt God taught me some principles that have helped me the rest of my life. I hope these insights will encourage you today.
God understands me.
He knows my weaknesses and problems. And He knows my heart better than I know it myself.
Psalm 103:14 For He (God) knows our frame; He remembers that we are dust.
Psalm 139:1-6 and 13-16 For You formed my inward parts, You covered me in my mother’s womb . . .. My frame was not hidden from You, When I was made in secret, And skillfully wrought in the lowest parts of the earth. Your eyes saw my substance, being yet unformed. And in Your book they all were written, the days fashioned for me, When as yet there were none of them.
God isn’t impossible to please.
As a loving Heavenly Father, He doesn’t demand perfection. He is pleased when I do my best to serve him from a heart of love, even though I make mistakes. He rejoices to see when I’m growing, even though I have more to learn.
Hebrews 4:14-16 Seeing then that we have a great High Priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession. For we do not have a High Priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but was in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore come boldly to the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need.
God doesn’t hide his will from me or if I'm pleasing Him or not.
He wants me to know if I have areas in my life that don’t please him because I can’t change them until I can identify them. So, if I sincerely want to please God and I’m looking for answers, He will show me what He wants me to change. Most often he’ll use his Word or someone speaking about his Word. Other times, he’ll use an incident or a person that speaks to me so clearly that I know he’s speaking to me.
See Psalm 139:23-24 above.
God sees my heart and wants me to feel his love and approval.
He knows when I’m basically serving him the best way I know how, out of a heart of love for him.
Hebrews 6:10 For God is not unjust to forget your work and labor of love which you have shown toward His name, in that you have ministered to the saints, and do minister.
How can I feel his smile of approval?
If I am serving Him the best I know how, depending on him, and following his guidance, and he’s not leading me in a different direction, I can know He is pleased with my life. Not only that, He will see to it that my work is not in vain.
I Corinthians 15:58 Therefore, my beloved brethren, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that your labor is not in vain in the Lord.
I may need to grow in some areas or make changes in what I think or say or do. But when I genuinely want to please God, he’s not frowning down in disappointment at me every time I stumble. He’s cheering me on to grow and change.
Is there a balance here? Absolutely. Warren Wiersbe says in his commentary on Philippians, “A sanctified dissatisfaction is the first essential to progress in the Christian race.” We need to make a healthy evaluation so we can change and grow. But he also says, “Self-evaluation can be a dangerous thing, because we can err in two directions: (1) making ourselves better than we are, or (2) making ourselves worse than we really are.”
So, I’m not talking about ignoring areas in which we might need to change and grow and feeling that we are better than others. I’m just saying that if we’re constantly beating ourselves up over our faults to the point we are depressed and defeated, maybe we need to reassess where we are in our Christian lives.
Sometimes moms need to say to themselves, “I’m struggling right now, but that doesn’t mean I’m a bad mom. Maybe I need to take a break, ask for advice, or work harder in some areas, but God knows my heart and wants to help me. Some days I don’t feel loving, but I can act loving even when I don’t feel it and that pleases God. Sometimes I sin, but God is ready to forgive me and give me the strength to try again. Instead of beating myself up when I fail, I will give apologies where necessary, pick myself up, and work to change to do my mom job better. But I will be kind to myself because God is kind to me and He knows I’m trying to please him.”
Sometimes people suffering with illness need to say to themselves, “This diagnosis is hard. Sometimes I worry more than I trust, but I’m trying to trust more and fear less. God knows my heart and He will help me grow in faith. I will focus on Scripture and feel his smile on me.”
All of us fail at times, but that doesn’t make us failures. It makes us human. God knows when we are basically trying to please him and don’t always get it right. That’s different than turning away from God in our hearts so that we don’t care if we please him or not.
After seeking His smile and finding it in Taiwan, in time God called us away from there to a different ministry, in New Zealand. We worked there for more than 25 years. We had some good years of fruitful ministry, as well as difficult years with little visible fruit, but we’ve learned that every ministry has ups and downs. We can’t let the down times shake us. Instead, we asked God how we could change to be more effective. Sometimes we just needed to be faithful to the task he’d given us and wait for God to work. In our last years there, God gave us more fruit than ever before. Visible fruit that cheered our hearts and built our church. Not because we’d found some magic formula, but because fruit takes time to grow.
Now I have joy in my retirement ministry and in my life because, in spite of what I may feel at times, I know God is smiling on me.
