Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Easy To Please, Hard To Satisfy

A few weeks ago, I realized something about myself... as I told Hannah, I am easy to please, but hard to please (fortunately, it made sense to her). What I mean is this... it is not hard at all for me to like something (in this particular case, we were talking about restaurants), but it is hard for me to LOVE something. With food, activities, events... chances are good that I will like whatever it is. But it will be hard to find something that I really love.

Anyway, I mention this because in a roundabout way, I think God is the same way. He is easy to please, but hard to please. Or, put another way, he is easy to please, but hard to satisfy.

He is easy to please in the sense that He loves all of our efforts, however feeble and often unsuccessful, to love Him and to try and follow His path for us. At the same time, He is never going to be satisfied until we are perfect, fully united with Him. Until that time, no matter how often we succeed, we will still fail, we will always be pushed harder.

CS Lewis explains this thought well, and though like I will go over it again at some point in my Mere Christianity series, it is worth mentioning here.

"And yet - this is the other and equally important side of it - this Helper who will, in the long run, be satisfied with nothing less than absolute perfection, will also be delighted with the first feeble, stumbling effort you make tomorrow to do the simplest duty."

Then he makes an analogy which I like, in part because analogies help me really be able to grasp concepts and have them hit home in a very practical way, which this one does for me:

"As a great Christian writer (George MacDonald) pointed out, every father is pleased at the baby's first attempt to walk: no father would be satisfied with anything less than a firm, free, manly walk in a grown-up son.

The two key points from all of this writambling, I believe, are this:
1) Every small action done for the will of God overjoys God.
2) There is no such thing as good enough. We are all called to be perfect, nothing less.

God is easy to please, but hard to satisfy. I tend to like that aspect about Him.

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