What obedience pleases God most?

In John 8:29, Jesus said, “I always do what pleases my Father” – and because of it he could say with total confidence in John 11:42, “Father, I know you always hear me.” And it’s the same for us, as John wrote in 1 John 3:21-22, because we too can “have confidence before God and receive from him anything we ask, because we obey his commands and do what pleases him.” 

So, what obedience pleases God most? John answers that in verse 23: “And this is his command: that we believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and love one another as Jesus commanded.” 

First of all, then, it pleases God immensely when we believe in his Son, and specifically in his Son’s “name” – Jesus Christ. Because in that name we see what God so dearly loves about him. He is Jesus, “given that name” in Matthew 1:21, “because he will save his people from their sins” – the name Jesus meaning “God saves.”  

John then confirms that in 1 John 4:14, that “the Father sent his Son to be the Saviour of the world by his “atoning sacrifice” (2:2) “purifying us from every sin” (1:7). No wonder God loves his Son and wants us to believe in him as well, because Jesus totally lived up to his name.

He’s also named “the Christ” (2:22) – Christ meaning “the anointed one,” or “Messiah” in Hebrew. According to the woman at the well in John 4:25, “I know that Messiah (called Christ) is coming. And when he comes he’ll explain everything to us.” John confirms that in 1 John 5:20, that the purpose of the Christ’s coming was to “give us understanding, so that we may know him who is true.” The truth of everything we need to know about “God and eternal life” (20), therefore, is what the Messiah was sent by God to reveal, which Jesus also fully did (John 17:3-7).

What pleases God immensely, then, is that we believe what he sent his Son to us for, to be both Jesus and the Christ. Which helps explain why John wrote in the last verse of 1 John 5, “Dear children, keep yourselves from idols.” In other words, don’t look to, or depend on, any other source   other than Jesus Christ to “explain everything.” As Peter said to Jesus in John 6:68, “to whom else shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.” 

But which of those “words of eternal life” that Jesus taught is God pleased by most when obeyed? It’s contained in “The message you heard from the beginning”….(next blog)