Are You Pleased with Me?

It is another new year: 2025! Are you pleased?

Are you taking inventory of your life, relationships, finances, dreams, health, and goals? At the start of a new year, many people make resolutions to improve their health through diet and exercise. 

Last month, I visited the Dominican Republic and was pleased to see our youth serving in spiritual leadership roles. I loved witnessing our directors ministering and sacrificing to show God’s love, and using the gifts and talents the Lord has given them as described in I Peter 4:10: “...use whatever gift you have received to serve others.” One Sunday, Dr. Arismendy Katz left church to respond to a woman who fell and broke her femur. Later in the afternoon, he left us again for a three-hour trip over the mountains in the rain to help a woman who was possibly having a miscarriage while at our women’s retreat. I’m sure God is pleased when He sees such dedication.

At times, I have not felt pleased with my own spiritual life. As the plane was taking off from Puerto Plata in the Dominican Republic, I felt compelled to pray for more faith. I can be pleasing to God only when I have faith. “And without faith it is impossible to please God...” (Hebrews 11:6). God looks at me through the work of His Son’s blood covering me. We can only count ourselves worthy of our salvation through the blood of Jesus. I remember being at a water baptism in Haiti years ago. A woman had repented of her sin, accepted Jesus as her Savior, and stood in line to be baptized. One of the pastors present knew of her living arrangement. Although she had five sons with a man, she was not married to him. She was refused baptism. I spread the wide bottom of my flowered Laura Ashley dress around Madam Paul and explained to the pastor that God looked at her through the sacrifice of His Son—through the blood of Jesus. Like the Samaritan woman at the well in John 4, Jesus saw her need and forgave her.

We all struggle to live a life pleasing to God. It is not by our own works, but it is only by the shed blood of Jesus. I cling to Psalm 41:11, “I know that you are pleased with me…” In Luke 3, Jesus approached John the Baptist in His purity and humility, and God in the form of a man said to John, “I need you to baptize me.” God was pleased. “...and the Holy Spirit descended upon Him in bodily form like a dove, and a voice came from heaven saying: ‘You are My beloved Son, in You I am well pleased.’” 

This new year of 2025, be encouraged that as you listen to God speak to you through reading the Bible, and as you talk to Him when you pray, your life will show your relationship with Him and you will be preparing yourself to hear, “This is my beloved child. I am well pleased.” This is my intention in 2025: to act, and to hear, and to know that God is pleased with me. I will fail, and I will pray again and again and take another step. I will have faith in our God Almighty. ~Jeanne DeTellis Loudon