trusting is pleasing

To trust God is to please Him. If our motive it to please Him, we will never please Him enough and we not learn to trust Him either. Trying to please leads to striving. It leans on our own effort and ability. But in trusting God we learn that He is pleased with us. That then results in right values and actions. Pleasing God is a by-product of trusting Him.

The path of being motivated by pleasing God is a trap. It is fundamentally defined by more right behavior plus less wrong behavior equals godliness.

As the authors of TrueFaced put it:

It disregards the godliness - righteousness - that God has already placed in us, at infinite cost, and will sabotage our journey. Once we choose the path of pleasing God, the bondage of performance persistently badgers us. Our determination to please God traps us in a formula that affixes our masks so tightly that we'll need jackhammers to get them off!

Galatians 2:16-18, The Message

We Jews know that we have no advantage of birth over "non-Jewish sinners." We know very well that we are not set right with God by rule-keeping but only through personal faith in Jesus Christ. How do we know? We tried it—and we had the best system of rules the world has ever seen! Convinced that no human being can please God by self-improvement, we believed in Jesus as the Messiah so that we might be set right before God by trusting in the Messiah, not by trying to be good.

Have some of you noticed that we are not yet perfect? (No great surprise, right?) And are you ready to make the accusation that since people like me, who go through Christ in order to get things right with God, aren't perfectly virtuous, Christ must therefore be an accessory to sin? The accusation is frivolous. If I was "trying to be good," I would be rebuilding the same old barn that I tore down. I would be acting as a charlatan.