How can people know how to please God if they are born sinful?
God’s Word tells us plainly what pleases him — and in the same breath, reveals how far short we fall of it.
“And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”
Asked to name the greatest commandment, Jesus doesn’t reach for a rule about behavior — he goes straight to the heart. Everything else in Scripture’s instructions is really an outworking of these two loves: toward God, and toward the people around us. That’s worth sitting with, because it reframes “pleasing God” away from a checklist and toward a relationship — the question isn’t just “what did I do today” but “who and what did I actually love today.”
“He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”
Micah’s audience was busy asking an elaborate question — what sacrifice, how many, how costly — and the prophet’s answer cuts straight through the elaborate religious performance to something both simpler and harder: justice, kindness, humility. Not simpler in the sense of easy, but simpler in the sense of clear. There’s no confusion about what God actually wants from us; the difficulty isn’t knowing it, it’s doing it consistently.
“For by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin.”
Here’s the twist Scripture is honest about: knowing what pleases God isn’t the same as being able to consistently do it. Paul’s point is almost the opposite of what we’d expect — God’s law was never given as a ladder to climb into his good graces, but as a mirror, showing us clearly how far we actually fall short. That’s not a design flaw; it’s the law doing exactly what it was meant to do, driving us to look somewhere other than our own effort for rescue.
Hard questions
Why should we even care about pleasing God?
Because everyone already lives to please something — approval, achievement, comfort, other people’s opinions — and those things make notoriously unstable masters. They shift, they’re never satisfied, and they can be gone tomorrow. Scripture’s claim is that the only being actually worth living to please is the one who made us, loves us, and won’t change his mind about either. Pleasing God isn’t one more competing demand on our attention; it’s the thing every other pursuit was quietly hoping to substitute for.
How can an old book like the Bible help us know how to live today?
Plenty of ancient advice has aged badly, but the Bible’s claim is different — not that it’s timeless because it’s old, but because it describes something that hasn’t changed: human nature, and God’s character. Technology, culture, and circumstances shift constantly; what it means to love God and love a neighbor doesn’t. That’s why people across radically different centuries and cultures have found the same commands — love, humility, justice, faithfulness — just as demanding and just as needed now as ever.
Can anyone ever really keep God’s commands and please him?
Not on our own — that’s precisely the point Romans 3:20 is making. But Scripture doesn’t leave the story there. What we can’t achieve by effort, Christ achieved on our behalf; when we trust him, his perfect obedience is credited to us, and the Holy Spirit begins the slow work of actually growing that obedience in us over time. Pleasing God stops being a performance we’re failing at and becomes a relationship we’re growing into.