A Pleasure or a Pain - One Year Devotions for Women

But Noah found favor with the LORD. - Genesis 6:8

Noah was a pleasure to the Lord. We are either a pleasure to the Lord, or a pain! What are the conditions of being a pleasure, of having such favored friendship with God?

First, we need to find out how we can bring pleasure to the Lord. Sometimes we really want to please the Lord, but we don’t bother to find out how to do that. We’re a lot more interested in how he can please us. The first thing that pleases God is our right behavior—our holy living even when no one around us is behaving properly.

Noah was the only truly righteous man living on the earth at that time (Genesis 6:9), for Noah knew and understood God. It wasn’t easy. It’s hard to be the only one pleasing God when no one else is bothering. What was the state of Noah’s society? The crime rate was rising—there was “violence and depravity everywhere” (Genesis 6:12). God saw that the world was rotten to the core. Noah was God’s friend when others chose the friendship of the devil. But Noah tried always to conduct his affairs according to God’s will and commands (Genesis 6:9, 22).

Do we care more about pleasing God than pleasing others or ourselves? Do we see our world as “rotten to the core” as God sees it, and do we side with him? Then we can call ourselves God’s friends! When God looks at us, are we a pleasure to him, or a pain?

For Further Study: Genesis 6:1-22

Excerpted from The One Year Devotions for Women, Copyright ©2000 by Jill Briscoe. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers. All rights reserved.

For more from Jill Briscoe, please visit TellingtheTruth.org.

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