Sometimes Christians can give the impression that pleasing God is a sub-biblical motivation.

“We’re totally justified,” someone might say. “We’re totally accepted. If we tell our kids to please God, we are just giving them more law. We are training them to be little moralists. We’re discipling them to think of God as a kind of Santa Claus keeping a naughty-and-nice list.”

Obviously (or maybe not so obviously), that’s not how God wants us to parent, because that’s not what God is like with his children. But don’t let the potential abuse of this “pleasing God” language lead you to suppress what Scripture clearly says. One of the principal motivations for holiness is the pleasure of God.

• Colossians 1:10: Those who bear fruit in every good work and increase in the knowledge of God are pleasing to God.
• Romans 12:1: Presenting your body as a living sacrifice pleases God.
• Romans 14:18: Looking out for your weaker brother pleases God.
• 1 Thessalonians 2:4: Teaching the word in truth pleases God.
• 1 Timothy 2:1–3: Praying for your governing authorities pleases God.
• 1 Timothy 5:4: Supporting family members in need pleases God.
• Hebrews 13:16: Sharing with others pleases God.
• 1 John 3:22: Keeping the commandments pleases God.

Over and over, more than a dozen times in the New Testament, we have this motivation. We ought to be generous. We ought to be godly. We ought to love and live a certain way because it pleases God.

Some of us have taken justification to mean we no longer have a dynamic relationship with our heavenly Father, as if God is indifferent to our sin and our obedience. But Scripture says we can grieve the Holy Spirit, and in Hebrews 12 we see that a father disciplines those he loves. God is not pleased when we sin. Or, as John Calvin puts it, God can be “wondrously angry with his children.”

This doesn’t mean God is ever against us as his justified people. He is always for us. But just as a parent can be upset with a child, so God can consider our actions grievous and discipline us accordingly.

If that kind of dynamism discourages you, consider the flip side. We can also please God with our efforts. Through the finished work of Christ, our good deeds are rendered delightful to God. When we hear the language of “pleasing God,” some of us panic because we only relate to God as a judge. But he is also our Father.

If you think, “I have to please God with my obedience because he is my judge,” you will undermine the good news of justification by faith alone. But you ought to reason this way: “I’ve been acquitted. The Lord is my righteousness. I am justified fully and adopted into the family of God for all eternity. I am so eager to please my Father and live for him.”

It’s good to want to protect justification, but don’t do it at the expense of a dynamic relationship with your heavenly Father. There is a difference between saying to your child, “God is watching over you, and when you don’t share your toys, you make baby Jesus cry,” and saying, “God is our Father, and when you listen to what Mommy and Daddy say and you try to do what they want you to do, it makes God really happy. He gets a smile on his face when he sees you trying to do the right thing.”

That’s what a dozen New Testament texts teach us. It’s how God means to motivate all of us.

This article appears as a part of Kevin DeYoung’s chapter in the book Acting the Miracle: God’s Work and Ours in the Miracle of Sanctification, edited by John Piper and David Mathis, 2013, pages 57–59, used by permission of Crossway Books. Also available are all audio, video, and written manuscripts from Desiring God’s conference of the same title:

• Prelude to Acting the Miracle: Putting Sanctification in Its Place (John Piper)

• Incentives for Acting the Miracle: Fear, Rewards, and the Multiplicity of Biblical Motivations (Kevin DeYoung)

• Sinners Learning to Act the Miracle: Restoring Broken People and the Limits of Life in the Body (Ed Welch)

• Acting the Miracle in the Everyday: Word of God, the Means of Grace, and the Practical Pursuit of Gospel Maturity (Jarvis Williams)

• Acting the Miracle Together: Corporate Dynamics in Christian Sanctification (Russell Moore)

• Act the Miracle: Future Grace, the Word of the Cross, and the Purifying Power of God’s Promises (John Piper)