Proverbs 16:5 Everyone who is proud in heart is an abomination to the Lord.

An abomination to the Lord! Wow, how bad is that. The Lord has an opinion of every person. Some people in the Bible, such as Daniel are called God’s favorites, obviously God’s opinion of him was very high. Abraham was called God’s friend. I don’t know how important it is to you to be well thought of by the Lord, by the God of the universe, the all-wise, holy, all-powerful God. The apostle Paul declared that his goal in life was to be pleasing to the Lord in every respect.

2 Corinthians 5:9 Therefore we also have as our ambition, whether at home or absent, to be pleasing to Him.

That is my ambition in life, to please the Lord in all that I do. I am obsessed with it, thinking all the time about how I am doing. Wondering what God thinks of me as He watches all that I do, listens to how I talk, and hears all of my thoughts. The Bible says that “God weighs the motives of a man’s heart, ” I wonder what He thinks of my motives. It is hard for me sometimes to know what my motives really are, but He knows.

As people we have the ability to sense God’s pleasure in us, and we can refine that ability so that we are very in tune with his opinion of us. When pleasing the Lord is our greatest desire and we have grown to sense His pleasure in us we become highly motivated people.

Just as we can refine our sense of His joy in us, we can also dull it to the point of being totally unaware of his pleasure and also His displeasure to the point of being an abomination to Him. How sad to be an abomination to the Lord and not even be aware of it. How do we do that to our own heart?

The primary way is to become motivated by the approval of people rather than God, to be more concerned about the opinion of those around you instead of God’s opinion. It is subtle, it happens slowly, but it happens to most, we become “people pleasers.”

Colossians 3:23 Whatever you do, do your work heartily, as for the Lord rather than for men,

Galatians 1:10 For am I now seeking the favor of men, or of God? Or am I striving to please men? If I were still trying to please men, I would not be a bond-servant of Christ.

Reflective thinking is when I examine my heart and my motives, asking the question of myself, am I striving to please the Lord or people. God is so desirous of our hearts to be entirely devoted to Him that He will help us in our effort to figure out why we do what we do.

Self-worth, self-esteem is a critical human need. Self-worth is not really our own opinion of ourselves, it is our perceived opinion of either other people of us or God’s opinion of us. Which do you think is healthy self-worth? Self-esteem that comes from people’s opinions of us turns to pride.

I went to JBC’s Vacation Bible School program tonight. It was a lot of fun and very inspiring to see all those kids on the stage singing about Jesus. Jesus said that if we wanted to be great in the kingdom of heaven we needed to become like a little child. It was easy to see tonight what Jesus must have seen in the hearts of kids during his day that endeared them to Him.

My Mom took me to Vacation Bible School when I was a kid. In fact if there were four churches relatively close to us and their VBS dates were different she would take me to all four. I got a lot of good early teaching and training when I was a kid because of those faithful people who took time out of their busy schedules to teach a bunch of rowdy kids for five days.

Sometimes people will ask me when I got saved, and I will say in Vacation Bible School, in fact I got saved many times in VBS. At the end of each of the different programs there would be a gospel presentation and then the person who gave the lesson would say “anybody who wants to accept Jesus as their savior raise your hand.” I would raise my hand and pray with the teacher. If I went to four VBS’s I would get saved four times, and again the next year, and the next. As a kid I had a very strong sense of eternity, I thought about it a lot, and I did not want to go to hell. Back in those days preachers preached about hell more than they do today, and I had heard a number of them at an early age that put the fear of God into me. So every time there was an invitation I raised my hand, just to be sure.