Pleasing God (1)

“And we pray this in order that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and may please Him in every way: bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God...” Colossians 1:10
In Col. 1:10-12 Paul gives us four things that please God: bearing fruit, growing in knowledge of Him, persevering in His strength, and giving thanks. We’ll take the first two of these today and the next two tomorrow.
The topic of bearing fruit crops up (excuse the pun) many times in the Scriptures. Israel is symbolised by both a vine and a fig tree. Gentiles believers are ‘grafted in’ to the vine. God is described as a gardener and a vine-dresser. But despite all this, and despite our familiarity with how fruit grows, we often struggle to understand what this means in our own life. We think that bearing fruit it like bearing children – lots of pain and struggling, through our own works. But this is not how trees produce fruit. You don’t see an apple tree straining, and out pops an apple. No – it is the sap inside that causes buds to form, and then the fruit to grow. It doesn’t appear overnight, it takes time. Similarly with the fruit in our own life. We just need to allow the Holy Spirit to work inside us, to bring those things out.
In Col. 1:9, Paul says he is praying for the believers at Colosse for God to fill them with the knowledge of His will. As we come to know God better, day by day, we learn His will. As we mature in the Lord, our will is conformed to His.
How well do you know God? I don’t just mean what you know about God, but how well do you know Him personally? The mystery of the New Testament is that God can be known personally, by anyone who would come to Him in faith. Our knowledge of Him will never be complete, but we can increase in our knowledge of Him, by spending with Him every day.