Psalm 40.8 declares, I desire to do your will, my God; your law is within my heart.

Most of us who claim to be seekers of God want to please Him, the breakdown occurs in determining what it takes to please God. It seems only fair that if there is indeed a God that He would make clear what He requires from us.

Fortunately, that is exactly why God had His thoughts, words and deeds recorded and preserved in a book. In this way, all peoples for all time in all languages could know what the One True God requires of us.

So why is it so hard for us to read and study the Bible?

Instead of going to the source of God’s revealed will we decide for ourselves what will make God happy and roll with that. The deception in that methodology is that we are partially right.

Since we are created in the image of God He has supplied us with a conscience that reminds us that right and wrong, truth and lie, exist and that we must choose between them and will ultimately be held accountable for those choices.

As an example, all people from all time have found murder to be wrong. Certainly those who have ‘hardened their conscience,’ ignore the inner voice but societies everywhere recognize the immorality of murder.

So we would be right to believe we are pleasing God if we don’t murder anyone. However what God requires goes beyond us simply not taking the life of one another.

God revealed to us when He lived among us that He counts all hate, all malice, all evil and unkind words, all evil and unkind thoughts as murder, thus making all of us murderers for certainly none of us have never thought, said or done an unkind deed toward another human being.

When we compare ourselves to God’s standard then we find an incapacity to always live a life pleasing to Him whereas when we live according to our definition of right and wrong we always find ourselves doing well.

This inability to truly live a life pleasing to God is necessary for us to humble ourselves and admit our need for a Savior, for God to pardon us for our evil because we do not and can not obey Him.

At the same time, as we give ourselves to the reading, studying and applying the Bible to our lives we become increasingly more obedient to God and thus pleasing to Him, the very thing we are supposed to do.