John 16, serve God with your thirst. So whether we are at home or way, we make it our aim to please

Him, 2 Corinthians 5, 9. What if you discovered, like the Pharisees did, that you had devoted your

whole life to trying to please God? But all the while had been doing things that in God's sight

were abominations. Luke 16, 14 and 15. Someone may question this and say, I don't think that's possible.

God wouldn't reject a person who has been trying to please him. But do you see what this question

has done? He has based his conviction about what would please God on his idea of what God is like.

That is precisely why we must begin with the character of God revealed in Scripture.

God is a mountain spring, not a watering trough. A mountain spring is self-replenishing. It constantly

overflows and supplies others. But a watering trough needs to be filled up with a pump or a bucket.

So the great question is, how do you serve a spring and how do you serve a watering trough?

How do you glorify God the way He really is? If you want to glorify the worth of a watering trough,

you work hard to keep it full and useful. But if you want to glorify the worth of a spring,

you do it by getting down on your hands and knees and drinking to your heart's satisfaction

until you have the refreshment and strength to go down in the valley and tell the people what you

found. My hope as a desperate sinner hangs on this biblical truth that God is the kind of God

who will be pleased with the one thing I have to offer, my thirst. That's why the sovereign freedom

and self-sufficiency of God are so precious to me. They are the foundation of my hope that God

is delighted not by the resourcefulness of bucket brigades but by the bending down of broken

sinners to drink at the fountain of grace. By all means, we should seek to please God,

now and forever, but woe to us if our whole life proves to be based on a false view of what

pleases God. The Lord is pleased, not by those who treat Him as a needy watering trough,

but as an inexhaustible, all-satisfying spring. As Psalm 147-11 says,

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