Skip to main content

Lenten Observations, March 1, 2026 - Good pleasure of God's will

Ephesians 1:5 - ‘having predestined us to adoption as sons by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will,”

I’ve already written about the first two clauses/phrases (in English), so today we will think about “according to the good pleasure of His will.”

I was just listening to a podcast (Old School with Shiloh Brooks, highly recommended) where he interviewed Alex Jones (not that Alex Jones), the originator of the Hallow App. This gentleman is a tech entrepreneur and a devout Catholic; I knew it had Catholic connections because Mark Wahlberg and Jonathan Roumie are the spokespersons. He spoke of who meditative prayer changed his life and brought him back to the faith of his childhood. The point of Old School is to discuss a usually famous book. This episode discussed the wondrous Brothers Karamazov, and I was reminded it’s time for me to read it again.

I bring this up because Alex Jones said that his meditative prayer process was to focus on a word; I believe this is the lectio divina method. The word he started with was “hallow.” “To make holy.”

Using the same idea, I want to focus on one phrase here: “the good pleasure of His will.” His will gives God pleasure. The fulfillment of His will gives God good pleasure. His pleasure is good. His will is good.

Other translations:

NIV: he[b] predestined us for adoption to sonship[c] through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will—

NASB: He predestined us to adoption as sons and daughters through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will (same as NKJV)

ESV: he predestined us[b] for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, 

Interlinear



Ah: The well-seeming, the eudokian, the delight of His will. It wasn’t just something God wanted (for us to be adopted into Christ), but it was something that delighted Him.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why to Read Fiction, Idea #27: Empathy, anyone?

The Idea #27 is tongue in cheek.  But these are some ideas about writing fiction, which I have done in ten novels (and counting), a dozen short stories, and two produced plays (I know, not exactly the same).  Background: In 2015 a colleague and I wrote an open educational resource public speaking textbook for a grant provided by our University System. We didn't realize at the time that it would go viral and be used all over the world within a few years. There are two reasons for that: it is good (as good as anything on the market) and it is free, although only in digital form. Check out www.exploringpublicspeaking.com for it. We also didn't know at the time that my co-author would die at 39 in 2016. I still miss him. Back to the point, I receive requests for the test banks every other day, and this morning I received one from Pennsylvania. The writer had a signature line: "Reading fiction is important. It is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Books I Have Read Lately

 Retirement means more time to read.  One Blood , by Denene Millner. This book and author won the Townsend Prize for Fiction 2025 and therefore beat me as one of the other nine finalists. She deserved it for her dramatic and exotic style; mine feels pale in comparison. I have to admit, I have timed out on it when I got to the third main character's story. It starts with a Black midwife in 1950s/1960s Virginia, who is imprisoned for not lying on a birth certificate about a "white" baby's racial identity. The baby is clearly part Black, meaning either the family had Black ancestors or the mother had a lover (I'm not entirely sure about that). The midwife's daughter is brutally murdered by her lover and in this chaos, the granddaughter is spirited away to New York in a wooden box. (Why I am not sure--New York makes sense, because a relation lives there, but why she couldn't just be put on a train, I'm not sure. I imagine Black people could ride trains in ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Poem of the Day

 Vision Driving on a busy highway designed to relieve traffic on a busier one, My glimpse lands on a mound of color in the turning lane ahead. I see a human body. That is not what it is, but what my mind perceives. The envisioned body is wearing a bathing suit, and it is female. It is deceased of course; half of it is legs with pale skin, half is a mix of red and blue and yellow. My heart tightens; my eyes, which need to look elsewhere, are captured. I go under a traffic light and the pile transforms into a towel twisted into some elongated shape, either thrown and dropped from a vehicle. Why did I see a corpse in the way of oncoming cars? Are my eyes failing me? My corrective lenses? My imagination? My expectations? Is it too much true crime television? Who knows? And what if I had seen a human form that metamorphosed into a towel? --- This is more about a concern of aging, not to show my poetic skill. I write one or two (or fewer) poems a year. ...
Post a Comment
Read more