God is not hard to please. God is not so hard to please as men; it is easier to please God than to please men. The most unselfish things you do sometimes are the things that are most misunderstood. But when God sees you with a serious intent to please him, he is pleased with it. Let me illustrate this: God calls that perfection which is our best, doing the best we know how, and trusting simply in him, is what God in this text calls perfection. I will venture in the presence of a great deal of scholarship present here this morning, to say that the word perfection means vital conviction. The margin puts it “sincere,” “sincerity.” The true thought is, being true to your best thought, and that pleases God. There are a great many things, of course, that are impossible to us. We can not have absolutely perfect actions, because there is no such thing as a perfect judgment, there is no such thing as a perfect intellect, we do not see clearly. God knows all about that; he understands it. See in the 103d Psalm the wonderfully comforting words he says: “Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear him. For he knoweth our frame, he remembereth that we are dust.” Take a teacher: he has a boy that wants to learn to write. He sets him a copy of straight marks, and the little fellow is bound to do his best. Watch him as he goes through his contortions. The teacher tells him how to hold his pen, but he never holds it right; it is covered with ink; he sets his mouth and takes aim at his copy. He works slowly down the page, and there is a blot here and a blur there, and a great many crooked marks upon it, but the teacher knows he has done his best, and he says “well done.” The next time he does a little better. Finally, after a week upon straight marks, (there are none of them really straight or true) he brings in the book, and the teacher says it is perfect. It is far from perfect, but it is the best that little fellow can do. I remember sitting in a house once when the mother said to the boys, (three of them were there), “It is time to bring in the wood.” The oldest was about sixteen, the next about twelve, and the youngest boy was five. They all went out. The big boy, perhaps to show off before the new minister, came in with an enormous load, piled it up, and turned around to me with pride in his face. The mother looked on with approval. The second came in with only half as large an armful, and the mother looked approvingly at him. The last one came in with but two sticks, and they were so crossed that he had great difficulty in holding them, and finally they slipped through his arms, and the little fellow fell down with them. His mother ran to him and kissed him, and said, “You have done better than they all.”