Servants or Slaves

"Am I now trying to win the approval of human beings, or of God? Or am I trying to please people? If I were still trying to please people, I would not be a servant of Christ." Galatians 1:10

Paul is writing to people who had abandoned a gospel of grace and gone back to a gospel of performance, and in the middle of that argument he stops and asks a question that has nothing to do with theology and everything to do with the heart. Whose approval am I working for.

And he does not leave it hanging. He gives you the two choices and he makes them plain, and I have come to believe they are the only two there are.

You will either be a servant of God, or you will be a slave to the opinions of other people.

Notice that both of those words involve someone else holding your life. Neither of them is autonomy. There is no third door where you finally become free and self-sufficient and beholden to nobody, because that person does not exist and never has. You were made to be held. The only question is by whom.

And I want to be honest that this is a hard choice, and I am tired of hearing it presented as an easy one. Because for most of us, long before Christ ever broke into the hardness of our hearts and began to warm them with his grace, we had already spent decades living for the approval of others. It is the water we learned to swim in. It is the first language we ever spoke. It is entirely possible to live today, and tomorrow, and every day after that, constantly calculating what other people think of us, constantly managing how we are perceived, constantly working to keep a good standing with a room.

And to call it faithfulness.

Paul says that if he were still doing that, he would not be a servant of Christ. Not that he would be a worse one. That he would not be one.

That sentence should cost us something.