The Wheel

"For am I now seeking the approval of man, or of God?" Galatians 1:10

There is a picture I cannot get out of my head, and it is a hamster on a wheel.

The wheel is going. The little legs are moving. There is real effort in it, real exertion, real sweat if hamsters sweat, and if you were to measure the distance covered you would find that it is genuinely impressive. Mile after mile after mile.

And he is exactly where he started.

That is the approval carrot, and I have run on that wheel most of my life. You think you are going somewhere. You feel the motion. You can point to the effort as proof that something is happening, and effort does feel like progress, especially to a man who has always been able to work harder than the people around him.

But the carrot is hung from the wheel. It moves when you move. That is the design.

And so you get the promotion and the line shifts. You get the compliment and it lasts an afternoon. You get the approval you were sure would settle it, and by Wednesday your stomach is tight again and you are not entirely sure why, and if you are honest you already know what you are going to do about it.

You are going to run.

Here is what I want you to notice. Nobody put you on the wheel. That is the part that is hard to say out loud. The wheel is in your cage and you get on it every morning because the running feels like living, and stopping feels like dying, and you have never once tried to find out whether it is.

What would happen if you stepped off?

Not permanently. Just today.

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.