Between the Two Ponds
One passage. One idea. A few quiet minutes. Short devotional readings for people being formed by grace, written from a small chair beside still water in Falcon, Colorado.
Pull one up. Read slowly. There is no hurry here.
The Exchange Rate We Learn Young
Many people who cannot stop pleasing others grew up in places where love and acceptance were handed out on condition. Where you got them by meeting the expectation.
"Am I trying to please people?" (Galatians 1:10)
Many people who cannot stop pleasing others learned very early that love and acceptance were handed out on condition, earned by meeting the expectation. A child notices the arrangement the way he notices where the good fishing is, and once he has noticed it he uses it, and it works, and it quietly becomes the shape of a whole life. Be useful, and the good word comes. Perform, and you are accepted. Fail, and the warmth withdraws.
Underneath it is a hunger, a desperation for a good word carried home to someone you love, and a person can grow so addicted to finding that word, from anyone who will give it, that he never stops looking. Harriet Braiker calls people-pleasing an addiction, and the comparison is exact. Just as a drug addict seeks drugs, she writes, people-pleasers seek approval. A man may get sober from a great many things in his life and never once get sober from this.
And it will not be broken by trying harder to be humble, because the trying is itself one more bid for approval. The addiction only loosens when a deeper acceptance arrives, one you did not earn and therefore cannot lose. This is the whole scandal of grace. The Father's good word over you was spoken before you performed a single useful thing, spoken over a Son he loved and in whom he was well pleased, and given to you in him.
So stop trying to buy what you already own. You will know the exchange rate is finally breaking in you on the day you can do a hidden good thing that no one will ever carry home and praise, and be content that God saw it.
The Wheel in the Cage
There is a picture I cannot get out of my head, and it is a hamster on a wheel.
"For am I now seeking the approval of man, or of God?" (Galatians 1:10)
Picture a wheel turning in a cage, the small legs going, real effort in it, mile after mile, and the runner exactly where he began. That is the approval carrot, and many of us have run on that wheel for years. 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 person who can always out-work the people around him.
But the carrot is hung from the wheel. It moves when you move. That is the design, and it is why the thing never resolves. You get the promotion and the line simply shifts. You get the compliment and it lasts an afternoon. You get the very approval you were sure would settle you, and by the middle of the week your stomach is tight again and you cannot quite say why, and you already know what you are going to do about it. You are going to run.
Here is the hard thing to say out loud. No one put you on the wheel. It sits in your own cage, and you climb onto it every morning because the running feels like living and stopping feels like dying, and you have never once tested whether that is true. The fear of man keeps the wheel turning. Trust in the Lord is the door of the cage, standing open.
You do not have to leave it forever to find out. Step off for one day. Refuse the next lap. Let a single afternoon pass without earning anyone's good opinion, and see whether the God whose approval you already have was holding you the whole time.
The Only Two Masters
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.
"Am I now trying to win the approval of human beings, or of God? ... If I were still trying to please people, I would not be a servant of Christ." (Galatians 1:10)
In the middle of an argument about grace and performance, Paul 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 lays down two options and makes them plain, and in the end they are the only two there are. You will be a servant of God, or you will be a slave to the opinions of other people.
Notice that both of those words put your life in someone else's hand. Neither one is independence. There is no third door where you finally become self-sufficient and beholden to no one, because that person has never existed. You were made to be held. The only question is by whom.
It is a harder choice than it is usually made to sound. Long before Christ ever broke into the hardness of the heart and began to warm it, most of us had already spent years living for the approval of others. It is the water we learned to swim in, the first language we ever spoke. It is entirely possible to go on today and tomorrow and every day after, calculating what the room thinks, managing how we are seen, keeping our standing carefully in repair, and to call the whole exhausting business faithfulness.
Paul says that if he were still doing that, he would not be a servant of Christ. Not a worse servant. Not one at all. Let that sentence cost you something, and then choose your master on purpose, before the room chooses for you.