There are certain questions all of us need to ask ourselves. There are certain ways in which we need to probe our own minds and figure out just what we are doing. It never hurts to look inside and be honest and dig out our own motives.
For example, since I am now in that wonderful status of senior adult, every now and again I need to ask myself, “Do I weigh too much?” And, since the answer to that is perfectly obvious, then I need to ask, “Am I eating too many sweets, too many fats, too many things that I like but they don’t like me?” That’s a painful question; but you get to that point in your life when, if you care at all about your health, you have to ask it.
Or, again, since today my wife and I celebrate our 46th wedding anniversary, it’s time to ask a very penetrating question about that relationship. “How are we doing?” “Is our marriage healthy?” “Do we communicate accurately and lovingly?” I’m not going to share the answers to those questions, because she who has the right answers is sitting out here, and if you need to know, she will tell you in a heartbeat! But here is one of those questions that everyone in any significant relationship needs to ask. We’d have better marriages, better parenting, and better friendships if we stopped to figure that out.
Questions we need to ask ourselves – what else? Here’s one. Here is a whopper of a motive question: “Am I seeking human approval?” Am I seeking human approval? Do I need for others to affirm me and tell me I am doing well? Do I crave praise, and, on the other side of the ledger, do I hate to be criticized? It’s an important question, because if your need to be approved runs too deep, you will find that you aren’t you anymore! If you have to have others’ approval for everything, you’ll end up trying to please everybody, and you won’t even know what you think or what you believe any longer. In fact, if your life consists in little more than seeking human approval, you will have left God out of the equation. You will no longer be concerned with doing what God wants, because you are so preoccupied with doing what you think others want.
Now I need to confess from the start that this is an issue for me. If I ask myself, “Am I seeking human approval?” I have to tell you that I always have wanted that, and probably always will, to some degree. I remember an incident in the 8th grade – now, if you are keeping score, that would be around 1951, so you see how long this old hurt has stayed with me. My 8th grade English teacher, for some perverse reason, asked us all to write down on a slip of paper the grade we thought we deserved. Well, I had a need – not just a desire, but a need – to be a top student, and I thought I had done rather well, so I wrote down “Joe Smith, A”, and thought that was over with. Well, not so! Not at all! That teacher proceeded to open and read those little slips of paper out loud in front of the whole class, and I will never forget her reaction when she got to mine: “Joe Smith, A! Who do you think I am, Santa Claus?! More like C or B at best!” With a glare in my direction, punctuated by giggles from all around the room, she put me down hard. She did not know – or if she did, she did not care – that I needed human approval.
But don’t we all? In one fashion or another, don’t we all crave to be liked and appreciated? Don’t we all need for others to think well of us? Of course we do. Nothing wrong with that. Unless – unless – it becomes so profound a need that we forget to ask what God thinks of us. Unless our need for human approval wipes away caring about God’s expectations.
Saul of Tarsus, persecutor of Christians, had one day been confronted by a vision he could not deny and a power he could not shake off. On the road to Damascus, expecting to root out and punish those who were following the new way of Jesus, he had met this Jesus face to face. And nearly everything changed. His outlook, his perspective, his life purpose, his belief system -- even his name was changed. Known originally as Saul of Tarsus, he now used his Roman name, Paul, and was on his way to becoming the greatest of the Apostles.
Now Paul had to rethink just about everything, thanks to what happened on the road to Damascus. He spent several years reviewing his mind and clarifying his purpose. During those years, he thought through the meaning of his encounter with Christ and how it connected with and completed his earlier life as a rabbi. And he not only developed an understanding of what God had done in him through Jesus, but he also began to teach and preach that, and to start new churches on the basis of that thinking. Tomorrow night, when we invite Paul himself to come and preach, we’ll get him to tell his story more completely. Right now, in a nutshell, here is the situation:
Paul learned from his encounter with Jesus and his years of thinking that salvation comes through faith by the grace of God as a gift, and that it is not something anybody can earn. Especially it is not something you get just because you try to keep the rules of the old Jewish law. He had spent his earlier life trying to keep the Law, the Law, the Law – all its many rules. But he had found that this was not what God wanted; God wants faith, God wants trust. God wants a relationship with us. And so Paul had begun to teach exactly that. When Paul founded churches, they were made up largely of people who had been Jewish, and who knew about the Law, but now heard and received this wonderful word of freedom – salvation by grace through faith.
However – and this is the reason Paul wrote the Galatian letter – however, some of them had turned their backs on Paul’s teaching and had gone back to the rules-keeping of Judaism. They had found their old habits hard to break, and so had begun to reject what Paul was teaching.
Paul was upset at this. He was most unhappy. He could not understand why they would leave behind their freedom in Christ to return to an old, enslaving pattern of legalism. He said, “I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel”. And then, trying to get them back on the right track, he put himself into the picture and asked our key question, “Am I seeking human approval, or God’s approval? Am I trying to please people? If I were still pleasing people, I would not be a servant of Christ.”
Let’s think about this business of seeking approval. Can we find out from Paul’s experience the way to stay more focused on God’s approval instead of human approval?
I
The first issue is that most of us look backward too much. We look backward at old patterns, old ways of living, and we decide that what we used to do was good enough. It got us friends, it supported us, it connected us with approval. And so why bother with new life directions when the old ones work so well? Most of us look backward for approval.
The Galatian believers, I am sure, lived in towns and communities where every day they had to confront the friends they had made before they became Christians. Imagine the scene with me. Every Sabbath Day, here they are, headed out the door to the little gathering of Jesus people, and they run into the folks from around the corner who are on their way to synagogue services. “Oh, are you still going to that Jesus thing? We sure do miss you over at the synagogue! You remember how Rabbi Ezra teaches the Law -- why, he’s just getting better and better. You’re missing a lot. Why don’t you just give up on that fad – it’s not going anywhere – and come on home where you belong?”
It was tempting, I’m sure. Folks don’t like to be oddballs. They don’t like to stand out from the crowd. It feels good to fit in, doesn’t it?.
It gets worse. Do you still have your imagination turned on? Picture this: later that same Sabbath Day, the children of the Christians are playing in the streets, but the children of those who are still strictly Jewish are inside, allowed to do nothing more than read the Torah. The word gets around, “The Christians are flaunting God’s Law. They don’t keep the rules anymore.” Can’t you just hear it? “These Christians are slapping God in the face by not keeping the Law – why, I’ll bet they are even eating pork.” And so what happens? Christian folk are stung by the criticisms; they go back to what feels comfortable. They go back to what wins human approval. They go back to Law-keeping, because that was what got them the goodies in their community. Most of us look backward too much, because we want human approval.
Over the years I’ve worked with a number of men caught up in alcoholism or drug abuse, or both. My church and I worked hard to teach them new ways. We would get them new clothes, find them jobs, make sure they had a decent place to live, and, most of all, we tried to keep them involved in Bible study and worship and counseling. But in several of those cases, we would discover that the fellow we were working with would stop showing up. We’d go looking for him and not be able to find him. But inevitably the day would come when he would call me and say, “Pastor, I need your help. I kind of got into drinking again and got caught. I’ve been locked up and I need you to come get me.” Well, how did that happen, man? I thought we had you on the right path? “You did. It’s not your fault. I just ran into some of my old buddies, and they said, ‘Come on, man. One beer. Just one beer won’t hurt, for old time’s sake.’” And you know what happened -- how one beer turned into two, and two turned into a nightlong binge, and the binge ended in disorderly conduct. Back into the slammer!
The fundamental problem is that if we are hungry for approval, we go back to the old ways of getting slaps on the back. We think that happiness will come from pleasing the crowd, only to find that the crowd doesn’t really care about us, but will throw us away like yesterday’s newspaper when they have had their fun. The issue with us is that the fickle crowd out there is as messed up as we are and cannot sustain us for long. There may be a night or two of what feels like fun, but it will not last, it will not satisfy. Human approval always runs thin in the end.
And so Paul says to us, when we are out there seeking approval by going back to what we used to do, “A new creation is everything!” God wants to make of us something new. God wants to do a work of creation in us. God wants us to become what pleases Him. And that, I submit, is far better than any applause the world can give us. “Am I seeking human approval?” If I go back to what I used to be and used to do to get approval, I am forgetting that a new creation is everything. And I am forgetting that God wants to do this new creation in me, in you, right here, right now.
II
But there is another issue. There is another side to this thing of seeking human approval. It is not only that some of us look backward too much and find it easier to go back to old habits. It is also that some of us look forward too much! We look forward to the moment when somebody will do something special and solve all our problems for us. We look forward to the time when someone will give us a secret formula and all our personal issues will be resolved. We look forward to some wise guru who knows all the answers and who can fix whatever ails us. Not only do we look backward too much; we also look forward too much!
So there are folks today who get hooked on some TV preacher’s spiel – just send in your money and I will give you this book, this video, this tape, absolutely guaranteed to bring you happiness. Or others get tied in to some pop psychologist’s program – just attend my sessions for the next year or two or three and pay my bills, and you will discover the secret. Or most seductive of all, we listen to the merchants insisting that we buy, buy, buy – this house, this car, these clothes, these cosmetics, whatever – and you can look forward to romance, prosperity, and joy.
Does this sound familiar to you? If we are not looking backward for human approval, we are looking forward to it. We are falling for the schemes that promise happiness out there, just a step ahead, but at a price.
Paul sensed that in the Galatians. “I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you in the grace of Christ … but there are some who are confusing you and want to pervert the gospel of Christ.” Somebody more glamorous than Paul had come along and sold them a bill of goods. Somebody more glib, more up-to-date, somebody more trendy – or just the latest somebody! One of the professors at the seminary Pastor Vallerie and I both attended was said always to have agreed with whatever he had read in the latest book! Some of us have not tested our own minds so that we know what is right. And therefore we are subject to fall for anything that comes along, if it promises to fulfill us and make us happier.
But I will tell you that the woods are full of disappointed people. People who ran to the latest fad, read the most recent book, dabbled in the most exotic psychobabble, or who hurried off to the flashiest church with the brashiest preacher, all in search of happiness, and who did not get it.
Because the Bible tells us that true joy is not to be found in the things that are just over the horizon, out of reach. True joy is to be found in the truth you have right here, right now. True happiness is to be found in the crunch of everyday life, with all that you have to do and all that is coming at you, but now, in this present moment, God can make of you a new creation. A new creation! That is what God wants to give us. A new creation. And a new creation is everything!
Have you ever heard of a preacher of some years ago, named Russell Conwell? Russell Conwell was the pastor of a Baptist church in Philadelphia, and the founder of Temple University. He used to travel the country offering a famous speech called, “Acres of Diamonds.” In “Acres of Diamonds” Conwell spoke of a man named Ali Hafed, who had become enamored with the idea of getting rich from diamond mining. Ali was not a poor man; in fact, he lacked for nothing. But once he heard about diamonds, nothing would do but that he have them, lots of them. Ali Hafed traveled the world over, looking for places where he might find the shiny objects of his dreams; he spent all that he had in this elusive quest, and died on some distant shore, a broken and disappointed soul. He never found that treasured something that was always just out there ahead of him. So after Ali died, someone else bought his home, and one day, poking around in its garden, found a shiny stone. Pushing the sand and the soil back with his hand, there were more stones … many more. So was discovered the Golconda diamond mine in India, from which many of the world’s greatest gems have been cut. Ali Hafed had so pursued an out-there dream that he had failed to see the acres of diamonds in his own backyard.
Brothers and sisters, a new creation is everything. God wants to give us new life now. Our Lord wants to bring us to Himself and to make us fresh again, now. If we are hungry only for human approval, we will miss it. Either we will look backward and fall into old habits, resort to the old crowd, and resist what God wants to do in us. Or we will look forward and grasp after things that are not real and trends that will not satisfy, and miss entirely what God is already doing for us, right here, right now.
Today, God is calling you to live without remorse or guilt or shame. The past is past and cannot be changed. But you have now. If, with Paul, you are asking, “Am I seeking human approval?” and the answer is, “Yes, I keep on going back to the people who used to slap me on the back and tell me what a great guy I was”, then hear Paul reminding you, “If I were still pleasing people, I would not be a servant of Christ.” Nor would you have the new creation.
Today, God is calling you to live without fantasies, without idle hopes. The future is future and cannot be grasped. But you have now. If, with Paul, you are asking, “Am I seeking human approval?” and the answer is, “Yes, someday somewhere somebody is going to show me something that will give me power and popularity”, then hear Paul telling you, “A new creation is everything.” Everything. The only thing.
Open your heart, today. Open your mind, today. One thing let us do: forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, let us press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called us … in Christ Jesus. I want to be new, now. I want to be created new, now. For a new creation is everything.
