One of the troubles with inward sins is that they are inward. (The other trouble is that they are sins.) With inward sins, those we cannot measure objectively, it is all too easy to claim we have them whipped. When I covet my neighbor’s car, no alarm goes off. When you hate your brother without just cause, no one calls 911. That’s why it’s so easy to pretend we’ve mastered what has actually mastered us.
We not only pat ourselves on the back for having won these invisible battles, but we all get together and mock those losers that we assume are failing. Everyone knows that social media gives us the opportunity to present ourselves in our best light. Everyone knows that people tout their victories rather than their defeats. Everyone assumes that this is everyone else, when it’s really everyone. As one wise comic put it, “You’re not stuck in traffic. You are traffic.”
“Man pleasing” is another of those internal sins that are invisible, unless they reach the most obnoxious extreme. One need not be an obsequious lickspittle to like it when people think your vocabulary level proves your high intelligence level. All one has to do, like me, is look for the clicks, the likes, and the shares. All one has to do is keep an ear out for notifications, harbingers of tiny little dopamine releases.
I may belong to the most ironic and pathetic class of man pleasers. Some of us wouldn’t think of softening a position to maintain respectability. Some of us would never seek out gentle words to communicate hard truths. No, we’re the ones who proudly earn the reputation of being prophetic, bold, uncompromising. We hunger for the most precious of accolades, entrance into the Untouched by the Approval of Men Hall of Fame. We want people, lots of people, to think we don’t care what people think.
The problem isn’t the hunger, but its object. That is, we only begin to win this battle when we seek satisfaction in the love of our heavenly Father. Strangers on the internet cannot fill that yawning belly, no matter what our analytics report. We will never be truly alive until we are dead to ourselves. The trouble with our solution, as with so many solutions, is getting there is so much easier said than done.
It is a good thing to want to do great things for the kingdom. It is a bad thing to want to be great in the kingdom. It is a difficult thing to tell these two apart. We get there, I suspect, when our Father does a good thing in us. We need His grace to put to death in us our hunger for the approval of men. We need to implore our Father to bless us in this way, knowing that He is our good Father who loves us, who gives us good gifts. He has shown His love for us, not by growing our reach, or building our brand but by hiding us under the shadow of the cross.
