When I was growing up I used to love watching shows on Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel. Saturday mornings with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and other cartoons were one of the greatest days of the week! There were so many good shows! In fact, shows like Boy Meets World were so good they are now having sequels or being remade! Sometimes there would be shows that held “class elections.” It was like a kids take on politics. A student would get up and promise all of these things, like more candy in the vending machines, longer recess, and no homework.
Inevitably these kids won the election, but they were never able to deliver on their promise. These promises were made because they wanted to make people happy and get everyone on their side. If they could promise the most popular things, they were almost guaranteed to win.
Translate this and bring it to a more mature place. Really, these kids were doing something on a silly level that
we sometimes do on a more serious scale. It’s a pretty popular and well-accepted thing to just go along with the crowd; to not speak up or stand out or have an opposing opinion. It requires too much work, too much effort, too much vulnerability to stand up against something. And what if people end up not liking us? What if we are made fun of, laughed at, or pushed to the side and have no friends? What if people talk bad about us?
Luke 12:4-5 talks about the life principle that this kind of attitude comes from:
“I tell you, my friends, do not fear those who kill the body, and after that have nothing more that they can do. But I will warn you whom to fear: fear him who, after he has killed, has authority to cast into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him!”
Do you see it? We too often fear people more than we fear God. We fear someone looking down on us, looking at us like we’re weird or different, and not accepting us. We fear people because we want to belong. So we do what we can to belong and get along. Warren Wiersbe writes,
“When we are afraid of what others may say about us or do to us, then we try to impress them to gain their approval…”
Now, you are not alone. I have done this very same thing. We all have at some point. But the key to remember is that we will be so much more satisfied, so much more fulfilled, so much more fully alive when we fear God more than man. When we care more about what God cares about, and we care more about what He thinks of us, rather than what man thinks about us, our life will be lived much differently.
Today, I pray that you take this as your encouragement:
“Live today more focused on what God cares about than what man cares about.”