Incentives to Kill My Love of Human Praise
00:00:00.000 | A podcast listener named Dan writes in to ask this, "Pastor John, how do I conquer
00:00:09.920 | the love of human praise? My heart is so prideful." Well let me say that Dan has
00:00:17.360 | already made two key discoveries that I hear in the question. One is that there
00:00:25.240 | are two kinds of pride. There's the pride of the strong that praises itself, praises
00:00:31.540 | himself, and there's the pride of the weak that craves other people to praise
00:00:37.600 | me. And the other discovery that Dan has made is that he's more guilty of the
00:00:43.880 | second than the first. And I say more guilty because all of us are guilty of
00:00:53.000 | both. Everybody draws attention to himself at some time and brags, and
00:01:00.080 | everybody wants other people to notice when we we do something. It tastes good
00:01:06.120 | to be affirmed and praised. So this is a universal question. He's not unique. And
00:01:12.680 | it is amazing to me how directly Jesus addresses this issue in the Sermon on
00:01:20.920 | the Mount. Listen to this. Matthew 6 to 2, "When you give to the needy, sound no
00:01:25.680 | trumpet before you as the hypocrites do in the synagogue and in the streets, that
00:01:29.520 | they may be praised by others. Truly I say to you, they have received their
00:01:33.520 | reward." In verse 5, "When you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites, for they
00:01:37.880 | love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may
00:01:41.680 | be seen by others. Truly I say to you, they have received their reward." Verse 16,
00:01:47.240 | "When you fast, do not look gloomy like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their
00:01:52.640 | faces, that their fasting may be seen by others. Truly I say to you, they have
00:01:58.800 | received their reward." So Jesus is amazingly aware of this issue, and he's
00:02:06.760 | got much to say about it. In those three statements, verse 2, verse 5, verse 16, in
00:02:12.800 | Matthew 6, in the Sermon on the Mount, there are three incentives to help us
00:02:19.940 | hate this disease of praise-seeking. Number one, Jesus calls us hypocrites
00:02:27.500 | when we seek the praise of men. When you do something praiseworthy to get the
00:02:32.700 | praise of man, you're not doing the praiseworthy thing, you're doing the
00:02:38.100 | praise-craving thing. You're a hypocrite. You pretend to do the good, but that is
00:02:44.980 | incidental to what you really want, applause. So we fight this craving, first
00:02:52.620 | by hating hypocrisy. Everybody hates hypocrisy. "Well, we are one." "Well, you
00:02:58.260 | don't want to be one." So don't do that. Second, Jesus says in all three cases of
00:03:04.660 | praise-craving, "They have received their reward." What's the point of saying that?
00:03:11.540 | Well, I think there are two points of saying that. One, you lose something great, and
00:03:17.660 | you gain something pitiful. What do you gain? You gain the praise of man. You want
00:03:23.380 | it, you get it. That's it. And the connotation is that what you gain is
00:03:28.380 | pitiful. It's like a drug. It gives a buzz, it's gone.
00:03:34.020 | Gotta have another fix. You're always insecure. You're always needy of other
00:03:38.700 | people's praise in order for you to be happy or to feel secure. It never satisfies. And so
00:03:44.380 | when he says, "You have your reward," he means it's a lousy reward. You're
00:03:48.820 | settling for such a little reward. But the other point, this is the third incentive,
00:03:54.900 | is what you're losing, the reward of God. So here's Matthew 6, 1. "Beware of
00:04:00.700 | practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them,
00:04:05.260 | for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven." You gain
00:04:13.620 | this lousy, pitiful, drug-like reward, and you lose an infinite reward. And it
00:04:21.180 | doesn't say what the reward is, but back in chapter 5, verse 12, it says, "Great is
00:04:26.020 | your reward in heaven." It's from God, and it is very, very great. So three incentives
00:04:33.060 | with which to kill this craving for human praise. One, it makes you a
00:04:39.260 | hypocrite. We don't like hypocrites, and so let's not be one. Two, it delivers a
00:04:44.060 | pitiful reward. Three, it robs you of a great reward. And Paul, we go beyond Jesus
00:04:52.220 | now to Paul, he fleshes out this third incentive. He says in Romans 2, 29, that
00:04:57.620 | Christians are people whose praise is not from man, but from God. And 2nd
00:05:06.060 | Corinthians 10, 18 says, "It's not the one who commends himself who is approved, but
00:05:11.660 | the one whom the Lord commends, or praises." So do you want to be praised? Let
00:05:19.380 | it come from God. "His master said to him, 'Well done, good and faithful servant.'" C.S.
00:05:26.780 | Lewis called that "the weight of glory." How can it be that the infinite, perfect
00:05:33.020 | God would look upon my imperfect obedience and say, "Well done, good and
00:05:40.980 | faithful servant"? How could anything in me be praiseworthy? Of course, the answer
00:05:45.900 | is 1st Corinthians 4, 7, "What do you have that you did not receive? And if you
00:05:50.340 | received it, why do you boast as if it were not a gift?" Everything I have is a
00:05:55.260 | gift. If God praises anything in me, He's praising His grace in me. So these are
00:06:01.380 | some of the truths, and there are a lot more that we need to preach to ourselves
00:06:06.180 | in order to slay this dragon of craving for the praise of man. That's so good.
00:06:14.260 | Thank you, Pastor John, and thank you for the question, Dan. Tomorrow, Pastor John
00:06:18.020 | will answer questions from two different podcast listeners who are both asking
00:06:21.340 | the same thing. What to do when an unmarried couple who's living together
00:06:25.180 | travels and stays in your home? Should you give them one bed? Should you give them
00:06:29.660 | two beds? Or should you even host them together at all? I'm your host Tony
00:06:34.580 | Rehnke, we'll see you tomorrow.
00:06:37.380 | [BLANK_AUDIO]