Gospel Wisdom for Approval Junkies
00:00:00.000 | [Music]
00:00:05.000 | Podcast listener Victoria writes in to say this, "Hello, Pastor John. I often
00:00:08.800 | wonder how would you counsel someone who is addicted to approval, always fearful
00:00:14.480 | of what people might think of him or her, and always concerned over the slightest
00:00:18.560 | apathy from others, fearing rejection. What would you say to Victoria?"
00:00:23.000 | Well, I'd say the same thing to Victoria that I would say to me.
00:00:26.000 | [Laughter]
00:00:27.000 | Exactly.
00:00:28.000 | This is a totally universal problem, all right? This is not a small segment of
00:00:36.000 | people who are wrestling with this isolated little problem. There is a
00:00:40.000 | paradox, an irony in all of us in this regard. We crave approval from others, and
00:00:49.000 | we fear rejection by others, which means that on the one hand, we desperately want
00:00:57.000 | to be somebody, but on the other hand, by our craving and by our fear, we admit we
00:01:06.000 | are dependent on others for the somebody that we want to be. There's a built-in
00:01:13.000 | irony here. Put it another way. We want our worth, our strength, our beauty, our
00:01:20.000 | accomplishments to be validated by others, and in the very moment of our
00:01:26.000 | insecure craving and fearing, we are admitting we don't have much strength to
00:01:31.000 | be validated, but instead we are weak and we need to be propped up by validation.
00:01:38.000 | My word, yes.
00:01:39.000 | What an irony. There's an incredible lesson here. In one sense, this craving for
00:01:45.000 | approval and this fear of disapproval is both an indictment of the sin of pride
00:01:53.000 | and an expression of hope that if we're willing to admit it, we already know that
00:01:59.000 | pride is a hopeless way forward. We already know this. We're given evidence to
00:02:03.000 | it every day, and we need, we really need help from outside, and it isn't the
00:02:09.000 | affirmation of other people. It's God. We are trying to convince ourselves that we
00:02:16.000 | are okay without help from outside, ironically by seeking validation from
00:02:22.000 | people outside who are all trying to do the same thing. But the real way to deal
00:02:28.000 | with this craving and this fear of not getting it, not getting the affirmation,
00:02:34.000 | is to humble ourselves and to admit that our real security, our real identity, our
00:02:42.000 | real stability, our real joy comes from way outside ourselves, namely from God,
00:02:50.000 | and our problem is that we have replaced God-centeredness with self-centeredness
00:02:56.000 | and God-focus with self-focus and God-regard for self-regard. And as I was
00:03:03.000 | thinking about this, the quote from C.S. Lewis came up into my mind where—I think
00:03:11.000 | this is in one of his letters. I didn't write down the location. I think it's a
00:03:14.000 | letter where he says this, "The pleasure of pride is like the pleasure of
00:03:22.000 | scratching. If there's an itch, one does want to scratch, but it is much nicer to
00:03:29.000 | have neither the itch nor the scratch. As long as we have the itch of self-regard,
00:03:36.000 | we shall want the pleasure of self-approval. But the happiest moments are
00:03:42.000 | those when we forget our precious selves and have neither but have everything else—
00:03:51.000 | God, our fellow humans, animals, the garden, and the sky instead." Now that is a
00:03:58.000 | beautiful statement, because what he's saying is if we would just give up our
00:04:03.000 | hopeless self-preoccupation, we would inherit God as our treasure and the
00:04:11.000 | whole world thrown in for good measure. Self-regard is a hopeless way to live.
00:04:20.000 | If we're getting our pleasure from feeling self-sufficient, we will never be
00:04:26.000 | satisfied with others seeing and applauding our self-sufficiency. It will
00:04:31.000 | never work, and we'll always be plagued by the fear that they've not seen it or
00:04:38.000 | they didn't respond positively enough or what did that facial expression mean or
00:04:42.000 | why didn't they call back or on and on and on. Oh, what a miserable life. We'll
00:04:49.000 | always be second-handers. Our meaning in life, our joy, our identity, our worth
00:04:55.000 | will be constantly dependent on other people, and that is a miserable way to
00:05:01.000 | live. And so Jesus describes the Pharisees—boy, should this go home to all of us—
00:05:07.000 | they do all their deeds to be noticed by men. Oh, in this media-driven age of
00:05:14.000 | ours where you can tweet yourself out in a minute how we need this, they do all
00:05:19.000 | their deeds to be noticed by men, and they love the place of honor at banquets
00:05:25.000 | and the chief seats in the synagogues and respectful greetings in the
00:05:29.000 | marketplaces and being called by men "Rabbi." But evidently, there's a void.
00:05:36.000 | There's a void in this so-called self-sufficiency. Why? Because the self
00:05:43.000 | was never designed to satisfy the self. It was never meant to be self-sufficient.
00:05:53.000 | We are only images of God. We're not God. We're not the ultimate thing. We are
00:05:59.000 | shadows. We're echoes. So there'll always be an emptiness, an emptiness in our
00:06:05.000 | soul that struggles to be satisfied with the resources of self and constantly
00:06:11.000 | needs others to prop up the self, which can never happen because the self was
00:06:16.000 | never designed to be that for the self. So here's the key problem and the way
00:06:21.000 | out. The empty craving for the praise of others signals the absence of faith in
00:06:29.000 | God's future grace, the absence of a restful satisfaction in all that God is
00:06:38.000 | for us in Jesus, the absence of the outward look to God in Christ as our
00:06:46.000 | meaning and our identity and our security and our worth and our usefulness.
00:06:52.000 | And Jesus himself made the connection between faith in God or faith in Jesus
00:06:59.000 | and the opposite, namely craving for human praise. I remember years ago I was
00:07:05.000 | just powerfully impacted by John 5:44 where Jesus says this, "How can you
00:07:12.000 | believe when you receive glory from one another and you do not seek the glory
00:07:20.000 | that comes from the only God?" Well, what's the answer? You can't. You can't
00:07:26.000 | believe. Itching for glory from other people makes faith impossible. Why?
00:07:33.000 | Because faith means being satisfied with all that God is for you in Jesus. And if
00:07:39.000 | you are bent on getting your satisfaction from scratching the itch of self-regard,
00:07:45.000 | people's affirmation, you will turn away from Jesus because you can't serve two
00:07:50.000 | masters. But if you would turn from self as the source of satisfaction, which is
00:07:58.000 | what repentance is, and come to Jesus for the enjoyment of all that God is for us
00:08:06.000 | in him, which is what faith is, then the itch would be replaced by a well of
00:08:14.000 | water, springing up to eternal life. So my counsel to every Christian who
00:08:20.000 | struggles with the fear of man's disapproval and the craving of man's
00:08:24.000 | approval, which is all Christians more or less, is this. Realize that in Jesus
00:08:31.000 | Christ, in a solid God-chosen relationship with Jesus, man's disapproval
00:08:38.000 | cannot hurt you, and man's approval cannot satisfy you. Therefore, to fear the
00:08:46.000 | one and crave the other is sheer folly. You shall know the truth, and the truth
00:08:52.000 | will set you free—free from the fear of not getting other people's approval and
00:08:58.000 | craving it as though you just got to have it. And the truth that sets you free from
00:09:03.000 | that is, if God is for us, who can be against us? Romans 8:31. You don't need to
00:09:08.000 | fear anyone's disapproval when God Almighty is for you. Think about it. Let
00:09:13.000 | it sink in. And the other truth is that knowing Jesus, looking outside ourselves
00:09:19.000 | to the glory of the Son of God in the gospel, in the triumph for us over evil,
00:09:24.000 | looking to him is all-satisfying. I count everything as loss because of the
00:09:31.000 | surpassing worth of knowing Jesus. So the itch is satisfied, not with successful
00:09:38.000 | self-regard, but with the breathtaking Christ-regard.
00:09:44.000 | Brilliant. What a quote from C.S. Lewis, and for what it's worth, that quote
00:09:48.000 | appears in his Collected Letters, Volume 3, page 429. It also appears in John
00:09:52.000 | Pepper's book, Future Grace, in chapter 6. And for more information and to
00:09:57.000 | download our apps and our past episodes and to get us a question of your own,
00:10:01.000 | find us online at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn. I'm your host, Tony Ranke,
00:10:06.000 | and I'll see you tomorrow.
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