People pleasing. It feels like a lifelong battle for many people, including myself.
My struggle with people pleasing started as early as I could walk and talk. I’m from a small town in the Midwest where everyone knows everyone’s business. To be “liked” by others, you had to act a certain way, talk a certain way, and dress a certain way, if you get what I mean. I learned to adapt the way I acted to be liked by different groups of people.
As a young adult, I started to realize I didn’t know who I was. After so many years of conforming to others so that they would like me, I lost my own sense of identity. Friends would ask me my opinion on something, and I had no clue what to say. “What is the right thing to say to make them still like me?” is the thought that would run through my head before answering. It was paralyzing for me to make decisions in groups of people. I didn’t want to voice my opinion because I thought others would like me more if I was a “go with the flow” kind of girl.
What I learned over time is that my friends wanted to get to know me. Not the version of me that looked like everyone else, but the real me.
Part of my struggle with people pleasing was also fear of authority. I desperately wanted those in authority of me to think highly of me. This is something I believe we can all wrestle with to an extent. Colossians 3:22-4:1 talks about bondservants obeying their masters, not out of people pleasing but out of fear of the Lord.
About a year ago, I realized my fear of man was replacing my fear of the Lord. I was a month into a new job in ministry, and my world felt like it was crumbling down. I was being asked to speak hard truth to others, and they weren’t responding well to me (aka I couldn’t win their approval). I was fearful of saying the wrong thing but also fearful of saying the right thing. I was back to being stuck in a state of paralysis, and I didn’t know how to move forward.
After sharing with a few friends and receiving their wisdom, I was reminded of my identity in Christ. God has created each of us uniquely and wants us to freely be ourselves. The only way He can transform our hearts is if we surrender to His love. I believe as we fear the Lord, we surrender to His love.
Fearing God doesn’t mean acting out of terror of Him but rather acknowledging His holy character and acting in reverence to Him instead. This passage in Colossians acknowledges that we have an inheritance as our reward. The reward is not that those in authority would approve of us or that peers would like us. Rather, our Heavenly Father loved us so much that He sent His Son to die for us, and we will get to live with Him forever.
I don’t know if people pleasing or fear of man will continue to pop back up in different ways throughout my life. But what I can confidently say is that there is so much more freedom in fearing the Lord than fearing man. Think about it. The Creator of the Universe created you and delights in using you exactly where He’s placed you. Let us press on in obeying our leaders, working hard, and serving Christ as we fear the Lord in all we do.
