The outcomes in my (also your) life are not determined by how people regard me (and you), but by how I (and you) regard God.
It ought not be a shock or surprise that there are forces in this world that are opposed to you and me. These forces are a combination of people who are against you or who would not support you or whose interests are contrary to yours, and of unseen spiritual forces who are opposed to God’s purposes for the world and for you.
Would you be a God-pleaser or a people-pleaser? You will be a slave to whoever you seek to please. If you are a people-pleaser, you will be a slave to the people you are seeking to please. When you are a people-pleaser, you seek the affection of the people you wish to please. You make these people your masters.
There are many drawbacks to being a people-pleaser.
(1) The people you are trying to please are imperfect people who will never be capable of perfectly appreciating and valuing your efforts to please them — their response to your efforts will not be consistent, fully predictable or always worthy.
(2) If your actions are not borne out of conviction of what is right or wrong, you will please your masters where and when you think it matters, e.g. only when your masters are observing you — in other words, you may be trying to do things right or doing the right things instead of doing right.
(3) There are insatiable people whose pleasure and humour need to be cultivated and served on continuous basis, and so you will be enslaved to them if you seek to please them as a means to achieve your own ends.
(4) When the people you seek to please are no longer in a position of power or importance to benefit you, will you cease trying to please them and turn your efforts to please those new others who are in such position? What would this say about your integrity as a person?
(5) To be successful as a people-pleaser, you will have to do a perfect job of pleasing imperfect people — this sounds to the author like an impossible task!
Let’s consider the most influential man in history: Jesus Christ. He was certainly not a people-pleaser. Yet, people who knew him found no fault in him, and they loved him. Interestingly, people who did not know him tried very hard to find fault with him, and they hated him.
There were people opposed to Jesus from the moment he was born. In fact, it was before he was even born. Jesus’ birth was during the reign of King Herod in Jerusalem. When Herod was informed that the one prophesied to be king of the Jews was to about to be born, he sought to locate this child by deceit (Matthew 2:1–8). When this failed, Herod ordered that all toddler boys in Bethlehem (where Jesus was to have been born) be killed, in order to get rid of this supposed challenger to his rule.
When Jesus emerged from obscurity to enter into public ministry, the Jewish leaders opposed him tooth and nail. He had told them the truth that they they so needed to hear, which they did not wish to hear. By lies and deceit, they ultimately succeeded in condemning Jesus to death by crucifixion.
Spiritual forces opposed Jesus. Right after Jesus was baptised, Satan began to test Jesus by tempting him. When the devil failed to get Jesus to succumb to his schemes, he continued to work against Jesus by tempting other people who succumbed. The Bible says that Satan entered Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Jesus to be captured by the chief priests and captains (Luke 22:3).
(In their devilish scheme, the enemies of Jesus saw to it unwittingly the fulfilment of the first prophecy in the Bible: “And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel” (Genesis 3:15). These words were spoken by God to the serpent in the garden of Eden, which the Bible identified as Satan (Revelation 12:9), after the serpent successfully tempted the first man and woman to sin.)
As Jesus walked the sod of this earth, he was not a people-pleaser — neither to his enemies nor to his followers. He loved them — even his enemies (see for example his teaching to love our enemies in Matthew 5:44, and his prayer for his executioners as he hung on the cross in Luke 23:34) — and he did not keep the truth from them, truth that they needed if they were to live their lives in truth and righteousness.
Jesus Christ was of course the most successful man who ever lived — he obeyed the law of God perfectly and lived a perfect life, died a perfect death and overcame death and the power of sin by his resurrection from the dead, assumed all power and authority in heaven and on earth, and is ascended to the right hand of the Father in glory thereby ruling and reigning for eternity.
Who can top that? Certainly not the richest man alive, or the oldest man alive. And yet, we strive so hard to under-achieve by an infinity when we try to achieve things by being people-pleasers.
The Bible records that God has repeatedly said that He was well pleased with Jesus. At Jesus’ baptism, a voice from heaven proclaimed, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased” (Matthew 3:17). At the mountain called the Mount of Transfiguration, the companions of Jesus heard a voice from the cloud that enveloped them: “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased. Listen to him!” (Matthew 17:5).