Do I Seek To Please Men

He counted them in March and the counting is what has been sitting on him since.

It was not a spiritual exercise. He was doing something else entirely, thinking about a decision, and he noticed he was running it past somebody in his head. And then somebody else. And he thought, idly, how many is that.

Six.

His father, who has been dead nine years. His older brother. A man he worked for between 1998 and 2004 who he has not seen since. The pastor at the church he grew up in, not the one he goes to now. His wife's father. And one friend, from school, who moved away and who he speaks to maybe twice a year.

Six people. Two of them dead, one of them he could not find if he tried, and every significant decision he has made since he was twenty-two has been run past that panel, in his head, without him ever once knowing he was doing it.

And here is the part that keeps him up. He is fifty-seven. Most of those choices worked out. The panel has decent judgment. That is not the problem, and he wishes it were, because a bad panel would be easy to fire.

If you have just counted yours, come and sit down out here. Nobody on your list is going to be insulted here.

Paul asks it as a question about whose servant he is

Here is the sentence, and the shape of it is the useful part.

For do I now persuade men, or God? or do I seek to please men? for if I yet pleased men, I should not be the servant of Christ.Galatians 1:10

Notice he does not moralize about it. He does not say pleasing men is disgusting or that he is above it. He puts it as a question about employment.

I should not be the servant of Christ. That is a statement about who he works for. A man cannot take his instructions from two places, not because it is wicked but because it is not possible, and Paul is describing an operational fact rather than issuing a rebuke.

And read the context. He is not writing this from a position of strength. Galatians is a letter written by a man under real pressure from real people, some of whom he respected, over something that mattered. This is not a lofty sentence, it is a working man's sentence, said out loud in a hard year.

Which means the question is available to a man in a truck at fifty-seven, and it is available in exactly the form Paul used it, which is: whose servant am I, actually, when the two disagree.

You have one employer, and it is already settled, and it was settled long before you counted anybody. Galatians 1:10 is where that sits, in a sentence about service rather than about vanity, and the same Spirit who carried Paul through the year that produced it is the one who reaches a man who has just discovered his own panel.

The six are not the enemy, which is what makes this hard

Let me be careful here, because there is a cheap version of this article that would do damage in a family.

Those six people are not villains. His father was a good man. His brother is a good man. The one he worked for taught him most of what he knows about work, and the friend from school is somebody he would drive four hours for.

And none of them appointed themselves. That is the thing worth sitting with. Not one of those six has ever asked to be consulted, four of them have no idea they are on the panel, and two of them are not in a position to have opinions about anything any more.

He built the panel. Out of love, mostly, and out of respect, and out of the entirely reasonable instinct of a young man who wanted to do it right and had no idea how.

The problem is not who is on it. It is that it convened without his permission, that it has never been dismissed, and that a man who checks with six people before he moves has quietly outsourced something that was given to him personally.

You are answerable to One, and you were only ever answerable to One, and that has been true since the day you came to Him. He promised it, in the question about who a man stands or falls before, which names his own master and nobody else's (Romans 14:4), and His Spirit does not require you to think less of a single one of the six.

The paragraph that outranks the teaching

Before we go further, this outranks everything above it.

Some people must not go without food. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard relationship with food or with eating, if you are underweight, unwell, frail or elderly, or if you are simply not sure, speak to your doctor before you go without anything and let their answer be the answer. There is no length on this page, no kind of fast, no plan and no schedule, and there is not going to be one.

And the privacy in all of this is about audience and never about hiding. Telling your doctor is right. Telling your wife is right. Telling whoever cooks in your house is right and it is basic courtesy. None of that is a failure of anything, and a man with a panel in his head should hear that twice, because the temptation for him is to make the secrecy into another performance to get right.

You are not being graded on how well you keep any of this, and you were never being graded. It is written into Romans 2:11, where God is named as no respecter of persons, and the Holy Spirit carries that into a man who has been quietly submitting reports since 1990.

If today has more weight in it than a page can hold, call somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, or a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anybody near you is in danger tonight.