The Cultural Message: The opinions of those around us are more important than God’s opinion.
We know we are fearing man when we make choices based on the opinions of others instead of God’s opinion. The fear of man can strike at any time and for most of us, it will be a temptation we need to battle our entire lives. In the school age years the temptation is to either pick on others or allow others to be picked on so that the teasing doesn’t turn our way. There is also peer pressure to engage in risky behaviors to fit in. The adult years are not void of the fear of man. In this stage, we start to compare what we have with others. We see how we measure up in careers, homes, and families. If we feel we aren’t measuring up, we can be subject to overworking to overcome the perceived failure.
We all want to be thought of as good and we will work really hard to make sure that opinion stays that way. We can get the idea there is always someone looking over our shoulder and judging all our steps. Fearing man over God can be a crippling experience in our lives.
What the Bible Says
1.) God doesn’t judge as the world does.
Humans have a way of adding rules and pressures to ourselves and others that God never intended us to have. The Pharisees are the group in the Bible that is most rebuked for their rule adding. Jesus tells them this:
“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. Matthew 23:25
“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You shut the door of the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to." Matthew 23:13
I love the story of David getting annointed to be king. God sent Samuel to Jesse’s family and all of David’s brothers were shown to Samuel before God revealed that it was David that He picked. God didn’t pick the best one by human standards, He picked the best by His standards.
But the Lord said to Samuel, “Do not consider his appearance or his height, for I have rejected him. The Lord does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.” 1 Samuel 16:7
We can look at Jesus’ life as an example for us. The Bible tells us that Jesus didn’t have a physical appearance that would attract people to Him. The culture very much tells us that we need to be physically attractive, but the most important person who ever walked the face of this planet didn’t have an attractive appearance.
He grew up before him like a tender shoot, and like a root out of dry ground. He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. Isaiah 53:2
King Herod was asked by his step-daughter to bring him John the Baptist’s head on a platter. Herod found himself in a situation where what he wanted and what others around him wanted conflicted. Herod knew that John was innocent and that it wasn’t right to take his life, but he couldn’t go against his dinner guests. We need to look to God’s standards and not the standards of the people around us.
The king was distressed, but because of his oaths and his dinner guests, he ordered that her request be granted. Matthew 14:9
Even Jesus was pressured to do what man wanted him to do when He walked the earth. The people thought He was coming to overthrow the Roman government, but Jesus knew His purpose. This is what Jesus told Pilate before being handed over for crucifixion:
Jesus said, “My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jewish leaders. But now my kingdom is from another place.” John 18:36
As Christians, our kingdom is in another place as well.
2.) We shouldn’t fear man, we should fear God.
To borrow from last week’s blog post on fear:
Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell. Matthew 10:28
Charm is deceptive, and beauty is fleeting; but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised. Proverbs 31:30
3.) We are unable to make ourselves clean. Only God can do that.
The book of Leviticus tells the standards for which people were to be considered clean in God’s eyes. Before Jesus died on the cross, this was God’s chosen people’s way of being clean in front of Him. Jesus made a way for us to be clean without the sacrificial system, but we often replace Jesus’ sacrifice to make us clean with other people’s opinions. We start to get the idea that we will be clean before God if other people think that we are “good.” This is a terrible mistake because we are judging our cleanness before God by the standards of other people who have fallen short of His glory. Only God can make us clean. We can’t be made clean by other people’s opinions.
Although you wash yourself with soap and use an abundance of cleansing powder, the stain of your guilt is still before me,” declares the Sovereign Lord. Jeremiah 2:22
I will cleanse them from all the sin they have committed against me and will forgive all their sins of rebellion against me. Jeremiah 33:8
How much more, then, will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself unblemished to God, cleanse our consciences from acts that lead to death, so that we may serve the living God! Hebrews 9:14
Let us draw near to God with a sincere heart and with the full assurance that faith brings, having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience and having our bodies washed with pure water. Hebrews 10:22
So What?
The temptation to perform will always be with us. We will cringe when the doorbell rings and our house isn’t clean. When it’s our turn for our child to throw a tantrum in the grocery store, we will want to hide. We will feel pressure to do things that we don’t want to do because that is what the crowd wants. When these temptations come, we can rest in the knowledge that God is sovereign over our lives and He is the only one whose opinion matters. If we are in right standing with God, we can rest in the knowledge that we are fulfilling our life’s purpose. We don’t need to take a poll to see if we made the right decision, we talk to our Heavenly Father and do what pleases Him.
Your beauty should not come from outward adornment, such as elaborate hairstyles and the wearing of gold jewelry or fine clothes. Rather, it should be that of your inner self, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is of great worth in God’s sight. 1 Peter 3:3-4