A lot of us are carrying something we never agreed to pick up.
Maybe it was a letter. Maybe a conversation that turned into a lecture. Maybe years of small comments that added up to a verdict about who you are. And here is the part that makes it cut so deep. Often it did not come from a stranger. It came from someone who loved us, or said they did. Sometimes it came from a fellow believer, someone holding a Bible, telling us where we fall short and where we are failing God, in the name of caring about our soul.
I have learned that a wound like that has a strange power. Long after the moment passes, you keep answering it in your head. You defend yourself against sentences nobody is even saying anymore. You replay it. You adjust yourself to keep the peace. And without meaning to, you start living as though you are on trial, waiting for a person who has already made up their mind to finally hand down a verdict of “good enough.” That verdict never comes, because it was never really about you meeting a standard. It was about them holding the gavel.
The Scripture
“Am I now trying to win the approval of human beings, or of God? Or am I trying to please people? If I were still trying to please people, I would not be a servant of Christ.” (Galatians 1:10)
How I Understand It
Paul was writing to people who had been shaken by critics. Others had come in behind him, questioned his authority, picked at his message, and made the believers wonder if Paul was really the real thing. And Paul does not answer by begging for their approval. He asks one clarifying question that cuts through all of it. Whose approval am I actually living for?
Notice he treats these as two different masters. You cannot serve both. If your deepest need is for people to sign off on you, then their opinion becomes your god, and you will spend your life auditioning for it. Paul had been set free from that. Not because he stopped loving people, but because he finally answered to Someone else. The court that mattered to him had already ruled in his favor at the cross, and no human critic could overturn it.
That is not arrogance. It is freedom. The person who has stopped needing everyone’s approval is finally free to actually love people, because they are no longer terrified of them.
My Reflection
Here is the thing I have come to believe. The deepest hold another person has on us is usually not their anger. It is how badly we want them to think we are good.
That hunger is quiet, and it is strong. It will keep you in rooms you should have left. It will make you shrink yourself, second-guess yourself, and apologize for things that were never yours to carry. And when someone uses God’s name to do the wounding, it gets tangled up with your faith itself, until you cannot tell the difference between what God actually says about you and what a hurting, controlling person said about you while quoting Him.
So let me say this as plainly as I can. Being judged by someone is not the same as being known by God. A person can hold a Bible like a weapon and stand further from its Author than the very one they are aiming it at. Their disapproval is not a diagnosis. Their anger is not proof you did something wrong. And their version of you is not the truth about you.
You are allowed to hear criticism, weigh whether any of it is true, own what is actually yours, and hand the rest back to the person who gave it to you. You can forgive someone without pretending it never happened. You can love someone and still refuse to be afraid of them. Those are not contradictions, no matter who told you they were.
This is the very thing I keep coming back to in my own life and in my writing. So much of our pain is not that we are terrible people. It is that we have been measuring ourselves with a broken ruler somebody handed us a long time ago. Real freedom starts the day you stop putting your character up for their review and let God be the only Judge whose verdict was ever binding. And His verdict, if you belong to Him, is already in. Beloved. Forgiven. His.
If you are carrying that weight tonight, you have my permission and, far more importantly, His, to set it down. You are not on trial. The case was already closed at the cross.
A Prayer
Father,
Thank You that Your opinion of me is the only one that gets the final word, and that in Christ that word is already settled. Forgive me for the times I have handed the gavel to people who were never meant to hold it.
Heal the places where someone wounded me in Your name, and help me tell the difference between Your voice and theirs. Free me from the endless need to be approved of, so that I can love people without being afraid of them.
For everyone reading this who is carrying a verdict that was never Yours, lift it off their back today. Remind them who they are, and Whose they are.
In Jesus’ name, Amen.
I write about this often, because I have lived it. If this is where you are, my book The Maturity Gap digs into exactly this, the difference between who we pretend to be to satisfy other people and who God actually made us to be. You can find it here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H8KL8THF
If this spoke to you, I’d love for you to join me. Come read along at http://www.christaff.net, new encouragement every day.
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