What if I cared about people but didn’t care what they think of me? What if I only cared about pleasing God?
When I first explored this idea, it didn’t take me long to wonder how I could botch it.
Couldn’t pleasing God become an excuse to say the first judgmental thought, no matter how much harm I caused?
Would I start using “God first” to retreat into Bible studies while my kids go days without a shower?
Human nature, left to its own devices, turns its attention toward pleasing itself. I can’t trust my nature. I’m selfish. My flesh is concerned with the things of the flesh. And my flesh spends too much time influencing my mind.
I can’t trust my mind/spirit to have pure motives, even when I say I’m trying to please God and Him only.
But I can trust God.
Tucked into Paul’s letter to the Romans, we find the secret to living God’s way:
And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what [is] that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.
Apostle Paul, Romans 12:2 NKJV
When we focus on God, He begins transforming our minds to His way of thinking. Because He makes us more like Him, we can learn what He loves – His good, acceptable, and perfect will.
His ways become my ways. His ways become my will so that I want what He wants.
He changes my mind (renews) so that I don’t have to blindly obey my selfish nature.
But transformation comes with a condition: do not be conformed to this world. Conform makes me think of pressing clay into a mold. The clay has no shape in itself so it takes on the form of its container.
Do we really wanted to be pushed and prodded into the shape of a world that will ultimately pass away?
Paul teaches us to break the mold – as followers of Jesus, we shouldn’t shape ourselves to the form of the world or mold ourselves to please people.
Transformation power requires us to renounce people pleasing. In God’s trustworthy hands, people pleasing transforms into people loving.
How?
Because God is love and God loves people. As our hearts align with God’s heart, we will love what He loves.
This people loving is different than people pleasing. People pleasing gives frail and fallible humans unhealthy power over us, but people loving pours the power of God’s love over them.
They, through us, receive love from love’s source: God, whose very nature is love. And love, by its very nature, is unselfish. Our true love of God never leads to selfishness – love changes us to be more like Him.
So have I botched it yet? Every day.
I don’t reflect Jesus with absolute fidelity and His perfect love filters through a person who mismanages it too often (just ask my kids).
But what I like about Paul’s instructions to be transformed by the renewing of my mind is that renewing is a present-tense adjective. It’s ongoing and describes new life being added to my soul daily.
Little by little I change. You change. Every day I practice what I preach with more consistency. And one day, in heaven, we’ll see the beautiful fruits of renewal with perfect eyes.