John 12:43 “…for they loved human praise more than praise from God.”
I’m selective enough in my desire for human praise that I can tell myself I really don’t want it. But I do.
The fact that I don’t want huge swaths of the public to adore me doesn’t change the fact that I want very specific kinds of human approbation.
I want my wife to think I’m the best husband.
I want my daughter to think I’m the best dad.
Even worse, I want other people—often strangers—to think I’m a good dad when I’m out somewhere with Catherine.
And yes, I want my students to think I’m a good teacher and my scholarly peers to think I’m intelligent.
I’ve had two experiences, one professional and one personal, that has alerted me to my weakness in this area, the kind of susceptibility to temptation that sends me to my knees when I read a verse like this one in John.
The first came during my first professional gig at Charleston Southern. A couple of years into the job, I looked up to realize that I was writing my papers differently. I was looking for truth, not looking to be interesting. It was a distinction I had long ago blurred as I sought to make a compelling and theoretically sophisticated argument in my dissertation. I realized, in hindsight, that I had sought to please my dissertation director more than God. This wasn’t as a result of some Faustian bargain on the type of my director. He let me determine the subject and argument. No, the irony was that I had tempted myself. I had made his praise—and by extension the praise of every other smart person who could potentially hire me—more important that the wisdom of God, often to the detriment of my own argument.
The second came about six months ago as I realized that in parenting, I was unnecessarily worried about what strangers thought of my parenting skills. I realized that if Catherine were screaming her head off in a store, I would worry more about quieting her for appearance-sake than for taking care of her problem. I could feel everyone’s eyes on me, and it caused me to compromise clear parenting dos and don’ts in an order to covet approval from people I didn’t even know.
Our hope, of course, rests in the fact that God doesn’t actually see us at all when he looks at us. Instead, he sees Jesus, the model of sacrificial love in all his perfection. If I’m excessively worried about receiving praise from people, I won’t be willing to properly love or sacrifice myself for them. One of Christ’s profound lessons is that he loved you and me while we still sinning: that is, before we were able to praise him for what he was going to do.
I pray for the patience to wait for God’s praise, for the humility to set aside excessive energy devoted to coveting or disavowing human approval, and the wisdom to love my wife, daughter, students, and peers in such a way that they would praise not me, but God.