As always, here’s my fairly literal translation of this passage:
10For am I now conciliating men or God, or am I seeking to be pleasing [to] men? If I were yet pleasing men, I would not have been being a servant of Christ.
At first glance this seems like a fairly vanilla passage. “Right, right. Yeah those people-pleaser types. Pleasing God, not people. Yeah, that’s my goal.” Hmmmm. I suspect anyone’s natural response would be to read this passage, assume it applies to someone else (certainly not ME or the group I associate with), and read on.
That is always a baaaaaad thing to do with Scripture. The Lord didn’t write the Scriptures for “them.” When I’m reading His Word, He is speaking to me. “Ten-hut! Front and center!” I have to stop and say, “Lord, help me see that this does in fact apply to me. I’m cut out of the same bolt of cloth as everyone else. I share their weakness. But how? In what specific ways?”
As I have pondered this passage, I think it is all too applicable. In fact, I would go so far as to say it ought to be a bombshell in anyone’s life. Actually, my mind is whirling. I will try to put it in some kind of logical order.
First of all, and I have run across this before, I think the church groups of which I have been a part have grossly failed to see this sin in their own hearts. The groups I’ve been a part of clearly see the sin of making a goal of “getting rich.” They are quick to say that no one should ever “serve God” for the love of money. It’s easy to see the evil of the televangelists. Most of their pastors, missionaries, and seminary professors live in relative poverty (by American standards). They are quite sure that is proof-positive that they are serving God, not money. But what no one sees is that one can “get rich” in more ways than money. And the verse before us addresses another perhaps more insidious way – people pleasing.
I fear it is really easy for a church-group to become an approval system. Like the Pharisees of Paul’s day, one can join the group and then literally ride the approval wave. Since the group thinks everything they do pleases God, one can conform zealously to their practices and convince oneself and the group I’m pleasing God. Just a few verses further in Galatians 1, Paul says of himself, “I was advancing in Judaism beyond many Jews of my own age and was extremely zealous for the traditions of my fathers” (v14). In Judaism (Pharisaism), Paul could literally ride a wave of adulation. He could strictly and zealously conform to the traditions of the group and thereby garner their enthusiastic applause, all the while convincing them and himself that he was quite the servant of God.
Yet, all the while, he was nothing but a people-pleaser. He was “getting rich” in applause, adulation, and approval. I suspect he is referring back to that when he says, “If I were yet pleasing men, I would not be a servant of Christ.” Notice the “yet.” When he met the risen Christ and chose to follow Him, he knew he was giving up that entire approval system. From now on, those same people would hate him and malign him. No more applause. No more easy “just follow the rules” approval system. I’m afraid we all err greatly if we let our church affiliation become an approval system. Greed is greed no matter what it is I “want.” And it is an abomination to make any group’s “rules” or “traditions” the standard of righteousness. Too, too often in my own life, I have conformed to the group’s standards of “righteousness,” often even myself questioning, “Where is that in the Bible?” But that is one thing I am trying hard to correct now. I want the Bible and it alone to be my standard of righteousness, whereby I measure myself and people around me. And my goal should be to be constantly letting God measure my heart and life according to that standard and not any other. As Paul says in I Cor 4:3,4: “I care very little if I am judged by you or by any human court; indeed, I do not even judge myself. My conscience is clear, but that does not make me innocent. It is the Lord who judges me.” Even my own conscience isn’t a reliable guide. Even it needs constantly to be submitted to the correction and oversight of the Scriptures.
I guess the sum of it all is to say that I think it extremely important, being a part of a church group, to constantly be guarding my heart and making sure I do not simply conform to their “approval” system, but rather that I am, in fact, a servant of Christ, and Him alone. The idol of “approval” is just as insidious (maybe more) that the idol of wealth. Yet, we cannot serve two masters.
That is, ultimately, I think Paul’s point here. What is he saying? He is actually allowing his own motives to come under scrutiny. “What was my goal in preaching to you?” Note that, even in proposing the question, he’s making a profound logical connection: errant teaching arises from a heart with ill motives. He is asserting the purity of his own motives to accredit the truth of his teaching. Matthew Henry noted, “He did not, in his doctrine, accommodate himself to the humors of persons, either to gain their affection or to avoid their resentment; but his great care was to approve himself to God.”
As Someone important once said, “Go and do likewise.”
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