PLEASING PEOPLE

“How can you believe, you who receive honour from one another and do not seek the honour that comes from God only?” John 5:44 

Pleasing people is an art of deceit – mostly of self-deceit. There is no pleasantness in pleasing people. It all amounts to selfishness. One pleases people for the sake of self alone. To please people is to be self-seeking, one way or another. That’s why one can’t be a believer by seeking the honour of others.

Everyone who has the means and the attitude to please people, has the very means to be unpleasant as well, since selfishness is what drives people to be pleasant at all times. I believe that whoever pleases God alone and His law of love is not an unpleasant person ever. If one’s heart is absolutely changed one can’t deny love because it is inside us. Yet, there is no pleasing in love: there is but being heavenly pleasant by nature at all times.

There is a general idea that to be loving and kind, one needs to accept everything under the sun at any set time. There is no greater mistake than to think like that. One never needs to be pretending to be kind and loving. If anyone needs to pretend to be pleasant, or please people to do so, then one should rather choose to go to the Lord with a bad heart state.

The fact that the Lord so angrily talks against pleasing people means only that it amounts to selfishness. There is no love in pleasing people. There is a seeking of something from people every time one pleases another. And, by not getting it the way one sets one’s mind to get it, leads many to be either angry or hurt. This is where one sees that every unpleasant person is always someone who sets his heart upon pleasing people regularly as well, and vice-versa. There is no such thing as an unpleasant child of God. One may have another kind of life which does not go along with others, but id does never mean it is a bad life at all – it just means it is another kind of life people love not to see because of jealousy or hatred against real life and real living.

By trying hard to be pleasant one is on the set out to be unkind right through, since it drives people to coldness because one becomes all the more aware of others, something which gets our attention off God and His ways of accomplishing them within us all. Just leave people alone and get to work within and close to God and none will ever say you are unkind or unpleasant unless they do so by lying against truth.

I believe most kinds of modern unkindnesses are directly born from being on the lookout to be pleasant and kind (at least the kind of kindness we see as such). If you want to love people, you should stop pleasing them. And God will bless you that way, right through and with real love to share the right way. Have a try for once and keep your track to the end. Amen.  

José Mateus
zemateus@msn.com