“…Our purpose is to please God, not people.”

Question: How much time will you spend today trying to please your boss? Have a number of minutes or hours in mind? Now, take that number and multiply it by five and that gives you the amount of time you will spend this week. Now, take that number and multiply it by the number of weeks of the year that you work (52 minus vacation weeks) and there you have it for the year. One hour a day and you could be looking at 1200 hours or more of just pleasing your boss. That works out to be three weeks or more a year doing nothing but pleasing and making one person happy. Now, add on the co-worker who demands to be pleased, and the subordinate who needs the extra time and attention to be pleased. Okay, add on the external vendor or the hard to please customer, etc. You get the picture, work is a lot about pleasing others, but the question is not about the pleasing but about understanding who really matters. If we find ourselves having to please everyone, the math tells us that we will never get anything done and our work will turn into being only about running around pleasing others. What we have to do to be effective in our work is to be able to ascertain the difference between those that really matter and the people who really don’t. Not that we shouldn’t be sensitive to others’ needs, but we have to know the difference and focus on what really matters if we are not to get all of our time eaten up and thus become ineffective.

Paul tells us in 1 Thessalonians who really matters first and who we are really here to please and then let the rest follow. It is hard to not want to be one who pleases others but we need to recognize that by pleasing God first we will end up being the person that we are supposed to be and from there we will be holistically pleasing. If we are walking in the shadow of Jesus and we follow closely then we become the person that God wants us to be and at that point it is impossible to not be pleasing to the others who who we share our earthly time. All day long we work hard at pleasing others, when what God wants us to do is to work harder at pleasing Him first and then letting Him take care of the rest. He wants us to be great at how we work with and treat others so He will ensure that we succeed in how we interact with others and how they perceive us, if we keep our focus on Him as Who really deserves to be pleased.

Reference: 1 Thessalonians 2:4 (New Living Testament)