Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - What Does God Think of You? | New Testament | 1 Corinthians 4

Episode Date: June 12, 2023

Do you care what other people think of you? What about what you think of you? Should you care? In today's episode, Keith uses 1 Corinthians 4 to discuss the hope in desiring God's approval more than anyone else's. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now. Join the TMBT community in reading the entire New Testament in one year. Get your FREE reading plan here. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it with others, so others can find it too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter@TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passages: 1 Corinthians 4

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life. In the time it takes to get to work. I'm Keith Simon. When I was a kid, parents and teachers were very concerned about kids' self-esteem. They wanted kids to have a positive view of themselves. They wanted kids to have self-confidence. The desire to raise kids' self-esteem is a relatively recent phenomenon. There was a time in which a high view of yourself was considered a bad thing, but those days are long gone.

Now, low self-esteem is considered the problem that the self-esteem movement seeks to correct. Well, if the mission was to give kids confidence in themselves, then mission accomplished. Because today, kids, but also adults, feel very good about themselves, but sometimes without reason. For example, American students don't rank very high in math skills, but they rank very high in thinking they are good at math. The college board invites millions of students who take their test to complete. compared themselves with others in their own age demographic. In leadership ability, 70% of the students rated themselves above average, while only 2% rated themselves below average. I mean, if you think about it, that doesn't make sense.

60% of students rank themselves above average in athletic ability, and only 6% ranked themselves below average. Inability to get along with other people, 0% rate themselves below average. 60% ranked themselves in the top 10% and 25% see themselves in the top 1%. But of course, it's not just students. 94% of college faculty think of themselves as better than average in their teaching profession. The reality is that we're all very impressed with ourselves. Now, much of this is at odds with how the Bible teaches us to think about ourselves. Listen to 1st Corinthians chapter 4.

Paul writes, this then is how you ought to regard us, as servants of Christ, as those entrusted with the mysteries God has revealed. Now, it is required that those who have been given a trust prove faithful. I care very little if I'm judged by you or 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. therefore judge nothing before the appointed time wait until the Lord comes he will bring to light what is hidden in darkness and will expose the motives of the heart at that time each will receive

their praise from God so Paul says look I'm a servant and my focus needs to be on pleasing the one who entrusted the gospel to me and of course that's God so he says others can evaluate me but that's not a big deal to me because I'm not trying to please them it's nothing personal. He says, I don't even evaluate myself. I mean, my conscience is clear, but so what? My goal, Paul says, is not to please the church. It's not to please other people. It's not even to please myself. My goal is to please God. So he says, look, I'm going to aim at being faithful to God, faithful to what he's called me to do, and then God can evaluate me on the day I stand before him, because what I really want is God's praise, not the praise of people.

What Paul's telling us is that it's impossible to seek the praise of God and the praise of people at the same time. Here's what he writes in the book of Galatians. He says, am I now trying to win the approval of human beings or of God? Or am I trying to please people? If I were still trying to please people, I would not be a servant of Christ. But here's the question I like to focus on in our time together. And if you want to learn more about this, I would encourage you to pick up Tim Keller's book

on the freedom of self-forgetfulness. Here's the question. How does Paul get the power to live in a way where he's not dependent on other people's evaluation of him or even his own self-evaluation, but instead cares most about God's evaluation? Paul says, I don't care what you think. I don't care what I think, but I do care what God thinks. See, I think 1st Corinthians 4 gives us a completely different way of seeing ourselves, a way of seeing that isn't dependent on other people's opinion or our own self-esteem.

In verse 3, he says, I care very little if I am judged by you. Now, I don't know how honest you are with yourself, but I don't think any of us can honestly say that we care very little about what others think of us. I mean, we're embarrassed of it. We wish it weren't true, but the reality is that we care a lot about what others think of us. advertisers play on that desire to fit in in order to sell us their product. Maybe you even do good things like volunteer at your kid's school or volunteer in church because you don't want people to think you're a freeloader.

See, what you're doing there is caring about how other people see you and then responding so they have a better image of you. From where you live to what you drive, to the kind of vacations you take, to the kind of friends you have, we all care about what other people think of us. So how did that happen? How did we all become so dependent on other people's approval? What's at the root of this issue? Well, remember, human beings were created to live in a relationship with God. Adam and Eve got their identity from God. They got their acceptance and purpose from him. They wanted to please God. But ever since Adam and Eve sinned and ruptured that relationship and drove a wedge between them and God, we've all been trying to find approval and acceptance. What we're designed to get from God, we now seek from other places. Think about how people do things that they really have no interest in, but they only do it because it looks good on, say, a college application or a resume.

Well, that's what our egos are doing all the time. We move to a different city or we take a different job. We seek a promotion. We get married. We have kids or maybe we don't get married. We don't have kids. We go on diets. We compete in races.

We change houses. We redecorator houses. All so that we can put together an impressive resume. so that we can satisfy ourselves. We are desperate to fill our own sense of inadequacy and to make ourselves feel important. Listen to what Madonna said. She said,

my drive in life comes from a fear of being mediocre. That is always pushing me. I push past one spell of it and discover myself as a special human being, but then I feel I am mediocre and uninteresting unless I do something else. Because even though I have become somebody, I still have to prove that I am somebody.

My struggle has never ended, and I guess it never will. Everyone is trying to prove that they are a somebody. People are relentlessly trying to find the acceptance they long for. They're searching for something that will make them feel good about themselves. And another way that we seek to feel good about ourselves is by comparing ourselves with other people. So Jeremy Framer, who's the CEO of a company, said this, It's not enough to fly in first class. I had to know my friends are flying and coach.

Do you hear him playing the comparison game? Now, in contrast, Paul says he doesn't care about what others think of him because his self-worth, his identity is not tied up in other people's verdict and their evaluation of him. Tim Keller points out that a lot of counselors and therapists would agree with Paul, that we shouldn't try to live up and measure up to the standards and values and opinions of those around us. it should matter to us what they think of us. We're told that the only thing that really matters is what we think of ourselves. If you're okay with yourself, if you're okay with your values or your standards, then you're fine.

But Paul takes a different route. He says, not only do I not care what you think of me, but I don't even care what I think of me. Not only are you not my judge, but I'm not my judge either. He says this in verse three, 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. So the key question for Paul is, what does God think of me? If you let someone else sit in the judge's chair and render a verdict on you, then your

performance is always going to be on trial. Are you good enough? Are you smart enough? Are you attractive enough? Are you successful enough? Are you athletic enough? And as long as your performance determines your view of self, you're either going to be proud because you think you measure up or crushed because you know you don't.

When it comes to our life, we want to be a lot of life. God to sit in the judge's chair. And what's God's verdict of us? Well, if we're Christians, if our faith is in Jesus, then we know that there is no condemnation toward those who are in Christ Jesus. We know that we have been adopted as a child of God. We know that God loves us like he loves Jesus. We know that God has given us His righteousness. We know that God is well pleased with us. Jesus bore our judgment on the cross so that we are freed from living under the judgment of others. God's acceptance of me is the verdict that frees me from needing the acceptance of other people. If we know we have God's approval, then we don't have to fear the disapproval of other people. When I see myself as God does,

I'm free to acknowledge my sins and my struggles without hiding them, but I'm also free to acknowledge my strengths, the things that God has blessed me with, and do all that without pride. A gospel humility is not thinking less of myself, but it's thinking of myself less. So how do I break free from carrying so much about what others think of me? Or even how I judge myself. Well, I put my confidence in God's verdict of me. In Christ, I'm forgiven. In Christ, I'm loved.

In Christ, I'm accepted. Hey, thanks for listening. If you want to go deeper, sign up for the 10-minute Bible Talk newsletter. You'll get a short email once a week. challenge you to grow in your faith, give you interesting background on today's passage, and a lot, lot more. Just click the link in the show notes to sign up. It'll help you deepen your journey with Jesus.