People Pleasers forfeit their Dance with Destiny

Have you been guilty of trying to make everybody happy?

I was talking to a pastor friend of mine the other day. He told me of a time when he had become so exasperated in his work and paralyzed with the idea that he just couldn’t please everybody in his congregation that he wanted to quit.

He went into his study, fell to his knees, and cried out to God: “Lord, please show me how to make these people happy!”

God replied, “How do you expect me to show you how to do what EVEN I CAN’T DO?”

I cracked up.

My friend found new zest for his ministry from that day forward!

Jesus didn’t please everybody… he didn’t even please half the people. But he fully submitted himself to the Father’s will regardless of the opinions people had of him, and as a result he had the RIGHT approval (His Father’s), gained the RIGHT followers (even though it was the minority), and embraced his RIGHT dance with destiny. Left to the will of the majority, Jesus would’ve ended up somewhere other than Calvary. Even his followers had a different vision for his life than that of his Father’s.

Your validity as a leader is not measured by the number of people who follow you or ‘believe’ in you. It’s measured by your obedience to Christ despite what people think about you.

Your greatest attribute as a leader is not your ability to please everyone or build trust in everyone. God can’t even do that! There will always be skeptics, cynics, and doubters. The Hater Club increases its membership every year. Your job is to follow Jesus no matter what. Through hell and high water, to the ends of the earth, through a wooden cross, or into a city that will mob you such as they did to the early Apostles, you must do what God calls you to do. Your responsibility is to follow Christ relentlessly. When you do that, you are sure to find your dance with destiny and the right people will follow you as a result: people who want the same kind of reckless abandon to the will of God.

When you play to the audience of the majority around you, you forfeit your dance with destiny. We’ve all seen politicians come along and build trust through fancy rhetoric only to prove later they never had any character to begin with. Trust works better as a caboose rather than a steam locomotive. In other words, it shouldn’t be our primary agenda, but something that systematically trails our primary agenda. The steam locomotive should be obedience to God and honoring Christ. The caboose is the trust that comes from having the right agenda. When you make trust the steam locomotive (your primary agenda as a leader), you are most assuredly destined to become a people-pleaser and a failed leader.

As a leader, TRUST shouldn’t be your PRIMARY agenda, it should be the natural byproduct of making following Jesus your ONE agenda.

Jim Jones had people who trusted him… but they died from the Kool Aid! David Koresh had people who trusted in him… but they died in the compound as it burned to the ground. Hitler… you get the picture. Trust isn’t enough, nor should it be the primary virtue of a leader.

Moses had over two million followers, yet most of them didn’t trust him. They even appointed a new leader to lead them back to Egypt when they were afraid to follow Moses into the Promised Land (Numbers 14:4). But his leadership wasn’t invalidated merely because they didn’t believe him or trust in his leadership. On the contrary, Moses is esteemed as one of the greatest leaders in history. His leadership was validated even more because he made obedience to God his primary agenda, not pleasing the crowd.

Joseph was a man accused of sexual scandal, yet God had destined Joseph to be a great leader in Egypt, a leader who would save his family from a famine and rescue an entire generation. You think people didn’t lose trust in him when he was sitting in a prison cell because of some false allegations from a disingenuous woman? But Joseph wasn’t after man’s approval or the trust of the people… he was after his dance with destiny and he followed God completely despite the slanderous accusations others had cast over him. He wasn’t after trust, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t a man of integrity and character. If anything, his full-fledged obedience to God despite what people thought about him gave him even more integrity and character.

The Apostle Paul is the single most influential person in all of Christianity (apart from Jesus, of course). Yet when Paul began his ministry, none of the early Christians trusted him. He didn’t care. He wasn’t out to build a FOLLOWING, he was out to FOLLOW. And as a result of dogged determination to follow THE CHRIST no matter what, he became the influential model of reckless abandon to Christ that in turn made him such a fearless, admirable, and worthy person to follow. If his aim was to gain a following by making people believe in him, he wouldn’t be worth following as a leader. What validated him as a great leader was his aim to please Christ first and foremost, and as a result, he attracted people to Jesus. That is the business of the Christ-Follower – lead in such a fashion that it attracts people to Jesus. And you lead best when JESUS is in front of you and the crowd is behind you. You can’t do that as a people pleaser because your aim is not to follow Jesus, it’s to gain the approval of people. You have the people in front of you and Jesus behind you.

The GREATEST LEADERS are not those who make gaining approval or building trust their number ONE agenda. The greatest LEADERS are those who make pleasing God, not matter what, their number ONE agenda. Those leaders will always have followers because they are less conscious about their followers and more consumed with a relentless consciousness of pleasing JESUS.

That’s the kind of leader I’ll follow anywhere.

Are you stuck trying to please people? Frustrated with the disapproval of people? Maybe the fact that you are so frustrated reveals a hard reality that you’re not making Jesus-pleasing your primary agenda, but people pleasing the main thing. When you make people pleasing your main agenda it always leaves you frustrated… because after all, you are trying to do what EVEN God can’t do.