“Remember what a life of unquietness and continual vexation you choose, if you place your peace or happiness in the good will or word of man. For having showed you how impossible a task you undertake, it must needs follow that the pursuit of it must be a life of torment. To engage yourselves in so great cares, when you are sure to be disappointed; to make that your end, which you cannot attain; to find that you labour in vain, and daily meet with displeasure instead of the favour you expected; must needs be a very grievous life.
You are like one that dwelleth on the top of a mountain, and yet cannot endure the wind to blow upon him; or like him that dwelleth in a wood, and yet is afraid of the shaking of a leaf. You dwell among a world of ulcerated, selfish, contradictory, mutable, unpleasable minds, and yet you cannot endure their displeasure. Are you magistrates? The people will murmur at you, and those that are most incompetent and uncapable will be the forwardest to censure you, and think that they could govern much better than you…
Are you pastors and teachers? You will seem too rough to one, and too smooth to another; yea, too rough to the same man when by reproof or censure you correct his faults, who censureth you as too smooth and a friend to sinners, when you are to deal in the cause of others. No sermon that you preach is like to be pleasing to all your hearers; nor any of your ministerial works.
Your life and your ministry will be absolutely hi-jacked if you allow pleasing people to be your guide. It’s an end we can never attain. It doesn’t mean that we intentionally pursue offense or that we eschew the command to “make every effort to live at peace with one another”. But it does mean that we realize that our task is to be pleasing to the Lord. If he is glad with me, and in Christ He is, then all the world can bid me adieu.
It’s not that I don’t care if you’re pleased, it’s just that I’m after the delight of a much higher authority. If He is pleased then it helps me interpret your smile or frown. Your countenance only directs me when it matches His.
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