The Thing I Kept Because It Made Me Wanted

I am going to ask you something and I want you to answer it before you have decided what the right answer is.

Look at your week. Find the one thing on it you would fight hardest to keep.

Now ask this. If that one thing were gone next month, what exactly would be missing?

Not for other people. They will be fine, and you know they will be fine, and that is not the question. What would be missing for you?

Most people can answer that in about a second, and most people do not like the answer.

Because for a certain kind of commitment, the honest answer is not the work. It is not even the people, quite. It is that inside that thing, you are wanted. Somebody is glad you came. There is a specific room in your week where your arrival changes something, and if that room closed, there would be nowhere else in the week where that happens.

I am not going to scold anybody for that. I want to say clearly, before we go a single step further, that wanting to be wanted is not a defect. It is not vanity and it is not weakness. It is one of the most human things there is, and God made the human.

The problem is not the wanting. The problem is where it has been getting fed.

Whose approval am I actually after

Paul writes a sentence in Galatians that reads like an aside and is actually a diagnostic.

For do I now persuade men, or God? or do I seek to please men? for if I yet pleased men, I should not be the servant of Christ. (Galatians 1:10)

The word yet is doing the work in that sentence. If I yet pleased men. It is the language of a thing left behind, and the reason he is talking about it at all is that he has just been accused of softening his message to keep people happy.

His answer is not that pleasing people is wicked. His answer is that it is a different job. It is either working for the approval or working for the One who sent you, and both of those will produce activity, and from the outside the activity can look identical.

That last part is the bit that matters for a full week. This is not a distinction you can make by looking at a calendar. Two people can do exactly the same good thing on exactly the same Tuesday, one because they were sent and one because they need the room to be glad they came, and no observer could tell them apart.

You are not going to find this on a calendar, and it was never a thing an outside eye could see. Galatians 1:10 puts the whole question on who a person is serving rather than on what they are doing, and the Holy Spirit is the one who can show somebody an interior thing without shaming them for it.

I want to say the shape of this carefully, because there is a cheap version of it that does real damage. The cheap version says that if your motives are impure the work is worthless and you should stop. That is not in the verse and it is not in the gospel.

Paul kept preaching. He did not resign over the question. He relocated the source.

You have a mixed motive and a real calling at the same time, and the calling was never canceled by the mixture. Galatians 1:10 has a man name the question in a letter and go straight on with the work. The Holy Spirit is the one who separates a motive from a ministry without taking the ministry away.

What is actually feeding it

Here is the thing about being needed. It is a very reliable supply.

Love is not reliable in the same way. It arrives when it arrives, it cannot be summoned, and a person cannot make somebody else glad about them by working harder. Being needed can be produced on demand. Turn up, be useful, and the room will want you there, every single time, guaranteed.

So over a few years, without a decision ever being made, a person can end up running their whole sense of being wanted off a supply they control, and there is nothing dramatic about it. It just quietly becomes the arrangement.

And the cost is that the supply now cannot be reduced. Not because the work is precious, but because that is the pipe.

The Lord thy God in the midst of thee is mighty; he will save, he will rejoice over thee with joy; he will rest in his love, he will joy over thee with singing. (Zephaniah 3:17)

Read what He is doing in that verse. He is not being served. He is rejoicing. Over a person. With singing. And there is nothing in the verse about that person having done anything at all.

You have a delight coming toward you that is not paid for by usefulness, and it was already going on before you were told about it. Zephaniah 3:17 has God rejoicing over a person with singing rather than receiving service from them, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes that arrive somewhere lower than the ears.

What actually to do about it

So here is what I am not asking. I am not asking anybody to resign from the thing they love in order to prove a point about their motives. That is a religious answer and it would leave the room emptier and the person no better.

Here is what I am asking. I want the thing to stop being the only one.

If there is exactly one room in your week where somebody is glad you came, then that room has a power over you that nobody intended it to have, including the people in it. They do not know they are holding your whole supply. They would be horrified.

The answer is not to close that room. It is to be somewhere, once, where nothing is expected of you, so that the room is no longer the only one.

You are permitted to be somewhere useless on purpose, and the permission was written down long before you needed it. Zephaniah 3:17 has God resting in His love rather than in a person's output. The Holy Spirit is the one who can make an unproductive hour feel like belonging instead of like a waste.