Who Should I Look to for Approval?

Have you ever done something crazy to get someone to pay attention to you? What did you do or say?

It feels good to have people pay attention to us. It makes us feel special and like we matter to someone else. We can spend a lot of time and energy to get people to accept us, but that is not how God created us to live.

The Apostle Paul, who wrote the book of Galatians, had something to say about this. Can you help me find Galatians 1, verse 10? The book of Galatians is in the New Testament.

The book of Galatians is a letter Paul wrote to believers who had started to listen to false teachers. These false teachers were teaching it wasn’t enough to believe in Jesus and that people needed to earn their salvation and approval of God.

Paul knew how wrong that was. Before Paul believed Jesus had died on the cross for his sins, he tried to earn the approval of both God and the people around him through the things he did.

But Paul was a changed man. He came to know the truth that there is only one way to have a relationship with God, and that is to accept Jesus as your Savior. Paul reminds us in our memory verse that when we have a relationship with God, we should not live to please people.

It can be so easy to look at the people around us and want their approval. We all want to be accepted and know people like us.

We want friends. We want to feel loved and wanted. We can feel insecure when we think other people don’t like us. We start to wonder what is wrong with us and what else we can do to get the approval of friends and even strangers.

When you catch yourself looking to other people for approval, remember God created you and God doesn’t make mistakes. He doesn’t love you because of what you do or don’t do; He loves you because God is love and He is our loving heavenly Father.

There is nothing you can do to make God love you more. There is also nothing you can do to make God love you less. The most important relationship you can ever have is a relationship with God, and that comes by believing in Jesus as your Savior. God’s approval is the one that matters most.