No Approval Needed

You need no human’s approval.

Given that reality is quite variable, the only hope you have for solid ground on which to stand is your convictions. In theory, you should be able to read your convictions directly. It’s part of the result of moving your conscious awareness out of your head and into your heart.

However, most people are still working on that. It’s okay; start with your conscience. Your conscience is the brain’s interface with your convictions. Your convictions respond intimately and instinctively to God’s divine Presence, but your conscience has to learn. Your conscience on most issues will appear to change. That’s because it starts off pretty confused by all the various inputs; it’s vulnerable. So obey the conscience you have. When it fails — when it guesses wrongly — pay attention and learn from it. Eventually it will gain a sharper grasp on what your convictions demand.

By the way, “failure” in this sense is not the outcomes in terms humans measure such things. The only thing that matters is peace with God, which means a sense of peace with your own soul about how things turned out. As long as there are questions and discomfort, you don’t have peace. But at the same time, don’t get hung up on that. The point here is to teach your conscience, to learn how to read your convictions, not how to satisfy all the various scolding demands implanted by people in your human memory.

So we are back to the initial point: Learn to discount human approval. It’s a useful measure of what you’ll face, but it’s not any kind of moral barometer at all. The people around you who know God best are the ones who will make the fewest demands. They’ll keep throwing you back on your own convictions. The only demands they make are for things within their own feudal boundaries granted by God.

These are the people who will still believe you might be doing God’s will for you, even when they aren’t personally happy with what you choose. They may withdraw, but only because it’s necessary for their own sense of calling and mission. But they will still encourage you to follow your calling and mission, even from a distance. “Do what God says you have to do.” For example, they will tell you to never apologize for your sense of humor. Get new friends if you have to, people who will understand your sense of humor, but don’t look for human approval. That’s how God’s people will guide you. If it leads to conflict, they will trust the Lord for how it turns out, and not take it personally.

People who seek to expand their dominion beyond God’s grant are the ones who serve darkness, as far as you are concerned. People who register a sense of personal insult about your choices in serving the Lord are people you can ignore in your moral calculus. You may still have to deal with the temporal consequences of their displeasure, but it has no effect on your peace with God. The Lord allows a lot of crap like that, in part to test His people’s faith, but also because His agenda will never be clear to us in all details.

All we really need to know is what God demands of us, and no other human can justly assert what that has to look like. Only to the degree your divine service places you under someone else’s divine authority, and only in those things their authority covers, do you owe any accountability to another human. Covenant accountability has it’s own features and boundaries, but I can assure you the vast majority of this world, including professed Christians, have it all wrong. God has appointed no human to rule over your conscience. He never does that — ever.

During your childhood, it comes close to that with your parents. However, once you have your own sense of conviction, that recedes quickly. Godly parents know this and will restrain their guidance accordingly in stages. They will be looking for you to manifest a sense of divine urgency that releases them from responsibility, or a word from God to let you go in your sin. There is no “age of accountability” — there is only a manifestation of God working in your soul to generate a sense of moral consciousness.

The only question left is whether your mission means playing along because the issues at hand don’t matter, or whether you need to resist, and how you should resist. There is no good and proper way to resist that we can summarize in neat little rules. It ranges all over the map. God does commission elders to help you explore such questions, but they won’t decide for you. They can only be certain of what they themselves would do, and only God can confirm for you whether that matters and how it matters.

Least of all do you need the approval of established mainstream religious leaders. Deep and wide has been the compromise of organized religion with organized human politics, seeking to be taken seriously by the world. God calls us to testify to sin by openly rejecting prevailing standards. Most churches are not different enough from the world. You need to learn how to tell compromised religious leaders to get lost when they hold out hoops for you to jump through, hoops for which you have no drive from God to comply on some level. There’s nothing wrong with telling them,”Go screw yourself.” While it may not be appropriate to say those words in some settings, there are other ways to get it across.

God does call His servants to do some audacious and crazy things.