I am an approval addict.
You may not guess it by the way I appear cool and act calm. But deep inside, I crave approval…
…and many days, it’s your approval.
My peers, my “generation”, my readers, my Facebook friends, my small group members, my family, my neighbors. Even the people sitting nearby in a restaurant, on a train or at the coffee shop.
I crave your stamp of validation on what I do and who I am and what I say and what I think and what I wear and the things I write and the way I parent…
“Now that you have purified yourselves by obeying truth so that you have sincere love for your brothers, love one another deeply, from the heart. For you have been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable, through the living and enduring word of God.
For ‘all people are like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field; the grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of the Lord endures forever’.”
1 Peter 1:22-25
Oh God –
I’m grieved that I so easily trade your unchanging love for the fading opinions of man. Forgive me for putting people above you; for making my friends, family and acquaintances idols of affection; for seeking their approval instead of yours.
Fill me again, Lord, with your incomparable love. Strengthen my heart to crave Your truth, and not the approval and validation of the world around me.
Put in me an undivided heart that is consumed with one thing – You.
Amen.
*This is the start to a new (short) series on overcoming approval addiction that keeps us from living filled to the fullness of Christ in this world.