If I Yet Pleased Men I Should Not Be the Servant of Christ

He feels bad about something roughly every day, and he cannot tell which kind of bad it is.

There are two kinds and he knows there are two kinds. One of them is his conscience, which is a real thing and which he wants and which has kept him out of trouble. The other one is the anticipation of somebody's face, which is not a conscience and which produces the identical sensation in the identical place.

He has no way to sort them. They arrive the same. They have the same weight in his chest, the same insistence, and both of them dress in the same language, which is that he ought to and he should and it would be wrong not to.

So he obeys both, because obeying both is safer than working out which is which, and the cost of that is that his actual conscience is buried under a much larger volume of traffic and he has stopped being able to hear it clearly.

There is a verse in Galatians about this and it is one of the most misused sentences in the New Testament.

The two questions

Here it is, in the King James Version:

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)

Do I now persuade men, or God?

He asks it about himself. This is not a rule he is laying on the Galatians, it is a question he is putting to his own work, in a letter where he is about to say some hard things and wants the reader to know why.

Or do I seek to please men?

And then the conclusion: if I yet pleased men, I should not be the servant of Christ.

The word is seek. It is about what a man is aiming at, not about whether people end up pleased. Paul pleased a great many people. He is not describing an outcome, he is describing a target.

And this is where it gets misused, because a man who wants a license to be blunt can take that sentence and stop reading.

You are not being handed a permission to be difficult and you were never told that offending people is a virtue. Galatians 1:10 asks about the aim rather than the outcome, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than a harder personality who does the sorting a man cannot do himself.

What the same man says a few letters later

Because the same writer says this, and it has to be held next to the other one.

To the weak became I as weak, that I might gain the weak: I am made all things to all men, that I might by all means save some. (1 Corinthians 9:22)

I am made all things to all men.

That is an enormous amount of accommodation, described approvingly, by the same man who wrote Galatians 1:10.

And in Romans he tells people to modify their behavior specifically so as not to trouble somebody else's conscience:

Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind. He that regardeth the day, regardeth it unto the Lord. (Romans 14:5-6)

So the New Testament is not against a man adjusting himself for other people. It is full of instructions to do exactly that.

Which means the sorting question is not: am I accommodating somebody. It is: what am I aiming at when I do.

A man who bends toward somebody to gain them is doing what Paul did. A man who bends toward somebody because he cannot survive their disapproval is doing something else, and the two look identical from outside and often from inside too.

You have a way to tell them apart and you were never meant to solve it by refusing to bend. 1 Corinthians 9:22 and Galatians 1:10 sit in the same body of work without contradiction, and it is His Spirit who makes the difference between them visible in a man's own chest.

What the conscience actually is

And two sentences that give a conscience its proper size, which is neither infallible nor nothing.

Paul, describing his own practice:

And herein do I exercise myself, to have always a conscience void of offence toward God, and toward men. (Acts 24:16)

Do I exercise myself. Exercise is a training word. A conscience is not a fixed instrument that arrives calibrated; it is something worked on, which means it can be trained well or badly, and most men's have been trained by whatever room they grew up in.

And John, on what to do when it condemns:

For if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things. (1 John 3:20)

God is greater than our heart.

That verse is not saying the heart is always wrong. It is saying there is a higher court, and that the higher court knows more, and that a man whose heart is condemning him is not thereby condemned.

Which is exactly what a man needs when he cannot tell the two feelings apart: not a rule for sorting them, but the knowledge that the sorting is being done by somebody with better information than he has.

You have a higher court and you were never at the mercy of your own chest. 1 John 3:20 says God is greater than our heart and knows all things, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the work Acts 24:16 calls exercising a conscience.