I’m often worried about what people think of me. How do I grow?

We’re Christians, and we believe that we don’t have to meet up to or to measure up to other people’s opinions and standards of us. Why? Because it’s God’s opinion, and it’s fixed on the finished work of Christ on our behalf. But still, somehow, many of us continue to suffer and even to be ruled by pleasing others and needing their respect and their love for us. When we look at Scripture, that’s what God calls the fear of man. That’s when we put too much stock in what others think of us and too little stock in what God actually thinks of us. It’s caring more about what other people in our lives think about us than anything else maybe. It’s that need for approval, the need for respect and love from others, that we have to face down and we have to dethrone in our lives.

So how do we grow? How do we do this? How do we treat this quite common preoccupation? Well, I say first, we must ask God to grow our love for his praise more than our love for the affection and the respect and the approval of the people around us. That’s the medicine that we have to apply to our souls, is to strive to love, to do God’s will, to be faithful to him, no matter what the situation, right? No matter what setting you’re going into, and this is really key, more than you want to receive the approval and the respect of the people in that particular setting. That’s why I love so much the parable of the talents in Matthew 25:15–16. Jesus’s whole point in the parable is to remind us that no matter how many talents he’s given us, whether it’s one, two, or five talents, the goal is always to ask God to help us to be faithful, whatever little he has entrusted us to do with what he’s given us, and to seek with all our hearts, more than anything else, the “well done, good and faithful servant” that comes from him and him alone. I really do think that that is the key that unlocks social anxiety, that as we go into any given social setting that may be intimidating to us, we ask the Lord to increase our desire and our motivation for his love, for his joy, to serve him. That, I think, is the secret, is caring less about what others are thinking about you. And in fact, it’s not caring less as a whole, but it’s to care more about what God thinks of you, his joy, and being faithful to him than me caring about what others are thinking about me.

I think it’s common. We all want to seek our own personal greatness, our own success. We long to be respected, to feel needed and important. But think of your heart as a teeter-totter every day, and before you go into every social setting, whether at school, whether it’s going into the office or at church, and try to place, with all your strength, place all your weight or at least more weight on giving love to others on one side of that teeter-totter than the weight of your heart is giving to getting and receiving love on the other side of the teeter-totter. That’s the goal, every day in every setting. Now, does this mean that you can’t be hurt when others judge you or when people you care about reject you, when your friends either ignore you or leave you all together? No, of course it still hurts. But my desire is, along with Paul, to say and to pray and for it to be true: With me, it’s a very small thing that I should be judged by . . . and then you fill in the blank. By any human court, because it is the Lord who I care most about. That’s from 1 Corinthians 4:3–4. Oh, would that be true in my life and in your life more and more.

Secondly, we want to care less about what people think of us and devote more mental space and energy to building other people up. If every day, by the Spirit’s help, we place more weight in giving love than receiving love, I think that it’s true that we’ll soon find that we’re no longer controlled by seeking approval of other people and caring what they think about us, and we’ll even be able to tolerate the pain of being excluded and allow it to fade to the background, to be background noise, rather than that which controls and shouts for our attention.

So what does that look like to build others up? I really don’t think it takes brilliance. It’s really just in the small, unseen acts of worship. It’s the concrete ways we can encourage and help another person, whether that’s a fellow classmate, whether that’s a coworker, even a sibling or a parent or a stranger on the bus or the train, even an enemy. It’s noticing and paying attention to others who typically go unseen or fade to the background, striking up conversations that are genuine with them. That’s the new goal, to make this particular social situation that you’re going into more about God, his glory, to make him look good, and to care more about building others up who are there in that setting, caring more about these things than what others think about us, to be preoccupied by doing good, by seeking God’s pleasure. And frankly, God is especially glorified and magnified when we patiently endure and graciously respond when we do receive and experience rejection and criticism, when people disregard us or make fun of us even, even when we fail and others see it. And he, the Lord, gives us all the grace and care and love we need.

Finally, I love how Psalm 115 starts out. It’s perfect for a person like us who care too much about what ours are thinking. The Psalmist starts out by saying, “Not to us, O LORD, not to us, but to your name give glory, for the sake of your steadfast love and your faithfulness!”