Approval Addiction | Joel Osteen Sermon

God bless you. It’s great to be with you today and I hope you’ll stay connected with us during the week through our daily podcast our Youtube channel social media and you can come visit us in person.
We’d love to have you be a part of one of our services.
I’d like to start with something funny and I heard about this mother, she was cooking breakfast for her two young boys.
Ryan was five and kevin was three and they begin to argue over who should get the first pancake.
She saw this as an opportunity to teach them a lesson.
She said boys, boys, if jesus were here, he would say let my brother have the first pancake.
Ryan turned to his younger brother and said, ok, kevin, you be, jesus say it like you mean it, this is my bible, I am what it says, I am, I have what it says, I have, I can do what it says, I can do today.
I will be taught the word of God. I boldly confess. My mind is alert. My heart is receptive.
I will never be the same in jesus name. God bless you.
I want to talk to you today about approval addiction.
Too many people make decisions based on what other people will think about them.
They run everything through a filter.
How is this going to make me look, how will my friends, my coworkers perceive me, Will they be impressed.
Will they applaud or will they look down on me.
Will they think less instead of being confident in who God made them to be.
They let the opinion of others determine what they do.
They don’t realize they’re addicted to approval, psychologists call this faux po f O. P. O.
Fear of other people’s opinion. And yes, we all want approval. We all want to be liked.
But you can’t become dependent on what other people think about you. Everyone is not going to understand you.

Everyone won’t celebrate you. There will be seasons when people are for you giving you approval.
Then times when they’re not. If you have that filter, I have to keep pleasing them.
I need them to approve me to feel good about myself.
Then you’re letting them be in charge of who you are.
But your destiny is not predicated on other people’s opinion of you.
Whether they like you approve, you does not stop God’s purpose for your life.
When God laid out your plan, he didn’t have a committee, he didn’t form a group chat called 12 of your friends say let’s get together, decide who they’re going to be all by himself.
He called you equipped, you gave you favor.
If you live trying to please people and gain their approval, keep everyone happy. You’re going to be frustrated.
That’s gonna wear you out. You have to break free from what people think about you.
You don’t have to have their approval. You have almighty God’s approval.
Don’t live to please people live to please God.
He’s the one that holds your destiny promotion doesn’t come from people. It comes from the Lord.
How much time and energy are you spending trying to get approval?
Trying to be well, like trying to keep this friend impressed. Stay in this coworkers favor, take the pressure off.
You can’t follow what God put in your heart.
If you’re always trying to play up to people, what will they think? What if they don’t approve?
A much better question is what will God think?
I would much rather spend my time pleasing him than trying to please people?
The apostle paul had all kinds of opinions about him at one time.
He was the biggest enemy of the church. Then he became a believer. Some people loved him. Others were skeptical.
Despite all this opposition, he wrote almost half of the new testament impacted the world in an amazing way.
He gives us a secret of how he handled the pressure and how he dealt with all the opinions he said in first Corinthians for it matters very little to me what you or anyone else thinks.
I have been faithful paul was saying, I’m not looking to you for approval.
I’m not basing my decisions on what you think, whether you like me or don’t.
That doesn’t change who I am. He wasn’t trying to please everyone.
He was trying to please an audience of one.
The one who called him the one who gave him breath to breathe.
He went on to say in that next verse. My conscience is clear.
He was saying, I’ve done what God put in my heart to the best of my ability.
I pursued the dreams and goals. He’s placed in me. Some people didn’t understand.
Some didn’t approve, but he wasn’t ruled by their opinions.