Life application - practice not caring about how others think of you (Happy Sabbath!)

Hallelujah, may God bless us with His abundant grace on this holy Sabbath day.

Last week I shared about a mindset: being mindful of what’s within our control and what’s not. Letting go of what’s not within our control and focus on being gentle and meek in whatever situation we find ourselves in.

This week, I want to follow up with a second mindset: practice to not care about how people think of you. (This is different from not caring about other people’s feelings.)

The problem is this. If we care about how others think of us, then we’d naturally want to be seen in a good light (including being right). Then when we are criticized, our knee jerk reaction would be to defend our image or our “righteousness”.

1. It could be simply out of an innocent desire to be right, that we are biased into judging that we’re right.

2. And it could happen that we don’t want to be wrong, but we couldn’t find anything wrong with what they’re saying, so we find faults with the person criticizing us.

Ultimately, we end up deceiving ourselves and is unable to have an unbiased assessment of the matter.

Jesus reminded us to guard against the yeast of the Pharisees. And I think this falls under this category.

On the other hand, Jesus said, ”Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.“ ‭‭Matthew‬ ‭5‬:‭11‬-‭12‬ ‭NIV‬‬

God bless!