They Loved The Praise Of Men

There are four rooms in her week where she is entirely herself and one where she is not, and she can name the one.

It is not church. Church is fine. It is not her family, who know exactly what she thinks about everything and have since she was fifteen.

It is a room at work, a standing meeting, eleven people, and in that room there is a way of talking about certain things and she has never once departed from it.

Somebody says something and there is a small silence that is not quite a silence and everybody moves on, and she moves on with them, and afterward, going down in the elevator, she has a conversation with herself in which she says the thing she did not say, and says it well.

She has been doing that for two and a half years. She is not weak. She is the one who says hard things in every other room in her life, and she has the receipts for that, and it is exactly why this one bothers her so much.

If you have got a room like that, come and sit down. Nobody here is going to ask you what you are afraid of losing, because you already know.

John writes about people in exactly her position and does not call them unbelievers

There is a small, unhappy, extremely honest passage near the end of John's account, and it is about people who are in her room.

Nevertheless among the chief rulers also many believed on him; but because of the Pharisees they did not confess him, lest they should be put out of the synagogue: for they loved the praise of men more than the praise of God.John 12:42 and 43

Now read the first half carefully, because everybody skips it to get to the sting.

Among the chief rulers also many believed on him. Many. Believed. John says that as a fact, without qualification, about people who then went quiet.

He does not write that they secretly did not believe. He does not say their silence proved them false. He records both things in one sentence: the belief was real and the mouth stayed shut, and he lets both stand.

Then he names the reason, and he names it without softening: they loved the praise of men more than the praise of God. That is a hard sentence and it is meant to be, and it is a diagnosis rather than a verdict on their souls.

You are one of the ones who believed, and it was already true before you went quiet in that room. John 12:43 is where that sits, in a passage that keeps the belief and the silence in the same sentence, and the same Spirit who moved John to be that honest about people he could have simply condemned is the one who lets a strong woman read it without collapsing.

The two praises are being weighed against each other constantly

Look at how John frames it, because the framing is the useful part. He does not say they wanted the praise of men. He says they loved it more.

It is a comparison. Both are real, both are on the scale, and the sentence is a report on which side went down.

And notice: he is not accusing them of not wanting God's approval. They wanted it. That is why they believed. The problem is that in one specific room, at one specific moment, the other side of the scale was heavier, and John simply says so.

Which means her situation is not a question about whether she is a believer. It is a question about a weight, in one room, on a Tuesday, at eleven o'clock.

And the specific weight in her case is not vanity. It is the eleven people, and the way three of them would look at each other, and the possibility of becoming a certain kind of colleague, which is a real professional cost and I am not going to pretend it is imaginary.

That is what makes it hard. The synagogue in that verse was not a metaphor either. Being put out of it was a real loss of real standing among real people, and John names it plainly rather than dismissing it.

You have a praise available from God that is already given, and it was not withheld while you were silent. He promised it, in the description of a Father who sees in secret and rewards Himself (Matthew 6:4), and His Spirit does not ration approval according to how brave anybody was on a Tuesday.

The paragraph that outranks the teaching

Before we go on, this outranks everything above it.

Some people must not go without food. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard relationship with food or with eating, if you are underweight, unwell, frail or elderly, or if you are simply not sure, speak to your doctor before you go without anything and let their answer be the answer. There is no length on this page, no kind of fast, no plan and no schedule, and there is not going to be one here.

And this is worth saying twice on a page about silence: the privacy this subject teaches is about audience and never about concealment. Telling your doctor is always right. Telling your husband is right. Telling whoever cooks in your house is right and it is basic courtesy. None of that is a failure of anything.

You are free to speak to the people who look after you, and that freedom is already yours. It is written into Matthew 6:6, where the whole weight falls on a Father who sees rather than on anything being hidden from anyone, and the Holy Spirit carries that into a woman who has been managing her own mouth carefully for years.

If today is heavier than a page can hold, call somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, or a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anybody near you is in danger tonight.