Whose Voice is Running Your Life?

Whatever voice you’re most afraid of disappointing, that’s the voice running your life.

Some weekends just do something to you. Last weekend, I was in Townsend, Tennessee, for the 2nd Annual Act Like Men Conference, and I came home a different man than the one who left.

About 50 men gathered from literally all over the country. Different backgrounds. Different church families. Different stories. But the same hunger — to be sharpened, to be challenged, and to go home equipped to do hard things. And that’s exactly what happened.

Keith Stonehart opened things up, talking about his life story and conversion to Christ, and let me tell you, that was powerful. Kerry Brown followed on Saturday morning with a word on guarding our influence. And Isaiah Leslie called us to share Jesus with the people right in front of us. Three men. Three messages. All of them hit differently.

This event is becoming one of the highlights of my year. There’s something irreplaceable about men sitting in a room together, opening the Word, being honest about their struggles, and choosing to go deeper. Iron sharpens iron — and that weekend felt like someone had taken a whetstone to all of us.

I had the privilege of speaking Saturday morning. My message was called “This Must Be Harder Than That.” I want to share part of it here because I believe it’s something a lot of us wrestle with, quietly, privately, and probably more than we’d like to admit.

A Line in the Sand

Let’s go straight to the text. Galatians 1:10:

For am I now trying to persuade people, or God? Or am I striving to please people? If I were still trying to please people, I would not be a servant of Christ.

Paul is barely past his opening, and he’s already drawing a line. This isn’t a gentle nudge. This is an either/or …. there’s no middle ground.

What makes this so powerful is that Paul is writing from experience. He used to live on the other side of that line. He was Saul of Tarsus, climbing the religious ladder, collecting approval from all the right people, doing everything the establishment expected of him. He had credentials. He had reputation. He had clout. In the first-century Jewish world, Saul was the guy everyone wanted to be.

And then Jesus met him on a road to Damascus — and wrecked all of it.

After that encounter, Paul had a different question driving his decisions. Not “what will they think?” but “what does God say?” That single shift reorganized everything: his relationships, his risks, his willingness to suffer, his whole life.

The Voice Running Your Life

Here’s what I told those men Saturday morning: the opinion that defines you will direct you.

Think about it. Whatever voice you’re most afraid of disappointing, that’s the voice running your life. It might be your boss. It might be your father. The guys you grew up with. The version of yourself you always wanted to be. Or maybe it’s just a vague, nameless fear of being seen as not enough.

I know a man, a good man, hardworking, who loves his family, who has made almost every major decision in his adult life based on what his father would have thought. His dad passed away years ago. But that voice? Still in the room. Still at the table. Still casting a vote on every big choice. That’s approval addiction. And it’s more common than we want to confess.

Now, those voices aren’t always wrong about everything. I’m not saying every opinion you care about is worthless. But here’s the problem: they are not qualified to define you.

Only One is.

Identity Confusion Leads to Approval Addiction

When we live mostly at the mercy of others' approval, it reveals something. We haven’t really settled the question of whose we are.

Identity confusion always leads to approval addiction. When you don’t know who you are, you let the crowd tell you. We’ve all seen it happen. Maybe we’ve lived it. I know I have.

There’s a really interesting historical example I brought up Saturday. In 1935, a group of young seminary students in Germany gathered under the leadership of Dietrich Bonhoeffer at Finkenwalde. This wasn’t a normal seminary. The Nazi regime had already started seizing control of the church, pushing out church leaders who wouldn’t bend the knee. These students knew what they were walking into.

Before they could preach, they had to settle a question. Whose approval matters most? The state? The culture? The approval of men with power and titles and the ability to destroy their careers?

Or God’s?

We face the same question. Our moment might be less dramatic. Nobody’s threatening our careers for preaching the gospel, at least not most of us, not yet. But don’t let the lack of drama fool you. The stakes are just as real.

What Does It Actually Look Like?

People-pleasing rarely wears a name tag. It’s subtle. It looks like staying quiet in a conversation when you know the truth needs to be spoken. It looks like softening a hard passage because you’re worried about who’s sitting in the third row. It looks like agreeing with whatever group you’re standing in, until you switch rooms.

It’s the father who won’t have the hard conversation with his son because he doesn’t want to lose the relationship. It’s an eldership that won’t address the problem in the church because they’re afraid of who’s going to be upset. It’s the man who tells his small group what they want to hear instead of what they need to hear.

Paul had been all of those things. That’s why he could write Galatians 1:10 with such conviction. He knew what it cost to live for human approval. And he knew what it felt like to finally be free of it.

Settle the Question

I closed Saturday morning with a simple challenge, the same one I’ll leave with you here.

Settle the question. Whose are you?

Because until that’s settled, every other decision has the wrong foundation. Career choices, relationship choices, the things you say yes to, the things you say no to, all of it runs back upstream to that one question.

Paul settled it after his Damascus experience. He never forgot the answer.

The men at Finkenwalde had to settle it in a moment that could have cost them everything. Most of them answered well.

And us? We get to settle it right now. On ordinary days. In the quiet moments when no one’s watching except the One whose opinion actually counts.

The opinion that defines you will direct you. Make sure the right voice has the floor.