NOT OBEDIENCE — INSTINCT
Who You’re Really Trying to Please
There is someone in my life I have struggled to trust.
The relationship carries a title that implies trustworthiness — the kind of title that makes suspicion feel like a personal failure. So when the patterns continued and the unease wouldn’t leave, I did what I knew to do. I prayed. God, help me not to be such a suspicious person.
What came back wasn’t what I expected.
Instead of relief, something snapped. God is the one who holds me. God is the one who guides me. He is the one who keeps me from stumbling (Jude 24) — that’s what I claim, anyway. So if God wasn’t giving me peace about this person, that wasn’t my failure. That was information. Be as clever as serpents and as gentle as doves (Matthew 10:16), Jesus said. I could be both. I could stay gentle while honoring what God was and wasn’t giving me.
The experience left me with a question — a question I hadn’t thought to ask before.
It wasn’t who should I trust? It was deeper than that.
Who am I actually trying to please?
And who am I willing to disappoint?
Those two questions have a way of cutting through everything — the noise, the expectations, the titles, the obligations — and getting to the truth of where the heart actually lives.
I began to understand that the answer to both questions is the same person. Whoever you’re unwilling to disappoint is the one you’re living to please. And that person — whether you’ve said it out loud or not — sits in the driver’s seat of your life.
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The Ones Who Didn’t Know They Were Doing It Right
There is a passage in Matthew 25 that’ll jerk a knot in your tail, as my mom says.
Here, Jesus is describing the final judgment — the moment when all of humanity stands before him and he separates them the way a shepherd separates sheep from goats. To the sheep on his right he says, Come, you who are blessed by my Father. I was hungry and you fed me. Thirsty and you gave me drink. A stranger and you welcomed me.
And the sheep — the ones he’s welcoming into paradise — look at him confused. When, Lord? When did we see you hungry and feed you? When did we see you as a stranger? They aren’t being modest. They genuinely don’t remember doing anything remarkable.
Then Jesus turns to the goats.
The goats protest. They have a list. They did things in his name — good things, religious things, things that looked exactly like what the sheep did. And Jesus looks at them and says words that should stop every rule-following, box-checking, obligation-driven Christian cold:
I never knew you.
Not — you didn’t do enough.
Not — you got the doctrine wrong.
I never knew you.
So if the goats were outwardly obedient and still heard those words, and the sheep were so naturally living out their faith they didn’t even notice — what was the difference?
It wasn’t the actions. It was what was behind them.
The sheep weren’t keeping score. They were keeping company with Jesus. And somewhere in that company, loving the people he loved became the most natural thing in the world — so natural they didn’t even think to remember it.
The goats were performing. Working the list. Doing the right things for an audience that was never God.
Which raises the question Jesus was really asking all along — the same one that cracked open in my own life:
Who were they trying to please when they did all those things?
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The Boss You Don’t Want to Please
Have you ever worked for someone you couldn’t stand?
You showed up. You did the job — did it well, actually. You followed the directions, met the deadlines, fulfilled every requirement of the position. Technically, you were a model employee. But your heart was nowhere near that office. You weren’t thinking about what would make the boss happy. You were thinking about yourself — your reputation, your paycheck, your family waiting at home. Maybe you were thinking about the exit.
You were obedient. You were not trying to please.
Although you didn’t announce it, everyone in the office could feel the difference, even if they couldn’t name it.
There’s a particular kind of grief that settles into a relationship when one person stops caring about the other’s pleasure. It’s unmistakable. Something shifts. The obedience continues, but the warmth is gone, and what’s left feels hollow and mechanical — like going through motions nobody believes in anymore.
That is obligation. That is law.
I know what that feels like from the inside — and I found it in the last place I expected. Church.
When I first came back to God, I was gung-ho. Choir, Bible study, every committee, every request — if someone asked, I said yes. From the outside it probably looked like devotion. From the inside it was something else entirely. I was doing all of it to please the people around me. To look like a Christian to the observers. To say yes because saying no felt dangerous — like I might disappoint someone and lose my place.
God rescued me from people-pleasing long before I recognized it as something that needed rescuing. I was taking everyone else’s word for what following Jesus looked like, and by doing that, I had completely bypassed the only One whose opinion actually mattered. I was too worried about how I appeared to others ever to stop and ask — God, what would please You? Even if that meant disappointing everyone else in the room.
I was obedient. I was not trying to please Him.
And that is exactly what Jesus is not interested in.
He doesn’t want employees who follow the job description. He wants children who love their Father. He wants disciples so caught up in who He is that doing what He asks stops feeling like a requirement and starts feeling like the obvious response to being loved that well.
Obedience without the desire to please is just compliance. And compliance was never the point.
So what does it look like when the desire to please is actually there? When it goes so deep it stops feeling like obedience at all?
It looks like the sheep in Matthew 25 — people so naturally living toward Jesus that when He points to their faithfulness, they don’t even recognize it as anything special.
It feels like instinct.
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The Words That Change Everything
There is a moment in the Gospel of Mark that is so quiet you could almost miss it.
Jesus has just come up out of the water after his baptism. The heavens split open, the Spirit descends like a dove, and then a voice — the Father’s voice — speaks over his Son for all to hear:
“You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.” (Mark 1:11)
Not — you have obeyed me.
Not — you have followed all the requirements.
Not — you have fulfilled the job description.
I am well pleased with you.
The Father’s word over his Son is not a performance review. It is delight. It is the language of relationship, of a Father whose pleasure in his child runs deeper than a checklist ever could.
And then the writer of Hebrews says this:
Without faith it is impossible to please God. (Hebrews 11:6)
Not obey God. Not perform for God. Not satisfy God’s requirements.
Please Him.
The word choice in Scripture is intentional. God is not looking for compliance. He is looking for the heart that turns toward Him the way a child turns toward a parent — not because they have to, but because that is simply where they want to be.
Paul understood this. In Galatians 1:10 he asks the question plainly: Am I now seeking the approval of man, or of God? If I were still trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ. There it is again — please God or please man. You cannot do both at the same time. Eventually the heart has to choose.
And when it chooses God — really chooses, from the inside out — something shifts.
Obedience doesn’t disappear. It transforms. It stops being a ladder you climb to earn approval and becomes the natural expression of a heart that has already been fully accepted. Fully known. Fully loved.
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Not Obedience — Instinct
Now, ask yourself this question. Chew on it. Ponder it.
Who are you actually living to please?
It might be a parent whose approval you’ve chased your whole life. A spouse. A congregation. A reputation you’ve carefully constructed over years. It might even be yourself. Whatever name goes in that blank, that person is sitting in the driver’s seat of your life — whether you’ve handed them the keys consciously or not.
And if it’s anyone other than Jesus, you already know how that story ends. Matthew 25 told us. The goats had a list of everything they’d done. Jesus had one response: I never knew you.
That passage used to jerk a knot in my tail every time I read it. It doesn’t anymore — and not because I’ve stopped taking it seriously. It’s because I finally understood what it was actually saying.
The sheep weren’t less sinful than the goats. They weren’t more disciplined or more doctrinally sound. The difference was simpler and more profound than any of that.
The sheep weren’t keeping score. They were keeping company with Jesus.
And when you keep company with someone you love — really love, the way you love someone who gave everything for you — their preferences start to become your preferences. Their heartaches become your heartaches. What matters to them starts to matter to you, not because you’re trying to obey a rule, but because that’s simply what love does. It shapes you from the inside without you even noticing.
That is what grace produces. Not better rule-followers. People whose want-to has been transformed.
I’ll be honest with you. There are still moments I catch myself performing — doing the right thing for the wrong audience, saying yes when God hasn’t led me there, looking around to see who’s watching. Old habits are persistent. But the difference now is that I notice it. And the moment I notice it, something in me reorients — not out of guilt, not out of fear of getting it wrong, but because pleasing Him has become the thing I want most.
I don’t even experience it as obedience anymore.
It feels like instinct.
Why wouldn’t I want to please the One who died for me — over any other human being who is just as needy as I am? Why wouldn’t I orient my whole life around the pleasure of the One whose voice spoke over his own Son and said you are beloved, and I am pleased with you — and then turned around and said the same thing over me?
That is not obligation. That is not law. That is not a checklist or a performance or a seat in the choir you didn’t really want.
That is grace. And grace, when it has truly done its work, doesn’t produce reluctant obedience.
It produces instinct.
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So today, before you make a single move — in your relationships, your decisions, your yes’s and your no’s — ask yourself:
What will please Him?
Not them. Not you. Him.
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