The Approval Your Phone Can't Give

The Father said "well pleased" before Jesus did a single miracle

The relief from a like lasts about as long as it takes to scroll past it.

You post something you care about. Maybe it's a picture, maybe it's a thought you've been sitting on for a week. A few people notice. Then a few more. And for a minute something in your chest loosens. But it doesn't hold, so you check again, and the second check gives you less than the first.

I preached a message years ago called Highlight Reel, and I asked our church a question I still think about. How many times do you take a picture of yourself before you post it? Nobody posts the first one. You take twenty. You flip through them looking for your best side, because we're highlight people, and we only want to show the best part of our lives.

That's not just a social media problem. It's a heart problem with a screen on it. Under all the checking is a question nobody can answer for you in the comments: Am I enough?

The Room at 11:38

It's 11:38 on a Tuesday night. She's in bed with the lamp off and the phone held over her face. She checks the post again. A few more people have noticed. The room is still quiet, and the relief she felt an hour ago is gone.

She isn't shallow. She's hungry for something real, and she's looking for it in the only place that answers back at midnight. The trouble isn't that she wants to be seen. The trouble is that being noticed by people can only tell you what people think of you this hour, and the number resets every time you put the phone down.

What the Father Said Before Jesus Did Anything

Here's where the gospel walks right into that room, and it does it in the first chapter of Mark.

Then a voice came from heaven, "You are My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased." (Mark 1:11)

Watch where Mark puts that sentence. It's chapter one. Jesus has just come up out of the water at His baptism. He hasn't healed anybody yet. He hasn't preached a sermon or calmed a storm or fed a crowd. And the Father says well pleased, before the ministry and the miracles and before a single highlight reel.

Why does that matter to a woman staring at her phone at midnight? Because Paul says that what the Father said over Jesus, He says over everyone who's in Him. God made us accepted in the Beloved (Ephesians 1:6). Beloved is the same word the Father used at the Jordan. You're accepted in Him, not off to the side like a distant relative He puts up with.

I've said it to our church more ways than I can count. When God's happy with you, He's happy forever. When you got born again you became His son or His daughter, and His language over you doesn't change. Jesus is your highlight reel. The best picture God has of you is the one where you're hidden in His Son, and that one doesn't need twenty takes.

"We Make It Our Aim to Be Well Pleasing to Him"

Somebody who loves you might push back here, and they'd have a fair verse to do it with:

Therefore we make it our aim, whether present or absent, to be well pleasing to Him. (2 Corinthians 5:9)

Doesn't that put the whole thing back on you? If Paul had to aim at pleasing God, then maybe you're still working for a like from heaven.

But look at where Paul is when he writes it. He's just spent the chapter talking about a new body, a guarantee God has given in the Spirit (2 Corinthians 5:5), and a confidence about being at home with the Lord. Paul is writing as a man who's sure of his place. The aim grows out of being accepted, and it doesn't purchase anything Paul was missing.

I put it this way once on a Sunday. I don't do the things my wife loves so she won't divorce me. I do them because I love her and I know it brings her joy. That's the new covenant. Paul's aim is a husband's love, not a nervous employee's.

Known Before You're Seen

So what do you do with the phone? You don't have to throw it in a lake. You don't have to pretend you don't care what people think. You can post the picture and feel the little pull to check it anyway. But you can know, while you're checking, that the number on the screen isn't the number that decides who you are.

You are well pleasing to God because of what Jesus did. Try saying it out loud sometime when the house is quiet: I am well pleasing to God. You'll feel something in you argue with it. Say it anyway, because He said it over His Son first and He has placed you in that Son.

Somewhere around midnight she sets the phone face down on the nightstand, and she lets the quiet hold her for a minute while she remembers whose voice spoke over her first.