In With the In Crowd?

Romans 8:16-18

September 21, 1997

by Dave Wilkinson

How many of you used to listen to deejay Ron Allen?

Many of you probably did. You just don’t remember. You’re not meant to remember.

Ron Allen, for many years, was a name used by local disc jockeys and radio newscasters in cities and towns throughout America. The name served two purposes. It was flat and non-ethnic, so listeners in any town could tune to Ron Allen -- whoever he happened to be-- and accept him as a bland, white-bread part of their lives. The other purpose was just as significant: Local radio station executives were usually the ones who named their on-air performers Ron Allen. The broadcaster didn't come to town with the idea of being Ron Allen -- he was persuaded to be Ron Allen by his new boss. For the boss knew that if this particular Ron Allen didn't work out, he could always find another Ron Allen later. Ron Allens were as interchangeable as Darrins on "Bewitched."

The "Ron Allen Factor" is a good thing to be aware of even if you are the chief officer of your company and have never been in a radio studio in your life. It is a prime example of how we're interchangeable -- no matter how irreplaceable to our companies we think we are. There was someone in the slot before we got here; there will be someone in the slot after we're gone.

Of course not everyone is a Ron Allen. Some people get to be a Fess Parker -- or at least Fess Parker got to be Fess Parker. I tried to be Fess Parker. I had the Davy Crockett hat, the Davy Crockett jacket, the Davy Crockett gun, and the Davy Crockett lunch box. This fall I plan to buy a luxury hotel in Santa Barbara and open a winery. But only Fess Parker is Fess Parker.

What is that like?

Fess Parker tells his story in Bob Green’s book, The Fifty Year Dash: "Mr. Disney sent me on a tour of forty-five cities to promote the shows. I remember arriving at the airport in New Orleans. For twenty-five miles the route was lined with cars, people waiting to see me. They said it was a bigger reception than Eisenhower got when he was there. I grew accustomed to things like that. In Scotland, people pushed through the glass in a department store window. In Holland, they chased me down the street. There is nothing that prepares a man for something like that.

"I was pulled off the set once, because there was some sort of Walt Disney Night at the Hollywood Bowl. They drove me to the Bowl, and they put me on stage in my Davy Crockett cap and uniform, and they handed me a guitar. The Los Angeles Symphony Orchestra was behind me, and the Roger Wagner Chorale, and I was supposed to sing 'Farewell to the Mountains.' There were twenty-five thousand people in the audience.

"There probably isn't a day when I don't get some reminder of what happened to me. When people find out who I am, they tell me how much I meant to them when they were children."

But ultimately even a Fess Parker finally discovers that, to a later generation, he’s just another Ron Allen. Fame doesn’t last. As Parker comments. " I'll call some businessman, and I'll try to leave a message with his 21-year-old secretary, and she'll say, 'Wes Parker? How do you spell that?

Sooner or later, with the passing of the years, even a Fess Parker becomes a Ron Allen. We all do -- even when we were "somebody."

What I’m talking about this morning -- what I am getting at with this plethora of Baby Boomer illustration -- is fame, position, reputation. We all have a drive for recognition. In this world it doesn’t last. But we still have the drive.

Now this drive is natural and God given. There is a way that drive is meant to be satisfied and can be fully satisfied. Our scripture from Romans talks about glory. Today and in successive sermons I want to talk about what glory means to us.

But we have to move some baggage aside before we can understand what it means. Because the drive for glory can become twisted. So before I talk about glory I want to explore how this drive can distort our lives and our relationships if its not centered in the Lord.

In a talk to university students C.S. Lewis declared: "I believe that in all men's lives at certain periods, and in many men's lives at all periods between infancy and extreme old age, one of the most dominant elements is the desire to be inside the local Ring and the terror of being left outside."

It is the drive for recognition that pushes us to the destructive desire to be an "insider" -- whatever being on the inside means to us at different times in our lives. In high school it may have meant being "popular." If you were in the "popular group" it brought the discovery that there was an even more popular group and a desire to break into that group as well. Today it may come across as being "in the know."

Two of Jesus’ Disciples, James and John, came to Jesus with the request that they sit on Jesus’ right and left hands in His Kingdom. Now it is a good thing to want to be close to Jesus. But their desire was to be closest. For them it wasn’t enough to be a part of the twelve. They wanted to become the two within the twelve. They wanted to be the insiders which, of course, requires that some others be outsiders.

Lewis commented to the students: "Men tell not only their wives but themselves that it is a hardship to stay late at the office on some bit of important extra work which they have to do because they and So-and-so and the two others are the only people in the whole place who really know how things are run. But it is not quite true. It is a terrible bore, of course, when old Fatty Smithson draws you aside and whispers "Look here, we've got to get you in on this examination somehow" or "Charles and I saw at once that you've got to be on this committee". A terrible bore -- ah, but how much more terrible if you were left out It is tiring and unhealthy to lose your Saturday afternoons: but to have them free because you don't matter, that is much worse."

Has Lewis hit the mark?

Do you want to be in with the in crowd? Do you want to know what the in crowd knows? Do you want to go where the in crowd goes?

Lewis zeroed in on the destructive potential this drive can bring to our relationships and morals. He said to his student audience: "I have no right to make assumptions about the degree to which any of you may already be compromised. I must not assume that you have ever first neglected, and finally shaken off, friends whom you really loved and who might have lasted you a lifetime, in order to court the friendship of those who appeared to you more important or useful. I must not ask whether you have ever derived actual pleasure from the loneliness and humiliation of the outsiders after you yourself were in: whether you have talked to fellow members of the Ring in the presence of outsiders simply in order that the outsiders might envy; whether the means whereby, in your days of probation, you propitiated the Inner Ring, were always wholly admirable."

Lewis was talking to University students in 1944. But he could just as easily said the same thing to a 1997 assembly at any of the local Middle Schools. You remember Middle School -- the rigid pecking order ne the cliques -- who was invited to which party and who wasn’t. But it is still the same way. The drives are the same. We just become less obvious as we grow older, We still want to be included. We hate a clique unless we are in it.

Now if this drive to be in the inner circle isn’t enough, we also carry another "inner circle" around with us inside our minds and emotions. This internal "inner circle" is the list of people whose approval we covet -- the people who will make us feel okay if they just let us in.

Sociologist George Herbert Meade calls the personal inner circle we carry with us the "generalized other." It is the mental representation we carry inside ourselves of that group of people in whose judgment we measure our success or failure.

This "generalized other" is a composite of all the Siskels and Eberts in your life whose thumbs up or thumbs down carries emotional weight for you. It is a kind of mental jury box that holds all the people who rate you like so many judges evaluating an Olympic skater. Our sense of esteem and worth is largely wrapped up in their appraisal of our worth.

Mayor Richard J. Daley was as celebrated in Chicago for his malaprops as for his ability to get votes from the unlikeliest sources. Whole books have been devoted to chronicling these statements, including this classic from the 1968 riots: "The police are not here to create disorder. The police are here to preserve disorder."

Every once in a while, though, one of these statements carried so much truth (though perhaps unintentionally) that you had to stop and contemplate. One such statement, for me at any rate, was when he said about his opponents: "They have vilified me, they have crucified me, yes, they have even criticized me." As if to say, "Vilification and crucifixion I can put up with, but criticism--that's hitting below the belt."

Mayor Daley did not like to be criticized.

He's not the only one.

Why is it we often respond so strongly to criticism? I believe it reveals a serious addiction from which many of us suffer. It is what might be called approval addiction. Approval addiction is the second consequence of a misdirected drive for recognition People live in bondage to what others think Like other addicts, they will go to great lengths to get a fix when they feel Like other addicts, they find that no fix lasts forever, they keep coming back for more.

Who is in your internal jury box?

Almost certainly your parents are in that box. Probably some of your teachers are there too, and some significant members of your peer group, not to mention your boss, your co-workers, people in your neighborhood, and perhaps other members of your profession. It gets pretty crowded, that jury box.

We don’t let just anybody in there. We are selective. As Psychiatrist David Burns notes, it is not another person’s compliment or approval that makes me feel good, it is my belief that there is validity to the compliment. Suppose you were to visit the psychiatric ward of a hospital, Burns imagines, and a patient approaches you with this greeting: "You are wonderful. I had a vision from God. He told me the thirteenth person to walk through the door would be the special messenger. You are the thirteenth, so I know you are the chosen one, the holy one, the bringer of peace to the world; let me kiss your shoe."

Now most likely your sense of self-esteem would not rise. Why not? There was no recognition of validity on your part.

John Ortberg writes: When I was going through school, I spent one summer internship at a place called the Spiro Agnew Mental Health Center in Dorchester County, Maryland. One woman there used to tell me regularly that she wanted to marry me because she could not stop thinking about my body. She was heavily medicated, had lived in the facility for 20 years, find she would say the same thing to every other member of the staff. On her less lucid days she would say it to plants and inanimate objects. It was an outrageous compliment, but it did nothing to enhance my sense of value as a person.

Ortberg continues: "In between other people's opinions of me and my pleasure in them is my own assessment of the validity of their approval. I am not the passive victim of others' opinions. Neither are you. In fact, their opinions are powerless until you validate them. No ones' approval will affect me unless I grant it. But we do grant it and we do seek it out. We want recognition. We want to the be on the inside. And as we carry our mental jury box around with us,, we become people pleasers in an attempt to keep the jury happy.

This was as true 2,000 years ago as it is today. We need to know that approval addiction is not of God. But it takes a person with special insight to break out of the trap.

I believe that the Apostle Paul was able to escape the trap because of the way he knew the mind of God. Paul was definitely not an approval addict. While Paul loved people, he didn’t rise or fall on their okay. He said to some critics in 1 Corinthians 4:3-4: "With me it is a very small thing that I should be judged by you or by any human court. I do not even judge myself...It is the Lord who judges me." "It is a very small thing..." Paul says, by way of asking the Corinthians to get out of his face. He does not say "It is nothing." It still partly matters to Paul what they think of him. But he knows the danger of trying to be a people pleaser. If you are an approval junkie you will not be ready to walk the path of Christian discipleship. You won’t be able to do the thing that God requires but people won’t like.

Paul writes to the church at Galatia: "Am I now trying to win the approval of human beings, or of God? If I were still trying to please human beings, I would not be a servant of Christ." Paul knew that in the long run there is only one opinion of our lives that counts. There is only one rating that lasts. By knowing this, Paul is able to keep his internal jury box reined in.

Paul firmly points us away from being people pleasers. But he points us in its place to the Biblical promise of "glory". Glory, in the Biblical sense, is the way our inner drive for recognition can be satisfied in a way that is not only productive but eternal.

You see the appetite itself isn’t wrong. The ways we sometimes try to meet it are sometimes very wrong. But there is a way that it will be met that is eternally right. Paul tells us in Romans 8 that as the people of Christ we will receive the glory we have always looked for. We cannot look for it from other real or imagined people. But we will receive the fulfillment of our search from God Himself. God will raise us up at the proper time -- but only after we have humbled ourselves.

In The Writing Life Annie Dillard wrote: "I tried to heat the cabin with the wood stove and a kerosene heater, but I never was warm. At first, I did not know how to split wood. I set a chunk of alder on the chopping block and harassed it, at enormous exertion, into tiny wedges that flew all over the sand flat and lost themselves. What I did was less like splitting wood than chipping flints. After a few whacks my alder chunk still stood serene and unmoved, its base untouched, its tip a thorn. And then I actually tried to turn sorry thing over and balance it on its wee head while I tried to chop its feet off before it fell over. God save us.

"I did not know it at the time, but during those first weeks' when I attacked my wood every morning, I was collecting a crowd--or what passed on the island for a crowd. At the sound of my ax, Doe and Bob--real islanders, proper, wood-splitting islanders---paused in their activities and mustered, unseen, across the sand flat, under the firs They were watching me (oh, the idleness) try to split wood It must have been a largely silent comedy. Later, when they confessed, and I railed at them, Bob said innocently that the single remark he had ever permitted himself had been, "I love to watch Annie split wood."

"One night, while all this had been going on, I had a dream in which I was given to understand, by the powers that be, how to split wood. You aim, said the dream--of course! -- at the chopping block. It is true. You aim at the chopping block, not at the wood; then you split the wood, instead of chipping it. You cannot do the job cleanly unless you treat the wood as the transparent means to an end, by aiming past it.

It’s the same way with glory. If we try to hit it we will miss. We will end up enmeshed in the destructive drive to be in the "inner ring" or wrapped up in approval addiction. But if we aim past public recognition to steps of obedient Christian discipleship -- if we aim past glory for God Himself, -- we will have glory and recognition as well. We will discover that we are in the true inner ring of the universe for all eternity.

Scripture says that we shall "stand before" God, shall appear, shall be inspected. But Scripture also says that if we are in Christ, we will be glorified with Him. We will become the ultimate insiders -- not in the competitive way of reaching the inner ring and not in the priority warping way of being addicted to the approval of other people. We will have the valid fulfillment of the drive for personal meaning that God placed within us when he made us.

Paul assures us that the natural drive for recognition will find fulfillment in ways that are both healthy and way beyond anything we may have imagined in our wildest daydreams about being added to Mt. Rushmore or being given a ticker taper parade down Wilshire Boulevard. Paul says that as we are children of God though faith in Jesus Christ, we will receive glory. Not only will God inspect us but God will give us His approval.

What does being "in with the in crowd" have to compare with that?

Lewis concludes: "Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearten creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

If we desire our own glory we never get it. We will hurt ourselves and others in the attempt. If we get it for awhile we can’t keep it. Every Fess Parker sooner later becomes a Wes Parker and then a Ron Allen.

But if we turn our backs on our own glory and turn out face to God, we will find that we get with God the fulfillment of all of our deepest drives. That’s amazing but true. "Humble yourself under the mighty hand of God that he may exalt you at the proper time." Don’t worry about being a people pleaser. Focus on discipleship. Make discipleship real in how you invest your time and money. Make discipleship real by doing what Jesus tells you to do -- even if the public opinion polls disagree.

As Jesus told us: "Seek first God’s kingdom and His righteousness and all these other things will be added to you -- and that includes glory.