Well, we'd love to get emails to us that crystallize sort of abstract thoughts and put those thoughts into concrete questions.

And today we have an intriguing question from put those thoughts into concrete questions.

And today we have an intriguing question from Jacob a listener about the importance of popularity

and likeability in our gospel witness.

Jacob wonders if being disliked by others makes him a bad representative of Christ.

Here's his email, Pastor John.

Am I wrong if people around me don't like me?

Does being unliked by others make me a bad representative

of Christ? We can't be people-pleasers all the time or we will be pushovers. and at what point has our seeking to be

accepted by people compromised our faithfulness to God? I think what might be

helpful to do in answer to Jacob's question is to illustrate for

him how from scriptures he might go about answering his own question and I hope in doing it this way

really a hundred questions of this nature and lots of natures might be answered in the sense that people will

realize that all John Piper does to get ready for these little 10 minute talks is to open my Bible and find some

scriptures that come close to relating to the issue and think about them and then put my

thoughts down. Frankly, I think most people who listen to APJ, that's a

particular kind of people, could do this if they were encouraged actually to work at it.

So that's what I'm doing. I'm encouraging you. Like you could do this. You could have your own little APJ. I'd like to empower you to do that. So just watch now.

The first thing I did was to type the word please, because we're talking about when is it right to please people,

and is it not right to please be. I type the word please into my logos. You can have, there's a lot of different

private programs out there, I happen to use logoss, I typed it into my

Bible computer search and I told it to find all the places where

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