Hi everyone it's Leslie Lutie host of the Set-A-Part-Grel podcast biblical encouragement for women of all ages.

Today I'm really excited about our topic and we're going to be jumping back into the category

of Set Apart Living and specifically addressing the question of people pleasing.

It's a very trendy message today to say that it's wrong and sinful and dangerous and harmful to people please. and books, there are seminars, there are messages floating around on social media, with the idea

or the goal of freeing all of us, especially all of us who are women, from this constant pressure to please other people. And the

message goes something like this. If you bend to the desires and the

expectations of others you will only end up burned out and you will become a martyr.

And there's this implication that we need to protect ourselves from that kind of burnout.

And so we need to tell these other people who want things

from us to get in their place and get out of our face and back off and kind of

draw a protective little bubble around our lives so that we don't end up bending over backwards for other people.

The conclusion is that we should just focus on being ourselves and doing our own thing and let other people just sort of deal with that.

Now I definitely understand where this message of it's wrong to please people is coming from

because I believe there's a right way and a wrong

way to bend to the desires of other people. But I do think that this trendy

message that is constantly saying don't try to please people can sometimes become an

excuse to just live selfishly and let go of any desire or need or purposeful effort to serve other people.

So let's dive a little deeper into this from a biblical standpoint.

Is people pleasing really a sin and will it lead to burnout? Let's look at what the Bible has to say.

I want to start out by examining the story of Mary and Martha. Here were two very sincere women both with a desire to please and

serve Jesus Christ, but only one of them had her priority straight. Mary

understood that sitting at the feet of Jesus and hearing his word was far more

...