I couldn’t get the song out of my head last night. As I studied this Sunday’s text, Romans 15:1-13, my eyes immediately lit on the end of verse 1 and beginning of verse 2, and then the chorus of Ricky Nelson’s 1972 hit “Garden Party” was playing in my mind:
“But it’s all right now, I’ve learned my lesson well.
You see, you can’t please everyone, so you’ve got to please yourself.”
Nelson’s sentiment could not be further from the lesson of our text. In fact, our text could not be further from a sentiment like Nelson’s which is firmly lodged in popular psychology suggesting that it is mentally unhealthy to want to please others rather than oneself. The warning is that by focusing on the wants and needs of others, you will lose yourself and become desperately unhappy. Instead, we should seek self-approval and thus arrive at contented happiness.
This popular notion of self-contained happiness needs critique from serious psychologists, but it is clearly at odds with what Scripture says over and over. And (a theme in our text this week) it is at odds with the person of Jesus Christ Himself, who verse 3 says “did not please himself.” To say the least. The same verse goes on via a quotation from Psalm 69:9 to elaborate only one small aspect of Christ’s suffering on behalf of others, the insults which He endured.
The result of such concern for pleasing others, far from personal unhappiness, is harmony with each other (verse 5, literally “the same mind with each other”). That harmony results in unified worship of God.
In verses 7 to 13, Paul repeats the same injunction in different words, “Welcome one another as Christ has welcomed you,” and again affirms that “Christ has become a servant,” i.e., put other’s needs above His own.
The result, which Paul proves with several Old Testament quotations in verses 9-12 is the completion of God’s project which is at the heart of Romans, the bringing together of Jews and Gentiles in Christ.
And the final benediction in verse 13 suggests that the end result of seeking to please others, following the model of Jesus, is joy, peace and hope. So it may be true that you can’t please everyone (Nelson probably got that right), but the conclusion should not be that “you got to please yourself.” That only leads to a selfish, turned-in, blighted spirit and not to the joy, peace and hope which comes from giving up ourselves like Jesus gave up Himself.