“Now the Lord is that Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.” (2 Corinthians 3:17)
There is a difference between real Holy Spirit conviction and guilt produced from the fear of man. In the first, we aim to please God; in the second, we don’t want to disappoint man.
Ultimately, we give up on making others happy. It is too great a yoke to bear. No human being is God. We learn to tiptoe between satisfying the expectations of others, and pleasing ourselves. We do “enough” to placate them – more out of a sense of duty, than from our own feeling of delight.
The world would teach us that to “become ourselves” we must break free from what others expect of us. The advice: “You need to do you.” Selfishness is enshrined as a virtue. The first commandment is to make ourselves happy. To become our own person we shake off the guilt that has plagued us. We no longer answer to anyone else’s idea of how we should be. We are who we want to be; we do what we want to do. In order to escape the narcissists around us we become a narcissist. We have been transformed from a slave to a god. But which God? The God who created us, or the god of this world?
To become like the true God, we must become like His Son. He did not come into the world to show us how to “do our own thing.” He lived to please His Father. He wore a yoke which He called easy. He was willing to answer to God in all things. The Father’s happiness was His happiness.
When we wear Christ’s yoke, and walk as He walked, we are not beholden to men’s opinions of us, we are free from the fear of man. But we are highly sensitive as to what God thinks. We don’t wish to grieve the Holy Spirit. What we do, even by way of serving men, is done to please God. Such a life is the only true life of freedom – not only from the demands of others, but from the selfishness of our own heart. Living attuned to the Holy Spirit is living the life of perfect liberty.