Opinion Polls

When I was a senior in high school I actually campaigned to get voted "Most Likely to Be President." It just seemed appropriate to shake hands and harass people with my clever campaign slogan, "Jason Byerly, Most Likely to Be President, Vote for Me." It actually worked and I have the yearbook to prove it.

This election season politicians everywhere are spending a lot of money and going to a lot of effort to make us like them. After all, public opinion is the gold standard of politics. Politicians live or die by what happens to them in the polls.

It's funny. Other than my successful bid in high school I've never run for office, and yet I've spent most of my life living or dying by what other people think of me. It's fair to say that public opinion is often the gold standard of my life.

Why do I care so much what other people think? Throughout my life I've lied, compromised my values and bent over backwards in ways both big and small to try to make people think I'm better, smarter, funnier, richer or more like them than I really am. I've laughed at jokes, pretended to like things I don't like or not to like things I do, and have gossiped about friends, all to curry favor with people, who in retrospect, probably didn't change their opinion of me one way or the other despite my chameleon-like efforts.

That's one of the things I love about Jesus. He didn't care. He honestly didn't care what people thought about Him. Even when people spoke highly of Him, he didn't cling to it. "But Jesus would not entrust himself to them, for he knew all men. He did not need man's testimony about man, because He knew what was in a man." (John 2:24)

The only opinion that mattered to Jesus was His Father's, who said at the start of His ministry, "This is my Son, whom I love. With Him I am well pleased." God's opinion was all Jesus needed and that's opinion that never changes. God's approval was the solid bedrock of Jesus' life.

I wonder why it's not good enough for me sometimes? Maybe it just sounds too good to be true. Maybe people are more real to me than God. Maybe I'm just a a sissy. Whatever the case, I've seen this changing in my life. I've spoken my opinion, my honest opinion, more in the last two years than in all the years of my life leading up to it. And it feels good. It feels free.

See, Jesus reminds me just how fickle public opinion could be. There's this great story in Luke about Jesus going to this synagogue in Nazareth and announcing that He was the messiah. In the span of six verses, public opinion about Jesus shifts from "All the people spoke well of Him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his lips," to "All the people in the synagogue were furious when they heard this. They got up, drove him out of town and took him to the brow of the hill . . . in order to throw him down the cliff." Wow, and politicians thought they had it rough.

I love how Jesus handles it. He could have smoked the whole town with a lightning bolt. He could have changed his platform to try to win back their favor. He could have whined about how no one liked him. Instead the Bible says, "he walked right through the crowd and went on his way." (Luke 4:30)

Jesus said what He needed to say, did what He needed to do and was never affected by what other people think. A life like that gets my vote any day of the week.