By Dawn Owens @DawnMarieOwens

Let’s talk platform. Yeah, I said it. I know, I know…you cringe. Me too. It feels like that word is everywhere these days:

Grow your platform.

Build your platform.

Be the platform.

It’s as if it is constantly taunting us.

If we heard it once we heard it fifty times, “You can be the best writer in the world, but with no followers, no real platform, your book will never get published.” Ugh.

So what are we to do, as Christians whose aim it is to please God and not men, while at the same time submitting to the publishing industry’s needs to get our messages out to the masses?

As a confessed approval addict, you can learn more about that here, I have had no choice but to search the scriptures to gain perspective on God’s view of this concept.

Years ago, while I was still trying to figure out exactly what it was God was calling me to do, I found myself in 1 Samuel reading through the story of Saul. Until then, my thoughts of Saul were “he was a good king, gone wrong.”

I liked rooting for David; he was, after all, a man after God’s own heart.

But as I sat at the table asking God what I should do with my life, he led me back to those scripture verses in 1 Samuel. “Saul, Lord? Really. How am I anything like Saul?” I thought to myself.

Saul’s story, as found in Chapters 9 and 10, tells of him becoming the anointed King. It is in those chapters that we start to read about this young boy who was tall, dark and handsome (1 Samuel 9:2). But it doesn’t take long for us also to learn that he is incredibly insecure.

In 1 Samuel 9:19-20, CSB, Samuel the prophet is trying to calm Saul’s concerns about his father’s lost donkeys and helping him to place his perspective on what was to come. He says to Samuel, “I’ll tell you everything that is in your heart….And who does all of Israel desire but you and all your father’s family?” (Spoiler alert: In chapter 10, Samuel will be anointing Saul as king.)

Saul’s response says it all, “Am I not a Benjamite from the smallest of Isreal’s tribes and isn’t my clan the least important of all the clans of the Benjamite tribe? So why have you said something like this to me?” (v. 21

Does this sound familiar?

Maybe you have said something like this to the Lord.

“Who am I, Lord? I am a nobody. I am just some chick from Philly, living in this Southern town. What you are calling me to do, takes knowing people, having skills and talents and I know nobody, and I have nothing to give.”

Or wait, that was just me, only a few years before God launched a God-sized dream to serve the poor and unite the body of Christ in my husband’s hometown.

I was a nobody. A Yankee, in a Southern town. I barely knew a soul past my in-laws. I was overcoming a debilitating surgery and was unemployed for the first time in my life.

It is so easy for us to look at our situation and think, how in the world is God ever going to grow a platform out of what appears to be nothing. It was the same thing I wondered to myself after I left the Colorado Christian Writer’s Conference six years ago, pitching the same book idea, which I just finished writing last week.

But here is what I want to say to you today. If we focus on the things that we see as humanly possible, we’ll miss how God can do the impossible.

You see, Saul, just like me, was focusing on how he viewed himself. That picture made him feel small, weak, and insecure. He didn’t believe in himself, and there is no evidence that he was willing to believe God.

His insecurity brought on fear. His fear led him to please people. His desire to please people became his rejection letter from God.

You see if you fast forward to chapter 15, we’ll see yet another interaction between Saul and Samuel. Saul had been anointed King at this point and for the last five chapters been conducting himself as such. Samuel, the prophet, was dispatched by God to reject Saul as king because he once again sought to please other humans rather than patiently seeking the Lord.

When Samuel confronted him about why he sent men to war, Saul, the king answered the prophet:

“I have sinned. I violated the Lord’s command and your instructions. I was afraid of the men and so I gave into them” (1 Samuel 15:24, NIV, emphasis added).

Although Saul had a platform for a time, his people pleasing, insecurity, and fear of rejection had him rejected before he barely got started.

It was whi,le reading these verses that my heart stopped and my palms began to sweat. For the first time in my life, I realized how deep the addiction was to my need to please others. I was an approval addict and if I didn’t start addressing the issue right now, the moment God gave me a “platform” I could be hoisted right off, just as I was getting started.

David and Saul were so much alike but responded completely differently. Saul who chased after the donkeys and David who kept after the sheep. Both good-looking, from no name families. Neither showed any indication of the makings of a good king.

But here was the difference, David believed God.

David was sent by his father to bring food and rations at the standoff with Goliath, rather than worrying about what everyone around him thought, David, reminded everyone around him who God was.

Saul said to David, “You are not able to go out against the Philistine and fight him; you are only a young man, and he has been a warrior from his youth” (1 Samuel 17:32-33, NIV).

David described to Saul how many lions and bears had tried to attack his father’s sheep but he had defended the sheep and saved them from death.

“This uncircumcised Philistine will be like one of them, because he has defied the armies of the living God. The Lord who rescued me from the paw of the lion and the paw of the bear will rescue me from the hand of the Philistine.” (1 Samuel 17:36-37, NIV).

David later became the King who was known as “the man after God’s heart.”

• Saul pursued the approval of men, while David sought the approval of God.
• Saul attempted to please the masses, while David worshiped to please the One.
• Saul allowed fear and insecurity to rule him in what he could not do, where David’s security rested in what His God had already done.

So which will you choose to emulate Saul or David?

Will you focus on what everyone else is doing to grow their platforms on Facebook, Twitter, and every other social media presence or will you choose to keep your focus on where God leads you to share?

Will you make excuses deciding you are already a nobody or will you allow God to define you as His somebody?

Leading a ministry for the last five years, that nobody thought I should be leading, has taught me much. The more I focused on God, the more He opened doors of opportunity. The more I rooted my identity and security in Him, the less I worried about what everyone else was doing.

Focus on Him, and He will take whatever you think is possible and turn it into what others will say is impossible.

If you want to overcome the approval to addiction, determine right now to focus on becoming a man or woman after God’s own heart, rather than the pleaser of all men. It is there that healing and recovery can begin.

Join me next week for the last post in this series, as we talk about how a professed approval addict navigates through the query and publishing process.

Building your platform can be a struggle. But not having your identity rooted in Christ can make it nearly impossible. What are some good scripture verses you have used to help keep you focused on God and not striving to please others?

Dawn Owens serves as the Founder/Executive Director of a ministry to the poor in Cullman, called The Link of Cullman County in Cullman, AL, which serves over 3,000 people a year. She just finished her first manuscript, Like Me…or Not: Overcoming the Addiction of Approval and is currently seeking representation. She likes to blog about inspiring others to seek God and His glory at http://www.dawnmowens.com. She’s a wife, mom, and friend to anyone who loves lattes incoffeehouses. You can find her on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, or not. It doesn’t matter much to her.