Facade of Compliments

Until recently, I liked to think of myself as an encouraging person. 

I was generous with my praise for others, never missing an opportunity to express my admiration for their talents and works, respect for their character and growth, and amazement at how God is working in their lives. It gave me joy to show others how much they meant to me, and to watch their faces light up with bashful delight as they took in the compliments I readily gave out. Encouragement came naturally to me, almost too naturally, it seemed. 

A couple of weeks ago, I was reading a page of my daily devotional and came across the definition of flattery. It meant, based on the description given by Jude 16, “to compliment someone not to simply praise something good for its own sake or to build the person up in love, but in order to gain some advantage for yourself” (Keller and Keller 176). 

Flattery is a sin I had never thought I struggled with. 

When I thought of flatterers, my mind would picture loud-mouthed, ingenuine villains who talked people up to gain control over their favor. I would think of Prince Hans from Frozen, Mother Gothel from Tangled, and several of the manipulated Sith Lords from the Star Wars saga, each with a sinister purpose behind the compliments they so readily bestowed. 

Personally, I have no interest in vast power, eternal youthfulness, or complete domination over the entire galaxy, so I had thought my lack of a sinister objective behind my praise exempted me from this sin. But the language that this definition of flattery used cut deep through my previous convictions and gave me a whole new perspective on what flattery means for people living in today’s world. 

“To gain some advantage.”

The advantage doesn’t have to involve malicious pursuits in order to be considered flattery. It could be as small as making friends with someone simply because they could be useful to you in the future. It could look like praising others to build your reputation as an encouraging person. It could take the form of complimenting people to make them more amenable to your words, or even to get them to like you. 

If the purpose of the encouragement is not to “praise something good for its own sake” or “to build the person up in love,” the encouragement is not genuine. Instead, it is flattery. 

Of course, most of the encouragement I give is intended to encourage the recipient. Still, it breaks my heart to think of the amount of times I’ve unconsciously deceived people with my words. The amount of times people had graciously received my praise believing it was genuine, that it was intended to lovingly build them up, when it was actually meant only for my own benefit. 

We as Christians are called to “encourage one another and build one another up” (I Thessalonians 5:11). In other words, the praise we have for others should be expressed with the purpose of building them up, not building up ourselves. To do this, our encouragement must come from selfless hearts, hearts that think of the interests of others before our own (Philippians 2:4). 

The only person with a heart that was truly selfless was Jesus. 

He came to earth with no intentions of building up himself or his reputation. Instead, He came to empty himself in the most humiliating way possible — death on a cross, a criminals death. But because of His wonderful sacrifice, we can receive the gift of grace when we engage in the sin of using flattery to further our own objectives. In addition, we can look to His life — the way He spoke, acted, and treated others — as a perfect example of what it looks like to have a selfless heart that never offers a compliment with a selfish intent. 

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Keller, Timothy, and Kathy Keller. God’s Wisdom for Navigating Life: A Year of Daily Devotions in The Book of Proverbs. Viking, 2017.