The Cost Of Living For Validation And Applause by Apostle Femi Lazarus: MP3 Download & Sermon Notes

A Broken Heart Is Not What Most People Think

A broken heart is not relationship heartbreak. In the scriptural sense, a broken heart refers to the center of a person — the soul, the seat of self-perception, the place from which all decisions are made — being fundamentally flawed. Proverbs 4:23 says to guard your heart, for out of it are the issues of life. When that center is broken, the issues that flow from it are broken.

The soul realm is where the bulk of challenges live — after salvation, before deliverance. How a person sees themselves, and where they make their decisions from, matters enormously.

If You Cannot Enjoy a Moment Without Making It Public, You Are Broken

If you cannot enjoy a moment without making it public, you are broken.

Not because there is anything wrong with sharing memories — but because the question is why. If the reason is that you need strangers to validate the moment for it to feel meaningful, that is the signal. Whoever can validate you can also break you. Any person or platform that has the power to make a moment feel real also has the power to make it feel worthless.

True intimacy — whether with a spouse, in a private joy, in a sacred moment — is something that can be fully experienced without documentation. The most privately lived couples often lead the healthiest marriages. They are not hiding; they are simply contented enough with each other that they have no need for your opinion of their life together.

The wound underneath the compulsion to share is usually public shame. When a person grows up with shame that was visible — a household where fights and pain were known to neighbors, where poverty was conspicuous, where failure was on display — the recovery also wants to be public. The poor kid in secondary school, now successful, needs the WhatsApp group to know. The one whose parents' dysfunction was known to everyone wants the world to see the reversal. The impulse is understandable. But it is still rooted in brokenness, not in wholeness.

Why do you need to prove a point? Whose opinion of your recovery are you living for?

Faith Is Not Only About Receiving

Hebrews 11 presents two contrasting portraits of faith. Some through faith subdued kingdoms, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, became valiant in battle. Others — called equally elders, equally commended — wandered in deserts and mountains and caves, were sawn in two, were destitute. And the scripture says: the world was not worthy of them.

There is faith to receive. There is also faith to endure. There is faith to reject what seems like a good opportunity because it is not the appointed path.

Sometimes the proof of faith is not what it produced — it is what was turned down. The one who could have been a governor and instead became a missionary to one village, because that was the instruction — that is faith. What was given up in obedience can be more significant than what was accumulated in ambition.

The indices of a broken person do not always look like brokenness. A person can be celebrating someone else's trauma without knowing it. The table that is shaky can look completely fine from a distance.

Sit in the Pain

People must learn not to embrace their pain — but they also must not be in a hurry to escape it. Pain is how God gets our attention. There are so many things he wants to use to catch attention, and pain is often the last alternative — the one that finally works.

When pain comes, the right question is not "how do I get out of this?" The right question is "what is God drawing my attention to?"

Running from pain too quickly means missing the conversation it was carrying. Processing it — sitting in it, not internalizing it but not denying it either — is how the breakthrough eventually becomes real and lasting rather than cosmetic.

The Hype Will Build a Cage

When Paul and Barnabas healed a man in Lystra, the crowd began calling them Zeus and Hermes — gods walking among men. Paul's response was immediate and urgent: "Please, please, don't do this. I am a man like you." Not because he was being falsely humble, but because he understood what happens to the person who starts believing the hype about themselves.

When a leader stops showing their humanity and starts performing the image their followers have built — when they surround themselves with a heat squad, a PR team, a cleanup gang — they have built a cage and locked themselves inside it. The inevitable moral failure that comes from being made into a god is then managed through lies rather than confessed through repentance.

But the person who has consistently shown their humanity — who has said "I am a man God uses in spite of himself" — does not need the cage. When they fail, the response from the people around them is: "Yeah, what's the big deal? He's a man like me." That is the only kind of ministry that can carry the weight of a long obedience.

God has the capacity for the entire human experience. Nothing any person does will surprise him. It may disappoint men. It will never shock God.

Healing Looks Good on a Person

Every theme in this teaching converges on one point: the wholeness that comes from genuine encounter with God produces a person who does not need the validation of others to feel significant. Not because they have become proud — but because they have become secure.

The person who no longer needs to prove anything to the WhatsApp group, to the investor, to the colleagues who saw them at their lowest, to the family member who discounted them — that person has graduated into a freedom that performance cannot produce and applause cannot maintain.

Proverbs 4:23 — Guard your heart, for out of it are the issues of life. The heart healed is the life redirected.