Faith & Spirit Quote by Edwin Louis Cole

Cole frames devotion as a kind of social cheat code: aim at the highest, least negotiable audience and everyone else supposedly falls into line. The structure does most of the persuading. Two parallel sentences, two types of men, a clean moral sorting. “Pleased” repeats like a gavel strike, turning messy human relationships into a verdict. It’s less a theology lecture than a behavioral ultimatum.

The intent is pastoral and corrective, aimed at people who feel yanked around by approval-seeking. Cole’s subtext is that the hunger to be liked isn’t just exhausting; it’s spiritually disorienting. “Please others” here reads as code for compromise, for sanding down conviction until there’s nothing left to offend. The payoff is a paradox: chasing universal acceptance yields universal dissatisfaction, because the people-pleaser becomes legible as inauthentic and the crowd’s demands keep shifting.

Context matters. Cole wrote in the ecosystem of late-20th-century evangelical self-help, where “godly masculinity” and personal authority were recurring themes. The quote functions as a boundary-drawing tool: stop auditioning for peers, submit to divine standards, and you’ll regain coherence. It also smuggles in a claim about social order: if you align with God, “people” (a conveniently undifferentiated public) will reward you. That’s rhetorically comforting, not always empirically true.

Its bite comes from the implied critique: approval is a fickle idol. Cole offers a substitute idol that’s framed as freedom. Whether you buy the theology or not, the line works because it names a recognizable modern ailment - performative living - and prescribes an identity anchor sturdy enough to resist the audience.