Dear Friends,
Do you respond, or react, to
criticism? I must confess I usually
react first and respond later, but I have learned some lessons along the
way! First of all I ask myself, Is it true? Isaac D’Israeli said, “It’s much easier to be
critical than correct.” If it’s a
correct criticism, try to humble yourself and own it. Then ask the Lord how to proceed in dealing
with it. If it isn’t true, you need to
let it go rather than mull it over, rehearsing it late into the night or
sharing it with friends on the phone, thereby keeping it alive.
Second, commit yourself to
the Lord who judges fairly. After he had
been judged by various people in varying degrees of hostility and accusation,
the apostle Paul finally had to say, “It matters very little how I might be evaluated
by you or by any human authority” (1 Cor. 4:3). Sometimes we have to leave the record in God’s
hands, because we can’t control what others think and what they say about what
they think, and how many people they tell, and whether or not what they tell is
true. Often, when we try to go back and
clean up our record, it only muddies the waters.
Third, Paul urges us not to
spend valuable time judging ourselves on the matter. If we have endless postmortems over a
situation, no kingdom work will ever get done!
We need to take it to God and let His holy light into our hearts. We must open up the secret springs of our
motivation for Him to examine, for He alone knows us through and through. Then as we commit our actions to His
scrutiny, we need to rely on His judgment of the matter and, if it is possible,
put right our part and leave the rest to Him.
Job found out that the one
thing he needed to do above all else was to consider the source. Sometimes a critic is motivated by jealousy
(do you ever get the feeling that a person wants to see you fail?) or has some
other spiritual ax to grind. So when
someone says to you, “I have a word from the Lord for you,” check it out
against what you know about the person bringing you the message. Then check it against what you already know
about God. And don’t ignore what your
own experiences of life have taught you.
Job’s general knowledge of life had enabled him to say, in essence, “Were
you just born yesterday? Open your
eyes! Good people have trouble all the
time.”
Blessings,
Jill Briscoe
Executive Editor
Just Between Us Magazine
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