Sometimes in a world where we hear so much messaging, and especially in a world where so much of the messaging can seem to mimic God, it can become difficult to pick out the actual things we should be listening to.
Feofil gets it right.
If it leads us to becoming more humble and judging ourselves rightly, it is of God. If it encourages us to be proud or boastful or great in our own minds and leads us to not judging ourselves, likely it is not of God.
Funnily enough, I know the difference if I think about it for a moment. The problem is I too often rush forward without stopping to consider the immediate outcome. And the outcome can be illusory as well: we believe we are doing "good" when really we are self serving or pointing out "an issue" when in fact we have the same issue or something of equally bad value that we ourselves practice.
If I need to practice anything, it is to ask those two questions:
1) Does this help me become more humble?
2) Does this help me to judge myself?
Judging oneself is extremely difficult. I'm not sure why, but very few seem to see themselves accurately. All of our (my) rationalizations and excuses get in the way.
ReplyDeleteOne question I contemplate is what standard are we judging ourselves against? Most folks, it seems, compare themselves to others, to the world as they know it. Comparing Self to the standard of the Word is harder. Most of us don't want to face that kind of reality.
I wonder if judging oneself is actually impossible due to this fact: we are done doing until we are dead. Imagine you are writing a book. You would think it "good" and worth your effort to finish it, possibly, but if someone read the unfinished worked and declared it "crappy" you would say, "wait, I didn't finish it, it gets better." We wouldn't want to hear the opinion of a book critic if he hadn't finished the book. But say you took that criticism to heart and didn't finish the book. Or say you took the self-criticism about you - this is the judging oneself part - and deemed yourself "crappy" and decided to stop trying to work on a "good" ending. That would be a loss for the whole world.
DeleteLeigh - Even as far back as Classical Greece, humans were struggling to judge themselves; "Know Thyself" was inscribed on the Temple of Apollo in Delphi. Part of may simply be we whipsaw between being too hard on ourselves in all the wrong ways and not hard enough in the right ways. We justify where we should adjudge ourselves as failing and excuse ourselves when we should be judging.
DeleteComparing ourselves to the Word is very difficult. Christ made it the model in the Sermon on The Mount, pointing out that the religiously pious of the day - The Pharisees - were not capable of keeping the standard. But too often, at least for me, I look in comparison to others rather than to the standard of God, where I inherently will never meet the mark (thus, of course, the sacrifice of Christ).
Anon - It is a good point, and maybe part of the difficulty is that the word "Judging" has a lot of baggage in English. There is the judging against an objective standard, judging against malleable standards, and comparing ourselves to others (also judging). I cannot speak for Feofil, but I suspect that first meaning is what he was intending (a form of self-criticism, as you suggest).
DeleteYour point about the book is a great one, and one of the reasons is never good for Christians to "give up" on ourselves or others. We can never know the future, and speaking for myself, the "books" others have written with their lives that have helped me the most are one's which are sometimes the least proud and most difficult moments for them.
Following The Word these days seems a bit more difficult what with so many distractions TB. I need to commit those two questions to memory.
ReplyDeleteNylon12, certainly we have distractions that I do not think any other generation has had simply because they are so prevalent - in the form of The Computer In My Pocket, we literally carry them around with us. It means, I think, we have to be more deliberate about such things.
DeleteI guess I actively avoid judging myself. Doing so changes little if anything and given the same set of variables leading up to any judgeable event in my life, I would probably do things the same way. I do learn from my past. Judging seems more harsh than learning.
ReplyDeleteEd, there is "judging", and then there is the form of judging that is "self criticism to better myself". In a sense what you are suggesting about learning from your past.
DeleteFor example, over time I have learned that not everything that pops into my head needs to come out of my mouth. Part of that was "judging" myself against the objective standard of Scripture in terms of language, intent, and receipt. For me, this is the sort of thing I am interpreting the comment as.
Self inspection is difficult, it can turn into navel gazing. And that's another me-me-me thing, too. Like Leigh mentions, I have tended to measure meself by the shortest character I know. It's hard to compare the me today to the me of last year. And even worse is to compare me today to the Word's ruler.
ReplyDeleteWhen a small screw or spring would get loose, I learned to put a flash light on the floor and sweep with the beam. It would throw up a shadow from the tiny part that I could see. I think that is how the Word works on us. As we get closer to the Holy, our tiny faults look like monsters (because they ARE). So easily besetting....
STxAR - It can turn into navel gazing, which does make me wonder if part of the reason Scripture talks about judging ourselves fairly straightforward and the "what we should be striving for" is much more prominent.
DeleteThe flashlight is a great analogy, as the concept of the shadow it casts. To your point, we can inflate the size of the shadow by the proximity of the light. Often I have gotten so fixed on a single sin that I ignored the other 52 in the background.
Sorry, wrong first question. The first question should always be, "Does this please God."
ReplyDeleteMy second question would be, "Is this is in service of Truth, Beauty, and the Good."
Do those two and humility drops out like a remainder in a long division problem.
You can buy me a beer or a nice scotch sometime.
Noting: the first question I'm sure of. The second question is my working assumption, subject always to analysis by the first question.
DeleteFair, John. I suppose I am intuiting that the question of "Pleasing God" is already dealt with in this regard (speaking to Christians and not to non-Christians). The second works as well, although I need much more basic questions - and again, intuiting that if it is in the will of God, then Truth, Beauty, and the Good are inherent in that.
DeleteMy issue is that I can understand that something pleases God and is in service of Truth, Beauty, and the Good - and still be proud about all of it. But that may be a failing of my own.
It's no sin to be proud of pleasing God.
DeleteC.S. Lewis had a great chapter on pride and humility in Mere Christianity. He discussed the difference between "proud" and "proud" of pretty well - at least well enough that it is now the definition that I try to use when considering such things.
Delete