How to Conquer A Critical Spirit
Psalm 139
This morning we are going to be finishing up our little series on a critical spirit. Just to make sure we are all on the same page, we have defined a critical spirit as a negative attitude / perspective that focuses on real or perceived problems, with no thought given to a biblical or practical solution. The key phrase is the last one because what separates the critical spirit that God judges from genuine concern that God blesses is the presence or absence of a proposed solution.
So far in this series we have seen the danger of a critical spirit and the roots of a critical spirit. The danger of a critical spirit is seen in the severity of how God dealt with it [Miriam and Michal], and the roots of a critical spirit is usually either envy, pride, or hypocrisy. If you missed either of these two messages, please download them from my blog. All this leads us up to where we are today as we think about how to conquer a critical spirit. As I shared with you last week, there are four steps we can take to do this. Now, I need to point out that the title of this message isn’t “Four Easy Steps to Conquering A Critical Spirit.” It involves a lot of hard work and a humble spirit. And for the first one, I want us to turn to Psalm 139 as we consider the practice of rigorous self examination.
1. Practice Rigorous Self-examination – Psalm 139
O Lord, Thou hast searched me and known me. 2 Thou dost know when I sit down and when I rise up; Thou dost understand my thought from afar. 3 Thou dost scrutinize my path and my lying down, And art intimately acquainted with all my ways. 4 Even before there is a word on my tongue, Behold, O LORD, Thou dost know it all. 5 Thou hast enclosed me behind and before, And laid Thy hand upon me. 6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; It is too high, I cannot attain to it.
In verses 7 – 12, David spends some time talking about the impossibility of getting away from God’s presence. You may try to hide from God or ignore Him, but it’s impossible! In verses 13 – 16 he addresses God’s creative involvement in the fetus. If you have ever wondered about a good passage dealing with life before birth, this is it.
In verses 17 – 22 there are some thoughts about the wicked, but then note how David ends the psalm with a request. “Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts. And see if there be any grievous way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.”
What is interesting about this Psalm is that it starts with an acknowledgment of God’s intimate knowledge of us, but ends with an invitation for God to investigate his life. This needs to be our prayer. The first step to conquering a critical spirit is to humble yourself before God and ask Him to “probe” your heart. That is what the word “search” literally means.
When I was sanding our floor and got a huge splinter in the heel of my hand, it was broken off so deeply that I couldn’t see it. The doctor took a scalpel and cut the length of the bump, and then took a long needle and started digging around to find the splinter (which felt like a plank!). What was he doing? He was “probing.” It was difficult, and it was painful, but it was necessary to fixing the problem.
That is what David is asking God to do to his heart. Dig around. Probe a little bit. Pull away the layers of flesh and see if there are hurtful, grievous things in his life. And if you are serious about dealing with a critical spirit, this is where you start. You ask God to reveal to you if you are struggling in this area.
Next, I want you to turn to Mt. 23. In this passage we are going to see another important factor in conquering a critical spirit, and it is the discipline of distinguishing between gnats and camels. Look with me at verses 23 – 24.
2. Practice Distinguishing Between Gnats and Camels – Mt. 23:23 - 24
23 "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cummin, but have neglected the weightier provisions of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness; but these are the things you should have done without neglecting the others. 24 "You blind guides, who strain out a gnat and swallow a camel!
Here we see Jesus rebuking the religious leaders for a practice that is pretty familiar to us. In v. 23 we see how the scribes and Pharisees were punctilious, even obsessive in their tithing – even going to the point of separating out 1/10th of a portion of some of the smallest spices they had. Why would they be preoccupied with something so minute? It was because of their hypocrisy. One of the primary indicators of the hypocrisy / pharisaical spirit is a fixation on the visible. They pray on street corners to be seen of men, instead of in their closets. They mope and have long faces when they fast so that everybody will know they are fasting, instead of fasting in secret. They make a great show when they bring their offerings so that everyone will be impressed with their generosity instead of giving in secret so that only God knows of their generosity. Pharisees want to be seen, and their thinking was that if people saw them obsessing over something as small as their spices, surely the observers would conclude that the Pharisees were equally serious about big matters, and therefore quite spiritual.
But in verse 24 Jesus exposes them for their hypocrisy by mentioning two unclean animals, the gnat and the camel. In Lev. 5 God tells the nation of Israel that the swarming insects are unclean, and even if you inadvertently touch one, you are ceremonially defiled. In Lev. 11, God tells the nation of Israel that camels are unclean as well. So what we have here are the two extreme ends of the size spectrum of unclean things, gnats and camels.
The Pharisees, true to form, would put gauze over their drinking vessels to make sure they didn’t accidently swallow a gnat. But when it came to the huge issues that would defile a person, they couldn’t care less.
This concept has great application to a critical spirit, and if you struggle with this, it is important to learn how to distinguish between gnats and camels. Were gnats legitimately unclean things that could defile you? Yes. But all unclean things were not equal in their “badness.” How do we know this is true? Because the requirements for being restored were different depending on the infraction. For instance, sometimes when you became defiled, you were unclean until evening, sometimes you were unclean until evening and you had to bathe, sometimes you were unclean until evening and you had to wash your clothes, sometimes you were unclean for a week, but at other times you were unclean for a month, sometimes you just had to wait for a period of time but sometimes you had to bring a sacrifice.
All unclean things were not equal in their gravity, and the same is true with the issues we encounter in life that we are tempted to have a critical spirit about. Some things are gnats, and some things are camels, and a person with a critical spirit needs to develop the ability to distinguish between them.
I had a co-worker one time who continually bugged me because I ate ham. He told me I was violating scripture, that the swine was unclean (he couldn’t even bring himself to call it ham, or pork, or even pig – it was swine), and it was a huge issue to him. Yet he smoked pot every night because it acted as a sedative for him. In fact, he tried to argue that his smoking pot every night to get to sleep was no different than me drinking coffee every morning to wake up. Do you see the inability to distinguish between gnats and camels? The critical person needs to understand that all problems are not equal in gravity, and he then needs to give his energies to the big things and let the little things ride.
So as we think about the steps to conquering a critical spirit, we have seen that we need to practice rigorous self-examination, and secondly, we need to learn how to distinguish between gnats and camels. The third thing we need to focus on is found in 1 Thess. 5:18, and I’m calling this step practicing the discipline of gratitude.
3. Practice the Discipline of Gratitude – 1 Thess. 5:18
“In everything give thanks; for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus.”
How many of you see the comprehensive nature of this command? The verse doesn’t say, “Give thanks in most things,” or “Give thanks in many things,” but “Give thanks in everything.” Something else I want you to note about this verse is the phrase, “for this is God’s will for you.” That is a very rare phrase in the Bible! In fact, I think the only other place you see the phrase “for this is God’s will for you” is in 1 Th. 4:3 which talks about abstaining from sexual immorality. What this tells me is that there are at least two issues where you will never have to worry about what God’s will is – being thankful and keeping yourself pure.
But I point this out because God takes gratitude very seriously. It is God’s will for you to give thanks in every situation. I don’t know of too many things that will cure a critical spirit as quickly as this matter of deliberate gratitude. I learned this principle in the context of my migraine headaches. I knew I could either lie in bed and stew and complain and gripe about my condition, or I could “give thanks in everything, for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.” So I decided to give it a try one day and started thanking God for the chemists who have discovered codeine to deaden the pain, and a soft bed to lie on instead of being on a bumpy road, and for being self-employed which gives me the flexibility to lie down for a couple of hours. And it is amazing what the discipline of gratitude will do to improve your outlook on life.
Let me challenge you. The next time you find yourself about to complain or gripe about or criticize something (regardless of how legitimate it is), see if you can find ten things about that situation to give thanks for. And to make this really practical, let’s work through a situation that is facing us right now.
When I got home Friday night, I saw that our governor had signed this Marriage Equality Bill and I was very disappointed about it. I don’t know if you appreciate the magnitude of what happened in Albany on Friday, but it was huge. In the realm of culture, and society, and freedom – it was bigger than 9/11. 9/11 was simply terrorists who hate the United States, so they destroyed two landmark buildings and killed a lot of people. Without diminishing the grief of those who lost loved ones in the tragedy, 9/11 did not fundamentally alter our culture and set in motion a series of events that will eventually bring about the end of our freedoms as we know them today.
But my point is that as easy as it could be to have this critical spirit, is it possible to find ten things about this scenario to be thankful for?
1. Expressing my opinion without fear of arrest and torture.
2. I’m on the right side.
3. This world isn’t my home – no matter how bad it gets here I’m in heaven for eternity.
4. I can stand before God with a clear conscience in this matter.
5. It was a huge educational opportunity for my children.
See how that works? It takes our focus off the negative and onto the positive. We aren’t ignoring reality here, we are creating a spirit of optimism through the discipline of gratitude, even in the face of defeat or serious problems.
Now the final truth I want to share with you comes from the book of Nehemiah, and it is here we see the idea of focusing on solutions, not merely the verbalizing of the problem. So why don’t you turn to chapter one and we’ll skim through several chapters of this short book to look at how Nehemiah faced his problems.
4. Practice Focusing on Solutions – Neh. 2:17
If you aren’t familiar with the context of Nehemiah, here it is in a nutshell. The nation of Israel has been conquered and the people have been deported to foreign countries. The capital Jerusalem, and even worse the temple, have been destroyed.
In chapter 1, we see that Nehemiah is a Jewish official working in the palace of King Artaxerxes. The king graciously gives Nehemiah permission to go back to his homeland to start rebuilding the wall around Jerusalem. Starting in chapter 2 verse 12, you can read about Nehemiah’s survey of the damage.
In verse 17 we read “Then [Nehemiah] said to them, "You see the bad situation we are in, that Jerusalem is desolate and its gates burned by fire. Come, let us rebuild the wall of Jerusalem that we may no longer be a reproach." That was all he had to say about the situation. He wasn’t asking “why” it had taken so long to start rebuilding, he didn’t try to analyze the work ethic of the people, he didn’t deride the people who had been living there for not starting the work, he simply said, “let’s get to work.”
So in chapter 3 you see his solution to the problem. Various groups of people were assigned to various sections of the wall to get the job done. Some worked while the others stood guard, but they had definite goals to accomplish. What I like about Nehemiah is that he was a doer, not a talker. He was not an armchair quarterback. He could see the problems very clearly, but his focus was on solutions, not merely verbalizing the problem! Anybody can verbalize about a problem, and many people excel at it, but few people are willing to go on and do the hard work of coming up with a solution.
I remember when God highlighted my tendency to do this. Several months ago, there was a bill in the senate that was granting broad powers to the Child Protective Services. Part of the bill established that if a parent refused to let a CPS worker into the home, that refusal constituted probable cause and immediately established grounds for a search warrant. This is a huge invasion of privacy, which is why so many people in NY were having fits about it. So I called the Senator responsible for sponsoring the bill, spoke with his administrative assistant and expressed my opposition to the bill. I pretty much repeated verbatim the little paragraph that had been sent to me, and the woman on the other end of the line said, “And sir, what do you suggest instead?” And for a moment, I was stunned.
I could see what the problem was. I felt strongly about the situation. I could have spent some time telling her the problems this was going to cause in the future, but I had given no thought at all to an alternative solution to the rampant child abuse that takes place in the homes in our state. Fortunately, I was able to recover and said something about finding different language that protected our freedoms, but it was a powerful lesson to me about this problem of focusing only on the verbalizing of the problem.
So what does it take to overcome a critical spirit? Rigorous self-examination, the ability to distinguish between gnats and camels, the discipline of deliberate gratitude, and a focus on solutions, not simply spouting out criticisms.
May God help us at Cornerstone Baptist Church / Greenville Center Baptist Church not to harbor critical spirits.
