28. The Six Types of Condemnation

At Become New, get 10 minutes of spiritual formation every weekday with John Orberg.

We are given up condensation for what.

Now, you might be saying yourself, but I don't have a problem with that.

I never condone anybody.

Let me stop you right there.

I was out of walk with my good friend, Mark Yesterden, and he was telling me about a friend

he used to have when he was at the University of Leeds who periodically in a conversation

would just pause.

Maybe to introduce a new thought, maybe to challenge, maybe to encourage, or just took

me by the arm from him and said, let me stop you right there.

So that's what I want to do today because here's the deal.

We all can down.

We all have wills.

Those wills all run towards negativity.

We can all experience disgust.

We all judge other people in ways that Jesus commanded us not to.

It's just that we have different ways of doing it.

Some of us are sneakier.

Some of us are more subtle.

Some of us are more direct.

So what I want to do for these few moments is to walk through six styles of condemnation

and invite you to find what is your own style.

That's the way in which you condemn and then we'll come back around to how might I

be open to learning more and changing about that.

So here we go.

I'll try to shift back and forth if I remember to do it.

The first style would be a pretty open condemner.

So we might just say it's the aggressive style.

And here you just let condemnation fly.

So Neil Warren writes in his book, Make Angier Ally about a man in Bellevue, Washington

who is driven to autoside by a winter storm.

That's a Bellevue police major Jack Killam called a strange case of an irate motorist who

beat then shot his car after it got stuck in snow.

Police said the man became so angry when his vehicle got stuck, he pulled the tire iron

from the trunk, smashed all the windows, then he hauled out a pistol, shot all four tires,

loaded, and emptied half a second clip of bullets into the car.

He killed it.

Killam said it's a case of autoside.

He said the man was sober and rational, but very perturbed.

Okay.

So this man is condemning his own car.

We can condemn life, we can condemn experiences, but of course, most seriously, we can just

directly and aggressively condemn people.

I remember years ago taking our little dog, Winston, to obedience school and the teacher

said, now, you always have to reinforce power so the dog knows who is in control.

So when you are giving commands to a dog, you never get down at eye level.

You're up here.

The dog's down there.

If the dog wants to go outside, scratches the door, you never respond to that.

You make it do a trick first.

You're always reinforcing, I am above you.

I am in power over you.

And that's what this aggressive style does.

It's constantly reinforcing the people and it will get often fear based compliance, but

not genuine change or closeness.

One of the word about this one is gossip.

To speak or write about others in a condemning way with malice can leash unspeakable hell.

So that's the first style.

It's pretty obvious.

The second one is much sneakier.

And it looks a lot less unspiritual and that's the science, silence style.

This is from Paul Ternier's wonderful book, Guilt and Grace.

Sometime ago my wife and I were lunching in France on the menu as ox tongue is France.

My wife said to the server, I don't like tongue.

Can you give me something else instead?

Certainly.

During the meal, naturally we spoke about guilt, my current subject of study.

Do you know my wife said, it made me feel guilty when I asked for that change in front

of you?

You always eat whatever is put before you, I have the impression that you think me capricious

and difficult.

Ternier.

But I did not say a word.

Mrs. Ternier.

No, she answered, but your silence was most eloquent.

My immediate reaction was to defend myself, what?

I said, I make myself the champion of everyone's right, even as duty to be himself, reservedly

and without pretense.

You of all people do not dare to show your desires, not being afraid of my criticism,

but she was right.

In my troubled silence during her conversation with the server, that judgment was indeed

present, hardly conscious it is true, but enough for her to be intuitively aware of it.

There's a researcher at University of Sydney, Lisa Zadrow, I think it is, who talks about

noisy silence.

I walk out of a room and do it in kind of a dramatic way, not going to talk to you more

and I'm condemning the person in a pretty obvious way, or it can just be kind of avoidance

of eye contact and silence or redirecting who it is that I'm talking to, and she writes

about how we can often think, this is not a big deal, because it's not as dramatic as

direct words, but it can be unbelievably painful in a relationship.

And of course, I intend it to be almost Swedish introverts, so sometimes my silence technique

is not all that different than just my normal way of related to somebody, so I might take

a while for them to get it.

But we use silence to condemn people.

Jesus was talking to a group of religious leaders when he wanted to heal a man, he says

it better to do good or to do ill on the Sabbath, to take life or to give life, and they were

silent.

And he knew that meant they wanted to condemn him and they wanted to condemn the man that

he wanted to heal, and it filled him with a right kind of anger.

So that sounds, the next one, I can pronounce condemnation on people, you're my perfectionism.

This is the person who constantly has the highest standards in the world, and so nothing

is ever quite good enough.

I'm always a little disappointed in you.

A lot of people associate this one with God, David Benerites, when he asks people, when

you think about God's heart towards you, what's the first word that comes to mind for many

folks is disappointed.

Nothing you do is good enough.

I went to speak at church one time, and the guy who was kind of running the service took

a look at me and said, you're going to wear that?

And actually it was quite a neutral question, but we laugh about it all the time, because

that kind of statement, you're going to wear that, you're going to do that, you're going

to say that really, for the perfectionist that becomes a little tool of condemnation.

Now it's important to understand there's a difference between being perfect and being

a perfectionist.

To be perfect is to be whole, to be mature, to be complete.

A perfectionist is somebody who is driven by fear or pride, is afraid of shame, and is

really focused on performance, and it's an exhausting way to live.

God is perfect.

God is not a perfectionist, but we see this one in the Bible, Paul writes to the church

of Corinth, some of you all say about me, his letters are waiting and forceful, but in

person, he is unimpressive, and his speaking announced to nothing.

Really, Paul's speaking amounts to, yeah, so that's the perfectionist, all right.

Then another method of condemnation, which can be a little bit sneakier, is sarcasm,

or humor.

The Bible's word for that kind of person is a mucker.

Someone says, blessed is the one who doesn't sit in the seat of the mucker.

And the thing about using humor in this way is, it's kind of safe, because if the other

person takes offense and addresses you directly in counterattacks, he's, I was just joking.

Can you take a joke?

We have friends, and she went south one time for the first time to spend some time with

her in-laws, and noticed how often people would say, bless her little heart about somebody,

whose heart they were not going to bless.

And her comment at the end of the day was, now I know why it takes other women so long

to take off their makeup, they have to watch both their faces.

Now that in itself, kind of funny, but can be a statement of condemnation.

And I think about how devastating ridicule can be.

I think about somebody I know who grew up in a church and didn't fit the stereotypes

of masculine, athletic persona.

And the words that were used to ridicule him and the friend of his have done damage that

is indescribable in the last decades later.

And I don't think the people that did the damage knew very deeply because there was not

much empathy there.

And of course, when we're in the condemning business, we're not in the empathy business.

Next style.

And again, just think through it, do I use this one?

How much of this do I use?

The next one is what might be called conditional acceptance.

And so now in this one, it looks like I'm accepting you, but really, I'm only doing

it as long as you're giving me what I want.

Families can do this.

As long as we can leave together to think we're the greatest family, then we accept each

other.

But if you ever start to question that system, then there's trouble.

Or at work, I kind of lost it as long as you are useful to me, then I will give you

acceptance and celebrate you.

But when you cease to be useful, now it's not just about work productivity, but just

I had no time for you as a person.

Or therapist, because I pay my therapist to accept me.

So loose me says, we can spill all our beans to our therapist without having to worry

they will throw us out.

Hmm.

You would like to shoot your mother-in-law through the head, interesting.

Oh, you want to sleep with your sister-in-law?

Yes, of course, I understand.

No, I don't think it's terrible if you don't want to sleep with her.

Do you?

And now, of course, we need therapists who will accept us.

Sometimes that becomes a financial arrangement.

There's actually a kind of a smile that's called the Pan Am Smile, because it was an airline

Pan Am and their flight attendants were trained to smile all the time.

But it turns out that if it's a manufactured smile, it doesn't involve the eye muscles.

It's run by the motor cortex, whereas the Duchenne smile where the eyes are also smiling

is run by the limbic system.

And so that's a conditional acceptance.

I'll accept you as long as you're giving me what I want from you.

And then when you stop giving that to me, then the condemnation comes.

And then finally, this is a real sneaky one is the style of the martyr.

Now in this case, I'm condemning you, but I'm using my misery, my suffering, my

pain, to make you feel bad about you.

Peter Wagner used to talk about this in 1 Corinthians 13, Paul writes, and saying,

if I don't have love, he's contrasting that with other things.

And he says, even if I give my body to be burned.

And so Peter says, based on that, some people think that martyrdom is a spiritual gift,

but it's the gift you can only use one time.

A good friend of mine was telling you recently about how he worked with a woman that kind

of condemned in this way, and she would just complain about stuff.

And one time, he was trying to help her solve the problems she was complaining about.

And another friend said, no, that's not going to be helpful here, because it's not about

solving a problem.

This is about giving vent to her martyrdom in order to condemn this place or this person.

Negativity, just chronic negativity, people experience, but when we're with somebody

and we receive that, we experience that as condemnation.

So here's the styles.

Take a look.

Am I aggressive?

Do I use silence?

This is probably my preferred style.

Perfectionism and high standards that nobody can live up to.

Sarcasm, humor, be funny, Bob and weave.

Conditional acceptance, give you a lot of love and affection as long as you give me what I want

or martyr my victimhood.

And as you walk through the day, just allow periodically the Holy Spirit to interrupt you,

take you gently by the arm and say, let me stop you right there.

I just love that it was, let me stop you right there.

And is that become more aware of what my style is to be able to let it go?

Ask God for help, because there is now, therefore, no condemnation.

Hey, thanks for joining us here at Become New.

My name is Tim and I'm a part of the team.

We distribute 10 minute teachings just like this one from John Orberg every weekday to

help you grow spiritually in Christ one day at a time.

And we have a bunch of resources that go along with these teachings.

We've got an email that we write and distribute to anyone who wants it completely for free

every day.

We also have a text message reminder that we send out also completely for free.

If you just want the link to the video every day, text to you, we provide that.

Or if you want to go back through old teaching with John with your small group or with a friend,

we've created study guides for old content.

You can find all these things at BecomeNew.com.

And if you want to sign up for that email, it's BecomeNew.com slash subscribe.

Thanks for joining us.

We'll see you next time.