30. Can you be a good person and condemn others?

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

There is now no condemnation for friends of Jesus, so in this season we're learning,

how do I live without condemnation?

I want to talk in these next few moments about two vital questions.

The first one is, why does condemnation seem to be getting worse in our day?

The second one is, how can you make this day the most joyful day possible?

And then I want to talk about what a deep connection there is between those two apparently

unrelated questions. Now the first one, why is it that condemnation seems to be getting worse?

And the basic response here is that in our day, one of the primary reasons is that

we have changed the way we answer a key question of life, who is a good person?

Human beings can never get away from this. Dallas will I just say this?

One of the four inescapable questions of worldview.

But we've changed the way that we answer it.

How did Jesus answer that question? Who is a good person?

Well, of course he said love. It's the person who loves God and loves people.

And then along with that comes the acquisition of a certain kind of character that's needed to love.

So Paul writes to the church at Colossi, therefore,

clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, gentleness, patience,

bear with one another, forgiving each other, forgive his crisis,

for giving you over all these virtues put on love, which binds them together in perfect unity.

So we might say love or to talk about the kind of person who's capable of love,

the acquisition of virtue. This is true for Christianity. It's also true Aristotle and the

into world generally. That's the way that people answer that question. Who is a good person?

The person who is from the inside filled with compassion and kindness, a genuinely loving person.

Now, I want to quote from a book by Grace Hammond, Ask of Old Paths, and it's about virtues and

seven deadly sins. And so she's a medievalist and she writes about how when she was studying medieval

literature, the language of the virtues was exceedingly powerful. It was like a garden gone wild

after a rainstorm in July filled with fruits and weeds and decay organic matter so alive.

When I was always pleasant or as intelligible, but at pulse with life, beauty, and challenge,

the vibrancy of these concepts confused me, she goes on to say,

For since childhood, I've recognized the virtues were good, but pretty dull.

I always associated the language of the virtues with books about boring children.

My own virtue vocabulary suddenly seemed desiccated full of shrunken,

wilting words with shallow meanings. Glorious prudence, governor of the virtues,

something akin to practical wisdom faded into prude, the middle school insult.

Meekness, a medieval virtue, especially associated with Christ and Mary,

became the crumbling tool of the patriarchy that made me crinkle my nose.

And then she goes on, if the modern language of virtues in our culture feels more like dying

potted plants than the wild breathing garden it was in middle age, where did that life go?

Now here's the key. In American culture, the power in moral discourse seems to have moved.

There's enormous power on the question, who is a good person? How do we know who's a good person?

And if somebody tells me I'm not a good person, that's fighting language.

So there's great power in it that we cannot escape. We can never get away from that,

who's a good question. Here's what she says. I'm going to use slightly different language,

but essentially we have changed it into the language of who holds the right

ideological position.

We no longer answer the question in terms of love and virtue. We insert,

are you getting this issue correctly? If you do, then you're a good person,

if you're a bad, then you're a bad person. And that's what makes this so explosive.

In American culture, the power of moral discourse seems to have moved to terms like

pro-gun, anti-union, pro-life, immigration, LGBTQ. You drop any of these into a conversation,

she says, and they have atomic capacities of conveying who is evil and who is good.

Now, ideological issues, questions like these are terribly important, and the Bible has

much to say about many of them. Politics and legislation is terribly important,

and it's key to know that very often, at the level of legislation, it can be pretty complicated.

So, for example, prohibition was a very well-intended attempt to address a huge problem

of addiction and alcohol, but it probably did more harm than good. Love unattended consequences,

often hits, and politics, that's why it needs to be respected as its own sphere.

Here's the key. You can hold the right position and go to hell.

You can hold the right ideological position on any number of issues and still be a bad person.

I think about James 219. You know, I am a Christian, so I think that atheism is wrong-headed,

but James wrote it in there, so you believe there is one God? Good. So do the demons and shutter.

People can hold the right position on picking issue and be a bad person, but here's the key.

You cannot be filled with the character of Jesus and be a bad person.

You cannot be a living example of Colossians chapter 3 verses 12 through 14 and be a bad person,

and we have distorted what the Bible teaches about being a good person, and the evil one has

used that to create divisiveness and make hate a morally legitimized pastime in our country.

There's an article in the Wall Street Journal in 2024. We are starting to enjoy hatred.

Not a clue from here. We've always enjoyed hatred.

What we have not recognized in our day is that hatred is a sin,

and it is not the result of passionate pursuit of the right ideology.

It is a result of the absence of virtue and the presence of spiritual darkness inside me.

And there's forces that are trying to get us to give into it all the time.

This is from a book called Beyond the Politics of Contempt.

Polarization has become a business model.

Arguing the authors of a 2018 study, the Hidden Tribes of America adding,

media executives have realized they can drive clicks, likes, views, and make money for themselves

and their shareholders by providing people with the most striking opinion.

We live in the day of what are sometimes now being called conflict entrepreneurs,

and they exist in all the extremes of any ideological spectrum,

and they magnify and exploit and profit from polarization.

Social media posts that are more thoughtful and less emotional get fewer views by design.

And of course, in our day writings, discussions, social media posts on the virtues

will be more thoughtful, be renewed by the transformation of your mind, be transformed

by the renewing of your mind, and less emotionally manipulative.

And so they'll just get fewer views.

So today, ask for the character of Jesus, the character of Christ,

and I want to talk about one character in particular that will be especially helpful to me

and to you in letting go of condemnation today, because condemnation and the hatred that goes

along with it, ill will, malice, and disgust, always involves self-righteousness.

It always involves a sense of superiority.

That's why we enjoy hatred.

The Wall Street Journal was wrong.

We're not just starting to, but it's right.

We enjoy it.

I enjoy it.

I enjoy it.

I get off on it.

So instead, I ask God, God, would you give me the gift of humility?

Now here again, clarity is real important.

Humility is not self-condemnation.

It is not self-abasement.

It is not a lack of energized, courageous, enthusiasm for life.

I was listening to Philosopher Sabrina Little recently, and she talked about how Kierkegaard

had a wonderful phrase for the kind of humility that we're called to.

He called it, she said, blithe humility, blithe.

There's a kind of lightness to it, a kind of open-handed,

carefree, cheerful, courageous, utter dependence on God, for my worth, for my forgiveness,

for my life, for my future, for my death, for what lies beyond my death.

I was listening to a talk that Dallas Willard gave, and I'd never heard him say this before.

He was talking about how sometimes our bodies communicate something about our character,

and it may just be our body.

CS Lewis said one time that he had the kind of face that caused other people always

saying him, take that look off your face, even when it was just his face.

Dallas said, people often tell me that I hum, that I'm humbly said, and I don't think of myself as

that way. So I think it's probably just something about the way that my face genetically was programmed to

look. I think Dallas might have been wrong. I think maybe people who have blithe humility don't

think of themselves as being humble. And I think maybe he is one of those kind of people.

So to ask today, God, would you fill me with the kind of dependence on you that allows me to live

in the present moment, in your presence, to be present to the presence in the present,

and then comes the joy of life. Now, Cucumber has got a wonderful little essay when he's talking

about learning from the lilies and the birds. And here's what he says,

the bird knows that it is not entitled to know the time or the day, and therefore it is silent.

It will be taken care of. It will surely take place in its due season. The bird says,

though the bird doesn't say this, it's silent, but its silence is expressive.

And its silence says that it believes it believes what we didn't care of. And because it believes

the bird is silent and waits. When the moment comes, the silent bird understands. This is the moment

I'm being cared for by a power beyond myself. Now, what blithe humility delivers us from is the

burden of Allah's carrying the world on my shoulders. So it also is with the wit lily. It is silent

and waits. It does not impatiently ask when will spring come? Because it knows spring will come

in due season. Those that it would be least useful to itself if we were allowed to determine the

seasons of the year. It does not ask when will we get rain, or when will we get sunshine,

or now we've had too much rain, or now it is too hot, it does not ask in advance what kind of

summer it will be this year, how long or how short. No, it is silent and it waits. And that is how

simple it is. Don't worry about tomorrow. Tomorrow will take care of itself. I am here this day.

God, I depend on you. My life is in your hands as are the lives of these other people. All of whom you

made. All of whom you love. Every one of whom has a story that I do not know.

Every one of whom for which Jesus died. So today, instead of condemnation,

blight humility, learn it from the birds and the flowers. There is now no condemnation.

Hey, thanks for joining us here at Become New. My name is Tim and I'm a part of the team.

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