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At Become New, get 10 minutes of spiritual formation every weekday with John Orberg.
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There is now no condemnation for friends of Jesus, so in this season we're learning,
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how do I live without condemnation?
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I want to talk in these next few moments about two vital questions.
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The first one is, why does condemnation seem to be getting worse in our day?
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The second one is, how can you make this day the most joyful day possible?
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And then I want to talk about what a deep connection there is between those two apparently
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unrelated questions. Now the first one, why is it that condemnation seems to be getting worse?
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And the basic response here is that in our day, one of the primary reasons is that
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we have changed the way we answer a key question of life, who is a good person?
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Human beings can never get away from this. Dallas will I just say this?
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One of the four inescapable questions of worldview.
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But we've changed the way that we answer it.
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How did Jesus answer that question? Who is a good person?
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Well, of course he said love. It's the person who loves God and loves people.
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And then along with that comes the acquisition of a certain kind of character that's needed to love.
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So Paul writes to the church at Colossi, therefore,
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clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, gentleness, patience,
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bear with one another, forgiving each other, forgive his crisis,
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for giving you over all these virtues put on love, which binds them together in perfect unity.
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So we might say love or to talk about the kind of person who's capable of love,
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the acquisition of virtue. This is true for Christianity. It's also true Aristotle and the
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into world generally. That's the way that people answer that question. Who is a good person?
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The person who is from the inside filled with compassion and kindness, a genuinely loving person.
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Now, I want to quote from a book by Grace Hammond, Ask of Old Paths, and it's about virtues and
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seven deadly sins. And so she's a medievalist and she writes about how when she was studying medieval
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literature, the language of the virtues was exceedingly powerful. It was like a garden gone wild
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after a rainstorm in July filled with fruits and weeds and decay organic matter so alive.
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When I was always pleasant or as intelligible, but at pulse with life, beauty, and challenge,
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the vibrancy of these concepts confused me, she goes on to say,
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For since childhood, I've recognized the virtues were good, but pretty dull.
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I always associated the language of the virtues with books about boring children.
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My own virtue vocabulary suddenly seemed desiccated full of shrunken,
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wilting words with shallow meanings. Glorious prudence, governor of the virtues,
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something akin to practical wisdom faded into prude, the middle school insult.
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Meekness, a medieval virtue, especially associated with Christ and Mary,
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became the crumbling tool of the patriarchy that made me crinkle my nose.
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And then she goes on, if the modern language of virtues in our culture feels more like dying
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potted plants than the wild breathing garden it was in middle age, where did that life go?
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Now here's the key. In American culture, the power in moral discourse seems to have moved.
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There's enormous power on the question, who is a good person? How do we know who's a good person?
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And if somebody tells me I'm not a good person, that's fighting language.
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So there's great power in it that we cannot escape. We can never get away from that,
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who's a good question. Here's what she says. I'm going to use slightly different language,
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but essentially we have changed it into the language of who holds the right
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ideological position.
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We no longer answer the question in terms of love and virtue. We insert,
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are you getting this issue correctly? If you do, then you're a good person,
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if you're a bad, then you're a bad person. And that's what makes this so explosive.
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In American culture, the power of moral discourse seems to have moved to terms like
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pro-gun, anti-union, pro-life, immigration, LGBTQ. You drop any of these into a conversation,
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she says, and they have atomic capacities of conveying who is evil and who is good.
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Now, ideological issues, questions like these are terribly important, and the Bible has
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much to say about many of them. Politics and legislation is terribly important,
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and it's key to know that very often, at the level of legislation, it can be pretty complicated.
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So, for example, prohibition was a very well-intended attempt to address a huge problem
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of addiction and alcohol, but it probably did more harm than good. Love unattended consequences,
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often hits, and politics, that's why it needs to be respected as its own sphere.
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Here's the key. You can hold the right position and go to hell.
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You can hold the right ideological position on any number of issues and still be a bad person.
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I think about James 219. You know, I am a Christian, so I think that atheism is wrong-headed,
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but James wrote it in there, so you believe there is one God? Good. So do the demons and shutter.
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People can hold the right position on picking issue and be a bad person, but here's the key.
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You cannot be filled with the character of Jesus and be a bad person.
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You cannot be a living example of Colossians chapter 3 verses 12 through 14 and be a bad person,
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and we have distorted what the Bible teaches about being a good person, and the evil one has
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used that to create divisiveness and make hate a morally legitimized pastime in our country.
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There's an article in the Wall Street Journal in 2024. We are starting to enjoy hatred.
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Not a clue from here. We've always enjoyed hatred.
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What we have not recognized in our day is that hatred is a sin,
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and it is not the result of passionate pursuit of the right ideology.
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It is a result of the absence of virtue and the presence of spiritual darkness inside me.
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And there's forces that are trying to get us to give into it all the time.
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This is from a book called Beyond the Politics of Contempt.
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Polarization has become a business model.
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Arguing the authors of a 2018 study, the Hidden Tribes of America adding,
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media executives have realized they can drive clicks, likes, views, and make money for themselves
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and their shareholders by providing people with the most striking opinion.
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We live in the day of what are sometimes now being called conflict entrepreneurs,
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and they exist in all the extremes of any ideological spectrum,
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and they magnify and exploit and profit from polarization.
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Social media posts that are more thoughtful and less emotional get fewer views by design.
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And of course, in our day writings, discussions, social media posts on the virtues
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will be more thoughtful, be renewed by the transformation of your mind, be transformed
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by the renewing of your mind, and less emotionally manipulative.
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And so they'll just get fewer views.
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So today, ask for the character of Jesus, the character of Christ,
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and I want to talk about one character in particular that will be especially helpful to me
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and to you in letting go of condemnation today, because condemnation and the hatred that goes
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along with it, ill will, malice, and disgust, always involves self-righteousness.
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It always involves a sense of superiority.
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That's why we enjoy hatred.
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The Wall Street Journal was wrong.
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We're not just starting to, but it's right.
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So instead, I ask God, God, would you give me the gift of humility?
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Now here again, clarity is real important.
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Humility is not self-condemnation.
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It is not self-abasement.
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It is not a lack of energized, courageous, enthusiasm for life.
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I was listening to Philosopher Sabrina Little recently, and she talked about how Kierkegaard
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had a wonderful phrase for the kind of humility that we're called to.
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He called it, she said, blithe humility, blithe.
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There's a kind of lightness to it, a kind of open-handed,
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carefree, cheerful, courageous, utter dependence on God, for my worth, for my forgiveness,
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for my life, for my future, for my death, for what lies beyond my death.
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I was listening to a talk that Dallas Willard gave, and I'd never heard him say this before.
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He was talking about how sometimes our bodies communicate something about our character,
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and it may just be our body.
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CS Lewis said one time that he had the kind of face that caused other people always
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saying him, take that look off your face, even when it was just his face.
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Dallas said, people often tell me that I hum, that I'm humbly said, and I don't think of myself as
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that way. So I think it's probably just something about the way that my face genetically was programmed to
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look. I think Dallas might have been wrong. I think maybe people who have blithe humility don't
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think of themselves as being humble. And I think maybe he is one of those kind of people.
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So to ask today, God, would you fill me with the kind of dependence on you that allows me to live
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in the present moment, in your presence, to be present to the presence in the present,
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and then comes the joy of life. Now, Cucumber has got a wonderful little essay when he's talking
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about learning from the lilies and the birds. And here's what he says,
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the bird knows that it is not entitled to know the time or the day, and therefore it is silent.
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It will be taken care of. It will surely take place in its due season. The bird says,
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though the bird doesn't say this, it's silent, but its silence is expressive.
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And its silence says that it believes it believes what we didn't care of. And because it believes
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the bird is silent and waits. When the moment comes, the silent bird understands. This is the moment
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I'm being cared for by a power beyond myself. Now, what blithe humility delivers us from is the
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burden of Allah's carrying the world on my shoulders. So it also is with the wit lily. It is silent
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and waits. It does not impatiently ask when will spring come? Because it knows spring will come
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in due season. Those that it would be least useful to itself if we were allowed to determine the
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seasons of the year. It does not ask when will we get rain, or when will we get sunshine,
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or now we've had too much rain, or now it is too hot, it does not ask in advance what kind of
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summer it will be this year, how long or how short. No, it is silent and it waits. And that is how
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simple it is. Don't worry about tomorrow. Tomorrow will take care of itself. I am here this day.
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God, I depend on you. My life is in your hands as are the lives of these other people. All of whom you
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made. All of whom you love. Every one of whom has a story that I do not know.
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Every one of whom for which Jesus died. So today, instead of condemnation,
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blight humility, learn it from the birds and the flowers. There is now no condemnation.
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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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