Should You Pass on Bad Reports?

Here is another post from Justin Taylor at "Between Two Worlds" (http://theologica.blogspot.com/) ...

Tim Keller and David Powlison recently collaborated to provide some biblical wisdom and guidelines on speech and relationships. Our thinking was that perhaps bloggers would want to adopt these and spread the word about them as a way, in Keller's words, to "spiritually season Christian conversation in cyberspace."

So if this perspective resonates with you (and I hope it does), I'd encourage you to pass it along or post it on your blog.

May the Lord help each of us to have truth-in-love speech that is always gracious, salt-seasoned, gentle, respectful, peaceful, and edifying (Col. 4:6; Eph. 4:15; 1 Pet. 3:15; Rom. 14:19)


Should You Pass on Bad Reports?
by Tim Keller & David Powlison

One obvious genius of the internet is that it’s “viral.” Information explodes to the whole world. The old neighborhood grapevine and the postal service seem like ox-carts in a speed-of-light universe. (Do twenty-somethings even know what those antiquities once were? In the old days, people had to talk to each other or stick a stamp on an envelope.) Instantaneous transmission produces some wonderfully good things. Truth, like joy, is infectious. A great idea feeds into a million inboxes. But it also produces some disastrous evils. Lies, rumors, and disinformation travel just as far and just as fast.

So what should you do when you hear “bad reports” about a person or church or ministry? We want to offer a few thoughts on how to remain constructive. To paraphrase Ephesians 4:29, “Let no unwholesome words come out of your computer, but only what is constructive, in order to meet the need of the moment, that what you communicate will give grace to everyone who ever reads it.” That Greek word translated “unwholesome” is sapros. It means something that is inedible, either devoid of nutritional value or rotten and even poisonous. It applies to thorny briars or to fish or fruit that’s gone bad. At best, it’s of no benefit to anyone. At worst, it’s sickening and destructive. Consider three things in how to stay constructive.

What Does James Say about Passing Along Bad Reports?

Humble yourselves before the Lord.
Brothers, don’t slander or attack one another.
(James 4:10-11)

The verb “slander” simply means to “speak against” (Gk. kata-lalein). It is not necessarily a false report, just an “against-report.” The intent is to belittle another. To pour out contempt. To mock. To hurt. To harm. To destroy. To rejoice in purported evil. This can’t mean simple disagreement with ideas—that would mean that we could never have a debate over a point. This isn’t respectful disagreement with ideas. James warns against attacking a person’s motives and character, so that the listeners’ respect and love for the person is undermined. “As the north wind brings rain, so slander brings angry looks” (Prov. 25:23). Everybody gets upset at somebody else: slanderer, slanderee, slander-hearer.

The link of slander to pride in James 4:10 shows that slander is not the humble evaluation of error or fault, which we must constantly be doing. Rather, in slander the speaker speaks as if he never would do the same thing himself. It acts self-righteous and superior toward one’s obviously idiotic inferiors. Non-slanderous evaluation is fair-minded, constructive, gentle, guarded, and always demonstrates that speakers sense how much they share the same frailty, humanity, and sinful nature with the one being criticized. It shows a profound awareness of your own sin. It is never “against-speaking.”

James 5:9 adds a nuance: "Don’t grumble against one another." Literally, it means don’t moan and groan and roll your eyes. This refers to a kind of against-speaking that is not as specific as a focused slander or attack. It hints at others flaws, not only with words, but by body language and tone. In print, such attitudes are communicated by innuendo, guilt by association, sneering, pejorative vocabulary. In person, it means shaking your head, rolling your eyes, and re-enforcing the erosion of love and respect for someone else. For example, “You know how they do things around here. Yadda, yadda. What do you expect?” Such a “groan” accomplishes the same thing as outright slander. It brings “angry looks” to all concerned. Passing on negative stuff always undermines love and respect. It’s never nourishing, never constructive, never timely, never grace-giving.

What Does the Book of Proverbs Say about Receiving Bad Reports?

He who covers over an offense promotes love,
but whoever repeats the matter separates close friends.
(Proverbs 17:9)

The first thing to do when hearing or seeing something negative is to seek to “cover” the offense rather than speak about it to others. That is, rather than let a bad report “pass in” to your heart as truth, and then get “passed along” to others, you should seek to keep the matter from destroying your love and regard for a person. How?

Start by remembering your own sinfulness. "All a man’s ways seem innocent to him, but motives are weighed by the Lord" (Prov. 16:2). To know this automatically keeps you from being too sure of your position and of speaking too strongly against people that you hear about or people on the other side of a conflict. You intuitively realize that you may not be seeing things right. Your motives are never as pure as you think they are. To know this acts to keep you from being too sure of the facts, too sure of your position, and of speaking too quickly and too negatively about other people. Knowing your own sinfulness helps you not make snap judgments that take what you hear too seriously.

When you remember your sinfulness, remember God’s mercies. "Love covers all offenses" (Prov. 10:12). The God who is love has covered all your offenses. He knows everything about you (and the whole story about that other person). He has chosen to forgive you, and life-saving mercy cost Jesus his life. He could write you up with a 100% True Bad Report, but he has chosen to bury your sins in the depths of the ocean. That makes the life and death difference. If your sins are not buried in the ocean of his mercy, then you will be justly exposed and will justly perish. But when you’ve known mercy, then even when you hear report of grievous evil, an instinct toward mercy should arise within you. To savor the tasty morsels of gossip and bad reports is very different from grieving, caring, and wishing nothing less than the mercies of Christ upon all involved. And most bad reports are much more trivial. They are the stuff of busybodies and gossips going “tut-tut-tut.”

Then remember that there is always another side. "The first to present his case seems right, till another comes forward and questions him" (Prov. 18:17). You never have all the facts. And you never have all the facts you need all at once. You are never in a position to see the whole picture, and therefore when you hear the first report, you should assume you have far too little information to draw an immediate conclusion. What you’ve heard from someone else is only “hear-say” evidence. It has no standing or validity unless it is confirmed in other ways.

So when you hear a negative report about another, you must keep it from passing into your heart as though it were true. If you pass judgment based on hear-say, you are a fool. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t check out the facts. Go to the person. Hear other witnesses. If you’re far away from the scene, wait for more of the story to come out. Suspend judgment. Don’t get panicked or stampeded by mob-psychology and rumors. Be content not to know many things. You don’t need to have an opinion about everything and everyone.

Third, what should you do if you are close enough to the situation to be involved AND you think the injustice or matter is too great or grievous for you to ignore? For starters, notice that you only really need to know something if it touches your sphere of life and relationships. In that case, you should do what will help you to express God’s call upon you to speak Ephesians 4:29 words of wise love.

In Derek Kidner’s commentary on Prov. 25:7–10, he writes that when you think someone has done wrong you should remember, “One seldom knows the full facts (v.8) and one’s motives in spreading a story are seldom as pure as one pretends (v.10). To run to the law or to the neighbors is usually to run away from the duty of personal relationship.” See Christ’s clinching comment in Matthew 18:15: "If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother." In short, if you feel the problem is too great and you can’t keep it from destroying your regard for the person, you must go personally before you go to anyone else.

When Should You Go?

Galatians 6:1 says we are to go when a person is caught in a trespass. That means there should be some kind of "pattern" or the unmistakeable exposure of a wrong. Don’t go the first time you hear a bad report about someone doing wrong. As we said above, there’s another side to most stories, and our motives are never totally pure when we get indignant. Go if the person seems caught—that is, trapped or stuck in a habit pattern of wrong behavior or falsehood.

How Should You Go?

Galatians 6:1 says we are to restore gently and in humility, bearing all the fruit of the Spirit. Beware of your own tendencies to be tempted—perhaps to the same sin, perhaps to reactive sins of self-righteousness or judgmentalism, perhaps to avoidance sins of cover-up and pretending. Galatians 6:2 goes on to say that we actually fulfill the law of Christ by bearing each other’s burdens. We become nothing less than lesser redeemers in the pattern of our Great Redeemer. Jesus in Matthew 18:15ff says we should also go persistently, and not give up in the process. Patience is one fruit of the Spirit because problems don’t always clear up quickly. There is a progression in efforts to get to the bottom of a bad report, to confirm the facts, and to work at bringing restoration.

Who Should Go?

Galatians 6 says you—plural—who are spiritual should go to the straying one. That both defines how you should go and it calls for multiple people to get involved. Similarly Matthew 18:15ff says to bring in other people if matters don’t resolve one to one. The right kind of checking out a bad report is always done in person and often will be done by involving multiple wise persons.

Why Should You Go?

In both Galatians 6 and Matthew 18 the goal is to restore the person and to re-establish sin-broken relationships. You are working to restore people both to God and to others.

Conclusion

In summary, from the Old Testament to the New Testament, the principle is this. If you hear bad reports about other Christians you must either cover it with love or go to them personally before speaking of it to any others.

* The first thing to do is to simply suspend judgment. Don’t pass on bad reports.
* The second thing to do is “cover” it in love, reminding yourself that you don’t know all about the heart of the person who may have done evil—and you know your own frailty. Don’t allow bad reports to pass into your own heart.
* The final thing to do is go and speak to them personally.

What you should never do is rush to judgment, or withdraw from loving another, or pass on the negative report to others. This is challenge enough when you’re dealing with the local grapevine or slow-moving postal service. In a world of instant world-wide communication of information it’s an even bigger challenge, because you can do bigger damage more quickly. Whether the bad report offers true information, or partial information, or disinformation, or false information—it is even more important that you exercise great discretion, and that you take pains to maximize boots-on-the-ground interpersonal relationships.

What to do with the Lord's Day?

"Between Two Worlds" (http://theologica.blogspot.com/) is a great Reformed website run by Justin Taylor ... he recently linked this blog by Iain Campbell about the Lord's Day. Hope you enjoy!

http://creideamh.blogspot.com/2008/03/case-for-sabbath-observance.html

The case for Sabbath observance
I have noticed that there are two subjects which never fail to provoke a response in my columns. One is psalm-singing, of which I am convinced that there should be more, and not less in our churches.

The other is the issue of Sabbath observance, perennially controversial and deeply divisive in the landscape of modern Lewis. I could wistfully look back to a past day on the Isle of Lewis and ask why the former days were better than the present; however, as my number two son reminded me when he gave a public talk recently, the Bible explicitly forbids such retrospection.

So we must face the issue as it confronts us in the present. Unfortunately, the debate seems to focus on the wrong issues. Simmering away is the subject of Sunday ferries to and from the Isle of Lewis, and the subject of Sunday sports facilities in the town of Stornoway. Travel and sport: these are the emotive and important issues which currently threaten to secularise our communities.

Up to this point we have infamously bucked the trend of contemporary British culture, in which Sunday travel and Sunday sport are fixtures on weekly routines. We have sold out our national Christian heritage to an industry of sport and leisure. The pursuit of these pleasures has pursued our national soul, and we have dived right in. But that is no reason why we should sell out our local Christian heritage.

I have said it often: there is no earthly reason why being different is a bad thing. Actually, in many ways it is our contemporary British culture, with its 24/7 madness that is bucking the trend; in many places throughout European towns and villages one would be hard pushed to find a shop open on Sundays.

My position, as a local minister, however, is that the case for Sabbath observance is not made by appeal to local tradition or to social custom. It is that such a case can be made, and has to be made, by direct appeal to the Bible. My argument, therefore, is a theological one before it is anything else, and consequently becomes a moral one.

The principle of one day in seven being observed as a day of rest and worship is built into the fabric of the universe. According to the Bible, God rested on the seventh day, and bequeathed a pattern to humanity. By enshrining this principle into the commandments, God made the principle of the sanctity of the Sabbath as important as the sanctity of life or the sanctity of marriage.I t is on this basis that the principle of Sabbath observance becomes a matter of conscience and a matter of principle, binding on all mankind everywhere.

The same categories in which the Old Testament seventh-day Sabbath are described apply to the New Testament Lord's Day Sabbath - same principle, different application. Now, post-resurrection, the first day of the week has become the Christian Sabbath. That point of doctrine, I have discovered, is attacked more fiercely within the church than outside it. Any suggestion that the Sabbath principle carries over into the New Testament is regarded as legalistic at best and heretical at worst.

It's part of a trend of course, in which the best doctrinal emphases of Puritanism have been thrown out with the rejection of formal theology by modern evangelicalism, which seems more interested in experience than in doctrine. It has become a truism among many evangelical Christians that Jesus is our Sabbath, and that the day is a type of the rest we have in him. We ought to meet on whatever day is convenient for us. If there is any distinction to be made, it is not between work and worship, but between work and rest.

That is a theology I reject. The Sabbath principle is too fundamental a part of the structure of biblical theology to be thrown out in this way. Jesus has not abrogated his claim to be Lord of the Sabbath; it is not now that his death and resurrection have shed light on the deeper meaning of the principle that we should jettison the day he has given for his worship.

And why should we? There are positive blessings to having a day that is different from all the rest. Our families need to spend time together. Our bodies need rest from the routine of the week. Our society needs protection from the trend towards round-the-clock shopping. And our employees need protection from the exploitation of employers who will work them into the ground for a profit.

But above all we need sacred times to remind us of the bigger issues. We really don't need Christmas to remind us of the birth of Jesus, or Easter to remind us of his resurrection if we have a weekly Sabbath to remind us of these things continuously. A weekly Christian calendar is of far more benefit than a yearly one. A society, however, which does not need a Sabbath, is a society which has declared its independence of God, and which has turned itself into a secular institution.

We have already begun a process of bringing up our children without the idea of God, marginalizing the relevance of Christianity, and making peripheral the thought that we may, in fact, be accountable for what we do with our lives. We have indoctrinated our children in the atheism of our contemporary culture. We have taken the Lord's Prayer out of their daily routine, Bible stories out of their regular practice, church-going out of their weekly habit. We have shown by our example that Sunday is a day for travel, leisure, shopping and sport. God is not in their thoughts at all.

So are we really surprised when our society cries out for help? Do we wonder why a secular society requires so much Child Protection legislation? Or why an atheistic culture needs a Suicide Prevention Week? Are we so blind that we cannot see the correlation between our contemporary humanism and our contemporary despair?

Let's get real. Let's not kid ourselves into thinking that this is an issue of human rights and freedoms. The case to preserve the standards of our contemporary culture in Lewis, including our distinctive approach to Sunday issues, is strong, both theologically and practically.

Having said all that, this is not a debate I expect to win. All I can do is hope that we will learn the lessons of our Island's past. Our economy was never stronger, family life never more stable, and communities never more cohesive, than in the days when God was given a primacy of place in the weekly routine. Could there, after all, be some truth in the maxim that those that honour God, He will honour?