When to Overlook A Fault: 12 Questions

January 28, 2015 David Murray 6 comments

“When you have been sinned against you have two options: to either lovingly cover or lovingly confront.” (Jim Newcomer)

But how do we know the right option?

Yes, some offenses require repentance before granting forgiveness, but there are other offenses that must be overlooked if we are to survive in any relationship (1 Peter 4:8; Prov. 10:12; 12:16; 19:11). But when to do what?

Here are some questions to ask to help us decide if we are to “cover” or “overlook” an offense.

1. What is my tendency? If I tend to default to confrontation, have I pushed myself harder to cover? If my tendency is to cover, have I sufficiently considered the need to confront?

2. Am I just trying to avoid confrontation? If my motive is primarily to avoid unwanted confrontation, then covering may simply be the easy option, not the right one.

3. Am I just trying to avoid addressing problems on my side? I may be motivated to cover rather than confront, if confronting would mean addressing faults on my side too.

4. How important is this? If the offense is small enough, we may overlook?

5. How clear is this? If my grievance is more about personal preferences and cultural norms than clear moral right and wrong, then overlooking is the right choice.

6. Does the person show a pattern of this kind of behavior? If it’s just a one-off and out-of-character, then it is easier to cover than if this has become a regular habit.

7. Will overlooking the fault hurt or damage the other person? Am I doing the person more harm than good by failing to help them address moral failings.

8. Have other people been hurt or damaged? If it’s just me, then covering is more likely to be an option than if others have also been offended.

9. Does this have the potential to spread? If the offending attitude, words, or actions, might make others do similar things, then confronting rather than covering is the answer.

10. What else is going on in this person’s world? Are there stress factors which may mitigate the fault? A related question is “What’s going on in my world?” Am I under stress and overreacting to minor issues, or, alternatively, avoiding issues because I’m too stressed?

11. Are there bigger faults to confront first? Sometimes tackling a small issue can result in a person refusing to hear us on far bigger issues.

12. Was it intentional? If the person committed the offense deliberately and with full knowledge of doing wrong, then confronting is required, not covering.

You’ll find great teaching on forgiveness in the following list of my favorite books on the subject, the first two being outstanding.

Top Books On Forgiveness

Unpacking Forgiveness by Chris Brauns

From Forgiven To Forgiving by Jay Adams

The Freedom And Power of Forgiveness by John Macarthur

Macarthur disagrees with Adams slightly in the area of conditional forgiveness.

Help, I Can’t Forgive! By Jim Newcomer

This is a brief but comprehensive booklet.

Revolutionary Forgiveness by Eric E Wright

I disagree with Wright’s view of forgiving the unrepentant, but still much helpful material in the book. Multiple anecdotes help to “earth” the problem in everyday life.

Embodying Forgiveness by L. Gregory Jones

The most academic and demanding of the books in the list.

The New Freedom of Forgiveness by David Ausburger. Read through the filter of the first two books in this list.

A “Repentant” Lance Armstrong “Would Do it Again!”

January 27, 2015 David Murray 2 comments

Imagine someone deceived you, lied to you, and stole from you for ten years, but was eventually caught and, a few years later, asked for your forgiveness. Would you give it?

You’d probably ask some questions first, like:

“Are you sorry for what you did?”

“Will you do it again?”

But what if the answers were:

“I’m not sorry for what I did, but I am sorry for the painful consequences.”

“I would do it again in the same situation.”

Well, you’re probably not going to forgive are you?

Yet, that’s what an allegedly “repentant” Lance Armstrong wants us to do. He deceived millions of people, told innumerable lies, stole titles from other cyclists, and made megabucks from books about his “miracle” come-back. But he now thinks he should be forgiven, and gives three reasons in this interview with the BBC:

Enough time has passed.
Everyone else was doing it anyway.
His bike sponsors made hundreds of millions, and his cancer charity raised $500 million and helped three million people.

Not exactly bearing fruit worthy of repentance, is it? (Matthew 3:8).

Perhaps most worryingly of all, when he does condemn the wrong, just like the unrepentant King David (2 Sam. 12:5-6), he talks of it in the third person, as if it was someone else that did it.

“I would want to change the man that did those things, maybe not the decision, but the way he acted,” he continued.

“The way he treated people, the way he couldn’t stop fighting. It was unacceptable, inexcusable.”

To top it off, he thinks he still deserves the seven Tour de France titles he was stripped of.

What a stark and sad contrast to the Westminster shorter catechism’s summary of the Bible’s teaching:

“Repentance unto life is a saving grace, whereby a sinner, out of a true sense of his sin, and apprehension of the mercy of God in Christ, doth, with grief and hatred of his sin, turn from it unto God, with full purpose of, and endeavor after, new obedience.” (A 87).

That’s the way not only for a sad and angry Lance Armstrong to get his life and happiness back, but to win eternal life, the greatest prize of all, a prize that is gifted not sweated for.

See full interview here: Lance Armstrong: I’d change the man, not decision to cheat.

Triviality of Trivialities

January 27, 2015 David Murray 2 comments

According to Joel Osteen, if you have the favor of God, you will:

Be given premier parking spaces while everyone else is driving forever in circles.
Get your child into your favorite school even if he is four days too young.
Escape speeding tickets.
Find restaurant tables in crowded restaurants.
Get waved into the best traffic lane.
Find checkouts opened just for you when all the lines are packed.
Get blouses for sale prices before the sale starts.
Be bumped up to first class seats on airplanes.

In chapter 5 of Your Best Life Now, Osteen says that having the favor of God means that God will “make your life easier,” by giving you similar “special advantages” and “preferential treatment.”

And how do we get such “favor”? Easy:

“Every morning before you leave the house, say something like this: ‘Father, I thank You that I have Your favor. Your favor is opening doors of opportunity. Your favor is bringing success into my life. Your favor is causing people to want to help me.’”

Like Osteen, I’m all for seeing God in everyday life, recognizing His goodness even in the small things of life, and living the whole of life before God. But, when this is the full extent of Osteen’s examples of God’s favor, I cannot help exclaim, “Triviality of trivialities. All is triviality.” It’s all so small, so shallow, so petty, so paltry, so insignificant, so, well, so trivial. If that’s the extent of God’s favor, it doesn’t say much for God. Indeed it says, “Your God is too small, your God is too trivial.”

I have four questions for Osteen based on what he wrote in chapters five and six:

1. What do you have to say to sufferers? To the rape victim, or the abused child, or the 21-year-old with multiple sclerosis, or the gifted and godly father with ALS, or the mother grieving over her son killed in a road accident?

2. Where’s God’s fatherly chastisement in your scheme? Are we not told that being disciplined by God is a sign of His favor (Heb. 12:6)?

3. What about spiritual favor? Why do you have little or nothing to say about God’s favor being manifested in spiritual graces of regeneration, repentance, faith, patience, contentment, and so on? Are these not worth far more than a cheap blouse or even a first-class seat?

4. Do you really think King David proves your point? You wrote:

“David didn’t focus on his faults or on the things he had done wrong. No, he lived favor-minded. It was David who wrote, “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.” Notice, he was expecting goodness and mercy, not part of the time, but all the days of his life. I like the way The Message translation puts it: “God’s kindness and goodness chases me down everywhere I go.” David’s attitude was, “I just can’t get away from the good things of God!”

I’m tempted to ask if you’ve read Psalm 51? Or anything after 2 Samuel 12v13. If you had, you would realize that David couldn’t get away from the sword of God. As Nathan the prophet said, it never departed from his house. Sure, he was forgiven, but God’s loving chastisement for his sin also followed him for the remaining days of his life. And for all the pain of it, David would say that also was one of the good things of God, one of the proofs of His favor.

This is the sixth post in a series on Joel Osteen’s book, “Your Best Life Now.” Previous posts were A Book That Begins With A Lie, Positive Negativity, Your Average Life Now, The Worst Ever (Mis)Quotation Of The Bible, and My Favorite Joel Osteen Quote.

10 Ways To Hate God

January 26, 2015 David Murray 76 comments

“If we are unconverted, one thing is absolutely certain: we hate God. The Bible is unambiguous at this point. We are God’s enemies. We are inwardly sworn to His ultimate destruction. It is as natural for us to hate God as it is for rain to moisten the earth when it falls.” (R. C. Sproul).

Yes, by nature, you and I are haters. We are born haters and hating (Titus 3:3). Which would be great if it was evil that we hated. But it’s not. It’s the epitome of all good that we hate – God (Roman 8:7). In chapter nine of The Holiness of God, R. C. Sproul wrote:

“By nature our attitude toward God is not one of mere indifference. It is a posture of malice. We oppose His government and refuse His rule over us…It is not enough to say what the natural human mind views God as an enemy. We must be more precise. God is our mortal enemy. He represents the highest possible threat to our sinful desires…We despise his very existence and would do anything in our power to rid the universe of His holy presence…If God were to expose His life to our hands, He would not be safe for a second. We would not ignore Him; we would destroy Him.”

You’d think that such unprecedented intense hatred would be obvious to us, but it’s not. It’s one of the greatest triumphs of the devil that he stirs up this hatred in us, while at the same time blinding us to it. What’s worst of all, is that some of this natural hatred remains even in the Christian who has been given a new and supernatural love for God.

To help both believers and unbelievers better detect and root out this hatred from our hearts, here are ten ways in which we hate God.

1. We Deny Him: We deny his existence, or, like Peter, in certain circumstances we deny we know Him.

2. We Belittle Him: By ignoring Him, sidelining Him, not talking to Him, or not listening to Him.

3. We Contradict Him: We argue with His Word, His works, and His will.

4. We Disobey Him: We just blatantly and knowingly and stubbornly do what He forbids, or don’t do what He commands.

5. We Insult Him: We speak evil of Him, we use His name in curses, or use it in vain and frivolous ways.

6. We Blame Him: We accuse Him of ill-will, unfairness, injustice.

7. We Refuse Him: We refuse His help, His hand, His salvation.

8. We Distort Him: Ignoring God’s love, mercy, grace, salvation, we focus only on God’s holiness, wrath, justice, and sovereignty – or vice versa – and end up with a distortion of God.

9. We Use Him: We expect Him to come to our aid when we’re really desperate, but ignore him all other times.

10. We Take From Him: We just take and take, but without a word of praise or thanks.

Beginning to see a problem? So did the Apostle Paul, which is why he described us as “foolish, disobedient, deceived, serving various lusts and pleasures, living in malice and envy, hateful and hating one another” (Titus 3:3).

But in the very next verse, Paul also announced the solution, a solution that’s provided by the very same God that we hate.

“But when the kindness and the love of God our Savior toward man appeared, not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to His mercy He saved us, through the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Spirit.” (Titus 3:4-5).

Yes, there’s a Lover for haters! More than that, this Lover turns haters into lovers!

My Favorite Joel Osteen Quote

January 26, 2015 David Murray 1 comment

“He’s called El Shaddai, the God of more than enough. He’s not El Cheapo, the God of barely enough!” (Joel Osteen)

Pretty good quote isn’t it.

The problem is that like so much of what Joel Osteen writes in Your Best Life Now, it’s followed by a deduction that is totally false. Here’s the fuller quote:

“He’s called El Shaddai, the God of more than enough. He’s not El Cheapo, the God of barely enough! Don’t let anybody convince you that God wants you to barely get by in life.”

So from “the God of more than enough” we suddenly jump to God wants you to have more than enough, that barely getting by in life is not God’s will for you. Quite the personal guarantee, isn’t it!

Breaking The Barriers of the Past
But let’s back up a bit to the beginning of this fourth chapter, “Breaking The Barriers Of The Past,” because the chapter starts with a powerful and persuasive illustration of how mental barriers can hinder progress.

Osteen describes how, for hundreds of years, no one thought running a four-minute-mile was possible. Roger Bannister didn’t accept that thinking, and within ten years of him smashing the four-minute barrier, 336 other runners had done the same. Osteen concludes:

“The barrier to running a four-minute mile was in the athletes’ minds. For all those years, runners believed what the experts were saying. They were convinced that it was impossible to run a mile in less than four minutes.”

Osteen then applies this to our own lives and says:

“You will never go beyond the barriers in your own mind. If you think you can’t do something, then you never will. The battle is in your mind. If you are defeated in your mind, you’ve already lost the battle…The barrier is in your mind.”

Devastating Negativity
We have to admit, there’s a lot of truth in this. If we haven’t experienced the disabling power of negativity ourselves, then we certainly know people who have, and still do. No question, a pattern of negativity and defeatism devastates human potential.

Sometimes we are not entirely to blame for this. As Osteen explains, if we’ve had a terribly critical person in our upbringing, or if we are constantly around such a person, their negative words are going to damage us.

Other times, we are entirely to blame, and we have to take ourselves in hand, rebuke ourselves, and challenge ourselves to think more positively by thinking more truthfully, accurately, and realistically, a pattern we also see in the Psalms (e.g. Pss. 42, 73, 77).

A Necessary Challenge
A large part of the counseling I do with depressed Christians is focused on this particular area; the battle in the mind to break untrue and damaging patterns of thinking and replace them with true and energizing patterns. As Osteen says, we must work not to let our past determine our future:

“You can’t have a victim mentality and expect to live in victory. You can’t live in a perpetual pity party and then wonder why situations aren’t improving in your life…No matter what anybody in your family has or hasn’t done, don’t let that impose limitations on you. Make up your mind that you are going to be the one to set the new standard. Be the one to affect generations to come.”

Osteen’s right to challenge people to take responsibility to change the pattern of their lives, even of their family and of future generations, by refusing to pass down an attitude of failure and defeat to the next generation.

The problem is what he does next, which is promise if we do that, we will definitely see massive change in our lives and in that of future generations. Some examples:

“If you’ll break through the barriers in your mind and start stepping out in faith, you will go beyond those old barriers, and the same thing will happen in your family…Your children, grandchildren, and future generations will continue to race past those barriers.”

“The Bible promises that God will give us ‘a twofold recompense for our former shame’ (Isa. 61:7). That means if you’ll keep the right attitude, God will pay you back double for your trouble. He’ll add up all the injustice, all the hurt and pain that people have caused you, the abuse and embarrassment, and He’ll pay you back with twice as much joy, peace, and happiness. That is God’s desire for you.”

He describes those who are accepting sub-standard marriages, health, jobs, and income and says:

“This is not the lifestyle God intends for you. God wants you to live an overcoming life of victory, He doesn’t want you to barely get by. He’s called El Shaddai, the God of more than enough. He’s not El Cheapo, the God of barely enough! Don’t let anybody convince you that God wants you to barely get by in life.”

Recognize that quote? Doesn’t look quite so good now, does it? God can give us more than enough, and often does. But His promises extend only to sufficiency (2 Cor. 12:9). Osteen then goes from bad to worse:

“Don’t just accept whatever comes your way in life. You were born to win; you were born for greatness; you were created to be a champion in life.”

“Many times, we pray almost as though we are inconveniencing God. We say, ‘God , would You please give me a bit bigger apartment? I don’t want to bother You for too much.’ No, God wants to give you your own house. God has a big dream for your life.”

Ungrounded Promises
As these are merely Joel Osteen’s promises, not God’s, they have no foundation whatsoever. Yes, God calls us to great faith and to expect much in prayer, but there’s nothing in the Bible that warrants us giving others such personal guarantees as:

Your children and grandchildren will do even better than you.
God does not want you to barely get by in life.
You were born to win.
You were born for greatness.
You were created to be a champion in life.
God wants to give you your own house.
God will give you twice as much joy, peace, and happiness as pain you have suffered.

Yes, it’s right for a Christian to have a positive, optimistic, hopeful attitude (if it’s based on the character of God and the Word of God). And yes, such an expectant outlook of faith will generally lead to a better life: spiritually, physically, relationally, and even financially. However, we can’t go around guaranteeing ourselves or anyone else that. Every prayer and desire must be prefaced and postscripted with, “Not my will, but your will be done,” or “If it be your will” (not “Because it’s Joel’s will”).

As many Christians can testify (and many have testified), sometimes the best thing that could ever happen for us spiritually is to lose our friends, our finances, our health, and just about everything else too. When we lose everything, but win Christ, God has truly repaid us double and even triple for our losses.

“But what things were gain to me, these I have counted loss for Christ. Yes indeed I also count all things loss for the excellence of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them as rubbish, that I may gain Christ” (Philippians 3:7-8).

This is the fifth post in a series on Joel Osteen’s book, “Your Best Life Now.” Previous posts were A Book That Begins With A Lie, Positive Negativity, Your Average Life Now, and The Worst Ever (Mis)Quotation Of The Bible.