1 John 3:18-24
I once talked with a woman who was telling me about her husband’s criticism. Nothing she did was right, at least in his eyes. He was most harsh with her when they were in public. He would constantly badger her about what he saw as her shortcomings, while others looked on in sympathy and concern. She felt humiliated and small.
I asked her how she handled it. She said she didn’t know how she could face being in public with him, so she came up with the idea of carrying around a hand towel. Whenever he made a humiliating, critical remark to her, she took out the towel and put it over her head. Finally, he was so embarrassed at being with his towel covered wife, he stopped. But, she said, even though the public criticisms had stopped, she could still see the criticalness in his eyes. He wasn’t saying anything anymore, but he was thinking it.
You might be imagining how awful that would be to live with a husband or wife like that. Or a boss. Or child. Or whomever. Having to be around someone who is always telling you your faults and shortcomings seems an unbearable emotional load. How do people keep going, under the deluge of relentless verbal putdowns?
Just about all of us should be able to answer that question, because most of us live with such a person. Most of us live with someone who is constantly fault-finding. Most of us live with someone who attacks us, condemns us, and seeks to knock us down emotionally and spiritually nearly everyday. Most of us probably know exactly how that woman felt. Most of us could probably carry around a towel and throw it over our heads when we are critically attacked.
Even when this person isn’t laying into us with another critical verbal barrage, we, like the woman, can see it in their eyes. All we have to do is stand in front of a mirror and look into our own faces. Because this overly critical person we are living with is ourselves.
In the comic strip Peanuts, Linus turned to Lucy, who was sitting next to him, and asked, “Why are you always so anxious to criticize me?”
Her response was typical Lucy: “I just think I have the knack for seeing other people’s faults.”
Exasperated, Linus threw his hands up and asked, “What about your own faults?”
Without hesitation, Lucy answered, “I have a knack for overlooking them.”
Most of us don’t have the “knack” that Lucy does. That is, being prone to overlooking our own faults. If you’re like me, the opposite is probably true. We are more ready to overlook someone else’s faults or mistakes, than we are our own. With ourselves we are unremitting and tireless with our critical eye.
I was reading one article this week that names this self-critical part of ourselves, “the committee.” The “committee” is your inner critic, with a host of voices accumulated from our past, that won’t shut up. It’s the “committee” that keeps trying to remind you that you’re not good enough, not perfect enough. It’s the “committee” that is always trying to sabotage your best efforts.
And in another article, the author wrote, “Having that inner critic is like sitting at a table and negotiating with a terrorist.” I like that image. No matter what good it is that you are building in life, we allow the inner terrorist to sneak in, plant a bomb of criticism and blow it up. No matter what kind of healthy relationships we are trying to bond, we allow the inner terrorist to come along and sabotage those relationships to the point that they are irreparable.
Did you notice those two little words I used in describing how the inner terrorist works? They were the words, “we allow.” In reality, the inner critic, or the inner terrorist, or the committee, or whatever you want to call it, is not some other person doing it to us; we allow it to do its work, speak its words, place its emotional bombs. We, believe it or not, enable the inner terrorist, the committee, the inner critic. We allow it to do what it does to us. It is ourselves, doing it to ourselves.
I’m so glad John wrote something about the inner terrorist, the committee, in his letter. If you have your Bibles open to this passage, you will notice that he wrote about self-criticism in the context of a larger teaching about love.
My dear children, let’s not just talk about love; let’s practice real love. This is the only way we’ll know we’re living truly, living in God’s reality. It’s also the way to shut down debilitating self-criticism, even when there is something to it. For God is greater than our worried hearts and knows more about us than we do ourselves. And friends, once that’s taken care of and we’re no longer accusing or condemning ourselves, we’re bold and free before God.
John piles up three phrases that are synonyms for each other that he uses to describe the authentic life: “practice real love,” “living truly,” and, “living in God’s reality.” John knows that people want life at its best. People want to live a good life. John knows that that good life, in order for it to be good, has to be filled with love and truth and that which is of God.
John also realized that there is a lot that gets in the way of that kind of authentic life from happening. Or rather, as I said before, there is a lot that WE ALLOW to get in the way from a Godly, loving, and true life from being ours. And one of the main things, says John, that WE ALLOW to get in the way of life happening is “debilitating self-criticism” and “accusing or condemning ourselves.”
One popular magazine wrote this disclaimer in the “Letters To The Editor” section:
Doctor’s mistakes are buried, lawyers’ mistakes are imprisoned, accountants’ mistakes are fined, dentists’ mistakes are pulled, pharmacists’ mistakes get sick, plumbers’ mistakes get stopped up, electricians’ mistakes are shocking, carpenters’ mistakes are sawdust. But just in case you find any mistakes in this magazine, please remember they were put there for a purpose. We try to offer something for everyone. Some people are always looking for something or someone to criticize, and we don’t want to disappoint them.
John realizes the same thing. People are always looking for something and someone to criticize. If you are like most people, at one time or another you have managed to put your foot in your mouth. It usually happens when we are being critical of another person.
For example, there was a man sitting in the concert hall listening to a soloist perform. He turned to the man sitting next to him and remarked, “What a terrible voice! Do you know anything about her?”
“Yes,” the man answered; “She’s my wife.”
Trying to do some back peddling, the man choked out, “Oh, I beg your pardon. Of course, it isn’t her voice, really. It’s the stuff she has to sing. I wonder who wrote that awful song?”
“I did,” was the answer.
We may be constantly critical of others, opening our mouths to change feet, but the truth of the matter, as John saw it, is that even our criticalness of others has its roots in our own inner critic. We make life so hard on others because we are making it so hard on ourselves. We are only projecting out, on to others, the categories of our own self-judgement. We are only becoming the committee for others, because we have the committee inside of us. We only assault others, because we have this inner terrorist, laying waste our own lives.
Self-judgement puts us in a prison cell--a tight spot--and attempts to bring others into that same cell with us. It ends up destroying any semblance of love, relationship, and eventually life itself--life as God wants us to truly and really enjoy.
John describes the life of living in a prison cell of self-criticism in two ways. He says it is to live with “worried hearts.” Worry often has to do with things that don’t exist, or don’t have as much emotional weight as we give them. Our inner terrorist can take this to the extreme, especially when we’ve done something we have evaluated as wrong or bad. Instead of worrying about the negative action or words themselves, worry and the inner terrorist combine to make this huge jump in our minds. Instead of saying to ourselves, “I’ve done something bad,” we say, “I am a bad person.” Worry keeps us from looking simply at the mistake, and moves us into the emotionally laden and destructive self-talk that tells us there’s something deeply wrong with who we are as a person.
The other way John describes the prison cell of self-criticism is by saying that it is created because we really don’t know ourselves, or see ourselves, as God sees and knows us. None of us sees the big picture about anything in life. That is more true about seeing the big picture of who and what we are. We take a part of us and think we are seeing the whole of us. And usually the part of us we look at is the negative. Thinking we are seeing all there is to see about ourselves, we make the awful mental leap into thinking that’s all we are.
But the truth is, we are all a mixture of good and bad, saint and sinner, holy and profane. Self-criticism, our committee, keeps trying to tell us that we are too much of the dark side, or we aren’t enough of the light side. We allow the committee to go overboard in thrashing us in either of those two directions. Soon the terrorist steps in, saying, “Let me take it from here,” and we begin to lose sight of life and love and God’s reality -- the big picture -- of who we are that only God sees and tries so compassionately to get us to visualize.
John recognizes that there may be some of the self-criticism that is valid or legitimate. But even then, there is a way to deal with it. Martin Luther constantly wrote about his ongoing battle and arguments with the devil. There is a story that Luther, during one such heated conversation, threw an ink well at the devil.
Luther described one such debate with the devil, writing in his journal:
When I awoke last night, the Devil came and wanted to debate with me; he rebuked and reproached me, arguing that I was a sinner. To this I replied: Tell me something new, Devil! I already know that perfectly well; I have committed many a solid and real sin. Indeed there must be good honest sins -- not fabricated and invented ones -- for God to forgive for His beloved Son’s sake, who took all my sins upon Him so that now the sins I have committed are no longer mine but belong to Christ.
I think Luther knew the truth that John was writing about. Yeah, there are some things about what we do that aren’t real good or real nice. But as we are in Christ, those kinds of self-criticisms no longer define who we are. The inner terrorist and the committee have lost the power in their voices, and we can not now allow them to do harm in our lives.
There is another Voice, a more powerful Voice in our lives that frees us from the self-inflicted prison cell of worry. Yeah, we’ve sinned, but God has taken care of that, freeing us so that we don’t have to worry about how we think we are such awful people. Not in God’s sight. Not by God’s love. That prison door has been opened by God through Jesus Christ. Come out.
In that way, God opens the door of the prison cell by telling us that he sees the big picture of who we are and what we’ve done, good or bad. “I see who you are, in all your breadth and depth, sun and shadow,” says God. God wants to show us the truth of his larger perspective so that we can come out of the cell of smallness that we have allowed our self-criticism to put us in. Our inner critic has only kept us captive with blinders, showing us a small section of the horizon of who we are. God wants to open the whole horizon of his view of our lives so we can “practice real love...live truly, live in God’s reality.” Not a fabricated reality of the committee’s making.
The committee and the inner terrorist have held us captive by telling us that the story we have created for ourselves, the small story of who we think we are, the small story written in strokes of self-criticism is the only story by which we can live. John, in this letter is saying, “NO!” There is another story by which you can write and live your lives -- it is the larger story of God’s loving and living perspective of who you are. Martin Luther discovered it. It is the story of forgiveness, embrace, welcome, freedom and life. All at the hand of God. Replace that old story with the new story written by God through Jesus Christ.
As John wrote, “And friends, once that’s taken care of and we’re no longer accusing or condemning ourselves, we’re bold and free before God.” My gosh, don’t we all cry out at hearing that statement: “YES! Yes! I want, I need that so badly!” I want to live bold and free before God. I don’t want to just talk about love; I want to practice real love. I want this true kind of life, living in God’s reality--not in the closed cell kind of life that I have allowed the committee and my inner terrorist to put me in. I want out! I’m ready for a new story! I want to live! Now, God! I’m ready now. Take care of my committee and inner terrorist for good, and replace them with your Voice, speaking to me of your full horizon of life and love!
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