This week AP sportswriter Jon Krawczynski wrote an article about the NBA playoffs that began with these words:
Talk is cheap in these NBA playoffs, and it seems as if everyone wants in on the act.
As the stakes grew in the first round, the venom being spewed became ever more toxic. Superstars are jawing at bench players. Reserves are picking fights with superstars. Coaches are accusing opponents of being dirty. Even Carmelo Anthony's wife hasn't been afraid to talk some serious trash.
''Try again,'' La La Vazquez tweeted after Celtics reserve guard Jordan Crawford was caught on video hurling curse words toward Anthony at the end of Game 5 against the Knicks. ''You on the bench for a reason.''
Unfortunately this kind of trash talk has now made it all the way down to the high school level and to even younger players. As a high school referee I don’t see it often, but it certainly does exist. And that’s troubling.
But what is even more troubling is the trash talk that occurs within the body of Christ. Someone once said that Christians are the only army in the world that shoot their own wounded. And when we do that, the weapon of choice is usually our words.
This morning, as we continue our study of James we’re going to look at just two verses. But as we discovered in our Monday morning Bible study, those two verses have much to teach us. Since the passage is so short, let’s read it out loud together this morning:
Do not speak evil against one another, brothers. The one who speaks against a brother or judges his brother, speaks evil against the law and judges the law. But if you judge the law, you are not a doer of the law but a judge. There is only one lawgiver and judge, he who is able to save and to destroy. But who are you to judge your neighbor?
(James 4:11-12 ESV)
You’ll notice that James is once again addressing his fellow Christ followers. Unlike in the first ten verses of this chapter where he refrains from using the term, he now calls his readers “brothers” three times in these two verses. So this is another one of the tests that he is setting forth in this letter to be used by those in the body to evaluate the genuineness of their faith and to determine if they are mature disciples of Jesus.
Let’s begin this morning by defining two key words that James uses frequently in these two verses.
Two definitions:
The first word is a single word in Greek that the ESV translates “speak evil against” or just “speak against”. James uses that particular verb three times in verse 11.
“speak evil against” = “katalaleo” =
“kata” (against) + laleo (to speak) =
defame, slander, “backbiting”
In the culture of James’s day this word was often used to describe the act of slandering someone when he was not there to defend himself – thus the idea of backbiting.
The other word is the word “judge” which is used a total of six times in these two verses – four times as a verb and twice as a noun. We’ll look at the definition of the verb, which should be adequate to understand the noun as well.
“to judge” = “krino” =
"to separate, distinguish, discriminate" -
in the context of this passage = “to condemn”
The verb itself merely means to evaluate and then separate, distinguish or discriminate. It has neither a positive nor negative connotation in and of itself. So the context determines how the verb is used. In this case, by combining it with the idea of speaking evil against, it obviously is used in a negative way and it would be accurate to translate it “to condemn”.
The idea of judging is not always negative in the Bible and as we’ll see more clearly this morning, the Bible certainly does not prohibit all forms of judging. In fact, as followers of Christ we are actually commanded to make judgments frequently in the Scriptures. But that kind of judgment is for the purpose of righteous discernment. So in order to clearly distinguish between those two kinds of judgment, I’m going to use these two terms this morning:
• Unrighteous condemnation is the kind of Christian “trash talking” that James describes here in which judgment takes the form of condemnation.
• Righteous discernment is the kind of evaluation that Jesus, Paul and the other New Testament writers command for the purpose of helping us keep ourselves and others from becoming the friends of the world that James described earlier in this passage.
We need to make one last observation before we’re ready to move on. When James uses these two verbs in these two verses they are in the present tense, which indicates that the people in the body weren’t just occasionally engaging in this kind of unrighteous condemnation – they were engaging in it on a regular basis.
It’s pretty obvious to see why this kind of Christian “trash talk” is so damaging, even on the surface. When we engage in that kind of talk, we actually hurt two people – the person who is the object of our condemnation as well as ourselves. But James makes it clear that there is an even deeper harm that occurs…
Unrighteous condemnation is so harmful because it usurps the role that rightly belongs to God
God alone has the authority to judge in this sense. He alone is capable of determining who will be saved and who will be destroyed. So when we condemn others in the way these people were doing we actually attempt to take on a role that doesn’t belong to us.
And not only that, as we’ll see more clearly in a moment, when we try to take on God’s role, we even fail to use the right standard. The judging that was going on here was not based on the Word of God, but rather on human standards. That’s why James claimed that these people were “judging the law”.
By imposing their own standards on others, they were essentially saying that God’s law wasn’t adequate so they had to add on their own rules. This was the same thing for which Jesus had condemned the scribes and Pharisees:
“You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men.”And he said to them, “You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition!
(Mark 7:8-9 ESV)
As James clearly points out our role is not to judge the law, it is to be doers of the law that God has given to us. But these people were so busy trying to point out how others had violated their man-made rules that they couldn’t even see that they were guilty of not putting God’s Word into practice in their own lives.
Although James’ command here is worded negatively – literally it could be translated “Stop speaking evil against one another” – I want to approach this from a more positive position. It’s not just enough to know what we’re not supposed to do. We need to understand what we do need to do.
As I pointed out earlier, as Christ followers we are not just permitted to exercise the right kind of judgment, we are actually commanded to do so. So I think the best way to really make this passage practical for us is to see if we can distinguish between the kind of righteous discernment that we are to exercise and the kind of unrighteous condemnation that James is describing in this passage.
Before we do that, we need to establish an important boundary:
Our responsibility to exercise righteous discernment is limited to other believers.
In 1 Corinthians 5 and 6, Paul addressed this idea in quite some detail, and summarizes it with these words:
For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Is it not those inside the church whom you are to judge? God judges those outside. “Purge the evil person from among you.”
(1 Corinthians 5:12-13 ESV)
In other words, God will deal with those outside the body. That is not our responsibility and if we attempt to do that we fall right back into the sin of trying to play God. So what we’ll learn this morning deals only with how we deal with sin within the body of Christ. That is a crucial distinction that we cannot lose sight of.
How to distinguish between righteous discernment and unrighteous condemnation:
• Righteous discernment talks to the other person
• Unrighteous condemnation talks about the other person
Jesus provided us with the Biblical model for dealing with sins in the life of another believer:
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. But if he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, that every charge may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church. And if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.
(Matthew 18:15-17 ESV)
Notice that the first step is to go directly to the person who has sinned and confront that sin directly with him or her. It is only if that person fails to deal with the sin that others are to be brought into the process. Although Jesus is specifically dealing here with a sin that a brother or sister has committed against me, the same principle can certainly be applied to any sin in the life of believer.
Here in James, the people weren’t doing that. Instead of going directly to the other person directly they were talking to others about that person’s sin behind their backs. The Bible calls that gossip. I really like Rick Warren’s definition of gossip:
When we are talking about a situation with somebody who is neither part of the problem or part of the solution, then we are probably gossiping.
Unfortunately in the church, we often encourage gossip and even make it sound “spiritual”. We just call it a “prayer request”. Often we even try to seek out information that we really don’t need to know claiming that we just want to be able to pray for the person.
As a general rule when we practice righteous discernment we only need to include those who can either help or those who need to be protected.
I’m reminded of the story of the three pastors who had gone fishing together. They decided that they would all confess their secret sins to each other so that they could pray for each other. The first pastor shared that his secret vice was gambling. The second pastor revealed that he had a problem with lust. Finally the third pastor spoke up. “My secret sin is gossip – and I can’t wait to get back to town and share what I just heard.”
• Righteous discernment is based on the Bible
• Unrighteous condemnation is based on human standards
Jesus certainly understood what it felt like to be judged by human standards rather than on God’s Word. On one occasion, He went to Jerusalem during the Feast of Tabernacles and He addressed the religious leaders who were seeking to kill Him because He had healed on the Sabbath:
Do not judge by appearances, but judge with right judgment.”
(John 7:24 ESV)
Judging with right judgment means judging with God’s judgment, not our own. When we address a sin in someone’s life using the objective standards of the Scriptures, we are not really doing the judging – it is the Word of God that judges.
But the problem in the body that James was addressing is a problem that still exists today. The judgment that was taking place was not based on the Bible but rather on a bunch of manmade rules. When we judge like that, James says that is when we are actually passing judgment on the law itself and placing ourselves above the law. What we’re really doing is to say in effect that God’s law didn’t go far enough here so we’re going to inject our own values and rules.
Or else we go to the opposite extreme and we decide that God’s Word goes too far so therefore, we’re going to just ignore certain parts of the Bible that we don’t like. We can certainly be guilty of doing that in our own lives, but we can also do the same thing within the body of Christ and excuse the sins of others by failing to hold them to a Biblical standard.
But even holding someone to a Biblical standard can be taken to an unhealthy extreme if we don’t have the right attitude. That’s why…
• Righteous discernment sacrifices self in order to edify the other person
• Unrighteous condemnation diminishes the other person in order to exalt myself
Although James has returned to addressing his audience as “brothers” in this section, this passage is not unrelated to the first part of the chapter where James focused on the need for humility. It’s pretty obvious that at least one of the reasons the people were condemning others in the body is because they thought that would somehow make them look better.
We certainly see this in play in our modern political campaigns don’t we? It’s no longer a matter of letting people know what the candidates are for. Instead every single campaign has become focused on tearing down the other candidate so that by comparison each candidate will look better than the other.
Unfortunately we see the same mindset in the church at times. If I can just make the other person look a little less “spiritual” then I’ll look more “spiritual” by comparison. Obviously when that occurs, pride has reared its ugly head.
But there is a better way, one that Paul described in Galatians 6:
Brothers, if anyone is caught in any transgression, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness. Keep watch on yourself, lest you too be tempted. Bear one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.
(Galatians 6:1-2 ESV)
When we exercise righteous discernment, our goal is not to tear the other person down, but rather to build them up and restore them. And we are to do that with a spirit of humility understanding that we, too, could fall into the same trap.
We live in a culture that is focused on tolerance and unfortunately that mindset has crept into the church. So often we become reluctant to point out the sin in the life of brother or sister in Christ.
But allowing someone to remain in bondage to some sin that is robbing them of the joy that God want them to have is really not love at all. In a few weeks, we’ll see that James closes his letter with these words:
let him know that whoever brings back a sinner from his wandering will save his soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins.
(James 5:20 ESV)
Frankly, most of the time, the easiest thing is to just let someone else wallow in their sin. Because if I approach that sin with the idea that I want to help the other person be restored, that means it is going to cost me. It is means that I have to sacrifice my time and effort in order to invest my life in the life of someone else. Bearing another’s burdens is not easy. But, as Paul points out, it does fulfill the law of Christ.
The kind of humility that is required in order to engage in righteous discernment is demonstrated further in the last pair of characteristics that we’ll look at this morning…
• Righteous discernment comes only after I first judge myself
• Unrighteous condemnation fails to recognize my own sin first
James already addressed this idea earlier in chapter 2 when he reminded his audience to speak and act as those who were going to be judged under the law of liberty and that judgment without mercy would be given to those who refused to show mercy to others.
That idea is also consistent with Jesus’ words in the Sermon on the Mount:
Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when there is the log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye.
(Matthew 7:3-5 ESV)
Although some people have taken the preceding two verses in that passage out of context to teach that we are never to judge others, Jesus makes it really clear here that we are to help our brothers take the speck out of their eyes. And that requires engaging in that righteous discernment that we have talked about this morning. But before we can do that we first have to get the log out of our own eye.
Obviously James audience had failed to do that. They were criticizing others out of jealously, bitterness, and selfish ambition. Those were the logs in their eyes and they had failed to deal with them before they turned to judging others.
The good news this morning is that every one of us can help stop “trash talking” in the church. The next time someone comes to you to try and share some condemning information about someone in this body, let me suggest that you try and put an end to that by asking these questions:
1. What is your reason for telling me? If I’m not in some danger or I’m not part of the solution, then I don’t need to know.
2. Where did you get your information? If the person won’t reveal sources it is like they are spreading rumors or unreliable information.
3. Have you gone to those directly involved in order to seek reconciliation and restoration?
4. Have you personally checked out all the facts? If the person hasn’t taken the time to seek out the other person directly or to check out the facts, they probably aren’t really interested in helping. If the person is genuinely interested in getting counsel on how to handle the situation, ask them to check back with you after they have gone to the other person.
5. Can I quote you when I check this out? Someone who is spreading false condemnation won’t want anyone else to know where it came from.
Let’s make sure that none of us are guilty of Christian trash talk. Instead, let us speak those words of life that build each other up.
