The Alpha of Dealing with Criticism

UV2966/10000 The Alpha of Dealing with Criticism
Who whet their tongue like a sword, and bend their bows to shoot their arrows, even bitter words:
Psalm 64 v 3

The human tongue is like a sword. The Word is also a sword. But the former is a life-taking sword if it is used only to criticise, demean, insult others, speak lies and abuse others. The latter is a life-giving sword. People sharpen their tongues with their intellect, their wits in order to use their tongues like a deadly sword. The untamed tongue is also a bow from which words are shot like arrows to hurt the hearts of others. The way to tame our tongues is to use the life-giving sword, the Alpha of the Word to blunt the rough edges of our tongues and make it smooth and powerful in building people up instead of pulling them down.

But how do we deal with people with untamed tongues? Do we turn a deaf ear to them or do we refuse to engage with such critical people? If there is an element of truth in the arrows they fire at us, we can learn from it. We can extract from their words whatever we find good, useful, constructive in their words even if the intent is to hurt or insult or humiliate us. We need to also discern the spirit or purpose behind the words. We need to be confident in our faith in the promise of the Lord that no tongue can stand in judgement against us. Since we are servants of the Lord and we make our tongues and limbs and minds to serve the Lord, we are subject only to the judgement of the Lord. Having said that, we can take feedback from the words of others to us.

We can emulate the example of Jesus. He faced criticism from the authorities of the day, criticism from the religious leaders of the day, criticism from common people and even from His own followers. But He faced it all with grace and answering all the critical questions and comments of different people with equanimity and even love. He did speak some hard words against the Pharisees. We too should not slink away from being truthful and speaking it when the situation warranted it. St James taught that the human tongue is naturally untameable. But with the grace of Jesus and the anointing and power of the Holy Spirit to tame our tongues so that we are neither hypocritical nor hyper critical. Our tongues according to St James is a rudder of our lives. Like a rudder, we need to balance our tongues so that we are neither sugar coating and glossing over the truth in order to be popular or to stay out of trouble with people or are we going around like a sharp open razor cutting people with whom we interact. A good way to avoid being over sensitive to the words of criticism or negative words of others and over critical on our part is to run the words we hear as well as the words we speak through several filters of questions like – is it true, is it necessary, is it timely or the right occasion, does it please the Lord, is it helpful or harmful to us, to others or to our relationships and prospects? These filters act as safety catches on our word-emotion triggers that work in us either as listeners or as speakers.