THIS IS A SPECIAL MESSAGE FROM PASTOR KYLE DURING THIS TIME WITHOUT CHURCH SERVICES BEING HELD DUE TO COVID19.

FOR PRINTABLE PDF OF THIS MESSAGE, CLICK HERE.

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DO NOT SPEAK AGAINST ONE ANOTHER

Good Afternoon Church Family,

The majority of the “one anothers” throughout Scripture are positive commands (Do’s), but there are a few that are negative commands (Do Not’s). So far I’ve only covered the “Do’s,” but today I’d like to discuss a very important “Do Not” that I’ve observed as a struggle amongst all people, myself included.

James 4:11a says: Do not speak against one another, brethren. There’s something in the sin nature of all people to desire to gossip and slander others in order to make ourselves look or feel good. We have all seen this both in others as well as in ourselves. The Bible, however, has no shortage of passages that deal strongly with this issue in how we, as believers, are not to be gossiping and slandering, and the consequences of such behavior.

The rest of verse 11 through verse 12 says: He who speaks against a brother or judges his brother, speaks against the law and judges the law; but if you judge the law, you are not a doer of the law but a judge of it. There is only one Lawgiver and Judge, the One who is able to save and to destroy; but who are you who judge your neighbor? As with all sin, the real issue is not so much the action, but the heart attitude behind the action. In this passage, the issue is a judgmental heart. The type of judgment referred to here is one of condemnation, not evaluation. We should be judging one another, as we observe and evaluate one another with pure hearts in order to encourage and challenge one another, but we should not be judging one another in order to condemn one another. When we gossip and slander one another, we’re condemning them. That’s where we get the saying, “throw them under the bus.” Why would we do this to other believers who are fellow children of the family of God with whom we’ll spend eternity in Heaven? Instead, we should be seeking to love, honor, and protect one another.

So how should we talk about one another to others? It’s not so much that we need to keep our lips shut, but that we need to think rightly about one another. If we’re thinking rightly about one another, we’ll talk rightly about one another. However, this doesn’t mean that we’ll only ever give glowing reports of each other. In fact, there are times when we need to talk to someone about another’s sin, but this is not to be done in a condemning way, rather it is to be done in a prudent and necessary way with much prayer self-examination. In other words, we should be talking about one another to others, but we need to be doing it in the right ways and for the right reasons.

We’re all temped at times to gossip or even slander one another. However, before we fall for this age old trick of the devil to please our flesh, let us be challenged to think rightly of one another and therefore speak rightly of one another.

Missing you all,

- Pastor Kyle