A thought by Jon Tyson from his book, The Burden Is Light: Liberating Your Life from the Tyranny of Performance and Success (p. 133). The Crown Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. (Click on the book title to go to Amazon.com to buy the book.)
Oh, it is so easy to be critical, isn’t it?

He goes on, “The danger of a critical spirit is that it creates a false power dynamic in our relationships. Judgment is based on the faulty assumption that we are in the right in every situation and that our opinion is called for and must be expressed. This is rarely true. The early church also wrestled with this tendency to be judgmental. It’s unique to our humanity, not to our era. Paul wrote to Christians in the city of Rome, urging them not to let a culture of judgment destroy the gospel of grace. The church in Rome was a mash-up of ethnicities and cultures that didn’t exist outside the church. All people tend to moralize based on their own culture and mistake their unique perspective for absolute truth and then judge others for their deviation from it. We make our perspective, rather than God’s Word, the gold standard.”
Later he says, “How many of the things we see in others, things that we rush to judge, are embedded in larger stories of heartache and pain, wounds, and frustration, of which we are oblivious? What made Jesus so compelling to lost and downtrodden souls is that he looked beyond the issues to see the people themselves. He could see the whole of their humanity and the arc of their redemption, and he helped them move toward healing through mercy… When we see the person, not the issue, we usher in the redemptive possibility that mercy unleashes… Judgment sees the issue. Mercy sees the person. This is how mercy triumphs over judgment.
Oh, if we would see the person as Christ sees them. It really would make a difference in our critical spirit, wouldn’t it?
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