NEUTRALIZING THE NITPICKERS

2 Corinthians 11

I'm going to lift a little part of the facade that I let people see and let you look at something deep within my mind that I don't like about myself. I have a hard time dealing with criticism. I wish that I could say that I'm thick-skinned and that I shed criticism the way water runs off a duck's back, but that's not true. I recall a time when I was shaking hands at the back door after preaching a sermon. People were saying nice things about what I had just preached. I don't remember the specifics, but they were complimentary. All of a sudden, a lady looked me right in the eye and said "X church across town is growing because it has dynamic preaching, unlike this church." I don't even remember the content of compliments, but I remember exactly what the critic said.

I may be wrong, but I don't think that I'm a whole lot different from most other folks in the church when it comes to taking criticism. I know that some of the people who offer criticism think they are doing something constructive. Every time I hear the phrase "constructive criticism," I think of the psychologist who responded to that by saying, "Baloney is baloney anyway you slice it." When I was a very young man, a Godly elder in the church where I was a member attempted to direct my fledgling preaching career in a positive direction. He said, "Norman criticism hurts the church more than anything." I said, "But what about constructive criticism?" He said, "There isn't any such thing." Criticism is such a volatile thing, that even when it is well-intentioned, perhaps even deserved, it's a rare thing for it to be productive of any good.

Charles Hodge once said, "Enough digs make a grave." I wonder how many people accept a ministry task believing their abilities are limited, but it needs to be done and nobody else has volunteered, so with some reservation, they say, "I'll do it." And then the criticism starts - a little dig here, a cute jab there, a half-joking but half-serious barb there and then we wonder why that brother or sister says, "I don't want to do this any more. I've enjoyed all of this I can stand."

I've been around long enough to receive just about every form of criticism that people can offer. I've had people walk in my office and tell me to my face that I'm totally incompetent as a preacher of the gospel. To tell you the truth I can shed that one like water off a duck's back, because I know it's not true. I'm not the greatest preacher alive, but I can preach. I can do a lot of other things. I'm not the best there is, but I'm also not the worst. The fellow who tells me I can't preach or teach or serve isn't really a very good judge of those things, so I don't worry too much about those kinds of guys, but the accumulation of a lot of little nit-picking complaints can become a heavy burden to bear.

The 11th chapter of 2 Corinthians can serve as kind of a manual for handling criticism. In this case the criticism wasn't coming from people who were throwing around innocent sounding barbs. They were downright mean-spirited. They were out for blood and the stakes were high. They were trying to undermine the influence of the great apostle, Paul.

Paul's response to their tactics in chapter 11 offers timeless strategy for neutralizing the nitpickers. I commend the chapter for your careful study, but in the limited space we have for this discussion, I want to focus on two tactics that Paul used.

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