Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript – Reformation Covenant Church

Sermon scripture is found in 1 Thessalonians chapter 4. Please stand for the reading of God’s command word. 1 Thessalonians chapter 4. We’ll begin reading at verse 9.

But as touching love, you need not that I write unto you. For ye yourselves are taught of God to love one another. And indeed you do it toward all the brethren which are in all Macedonia. But we beseech you, brethren, that you increase more and more, and that you study to be quiet, and to do your own business, and to work with your own hands, as we commanded you, that you may walk honestly toward them that are without, and that you may have lack of nothing.

May be seated. This time according to the example in the book of Nehemiah, the younger children may be dismissed if their parents desire that of them to go to their Sabbath schools.

What I’m doing this afternoon is sort of taking a diversion off to a subject study in the middle of going through the book of First Thessalonians. And the reason we’re doing this, as you remember from last week, is that the passage of scripture we just read is part of the practical exhortations by Paul to the Thessalonians at the concluding two chapters of the book.

Now, after this section, which we’ll finish up either today or if this sermon goes too long next week, the following week after that, Paul gets into a section dealing with those that are dead in the Lord and the coming of Christ and then he returns to the practical exhortations. Because of that, some have seen that perhaps one of the reasons for the idleness that marks those people that engaged in sins that Paul is warning them against in the verses we just read is that part of that idleness is based upon what you might call rapture speculation or second coming speculation. And that is pertinent to our day and age. And we’ll talk about that when we get into that section.

But today, what I want to do is reiterate basically what we said last week. I took some time last week to develop what I think the central message of the passage we just read from First Thessalonians is.

And that is that in the context of brotherly love, there are some bounds in terms of intervention in other people’s affairs that if you go beyond those things, you’re no longer acting in brotherly love. You’re now acting in terms of discord among the brethren, which is one of the things that God hates. And so Paul in that verse we just read said that they should study to do their own business and that they should by doing that then avoid becoming busybodies and avoid, I think, talebearing and perhaps even false witness implied in that as well.

And so because of that we’re going to go off into a discourse today on a subject study really of sins of the tongue against brothers.

Before we get into this I will just mention and I won’t read any more questions from this paper. I think well I might just read a few now. Remember I’ve been mentioning this paper that has questions for evaluation written by a man to his sister back in 1833 and it was a directory of the faith essentially was 300 pages long or more and he had various questions she should use to evaluate her growth.

The sermons that we’re involved with now and will continue for the next few months will be pointless unless you take and evaluate your life in terms of the command word that we hear. We’re called into worship God. He gives us instructions how to run our lives, what we should do in our lives and a message to take to those that we come in contact with. And we’re to evaluate ourselves as we go back to our Monday through Saturday affairs.

How will we implement what God has instructed us to do on his holy mountain as it were, coming forth the law of God from the church into our lives to instruct us how we’re to live. So it’s very important that evaluation is a part of our growing sanctification, the way we put to death sins of the flesh and we resurrect in actions rather that are not sinful but that are righteous.

I made some copies of these questions and they’re downstairs on the table by the door as you go into the room. There’s not enough for everybody, but if you want one, please feel free to pick them up.

In any event, some of the questions for Sabbath evening, you might consider these yourself in the context of your family when you get home. This is a good activity to sort of evaluate your day. Some of the questions that he said she should ask herself: What was my general frame of mind while there, that is at worship services? What was my manner? Have I felt any sensible delight in the exercises of public worship? Have I enjoyed worship? In other words, worshipping God with what feelings did I join the devotional exercises of singing and prayer?

You know, are you actually participating in the singing mentally with your whole heart or are you just sort of going along and silently saying the words because you’re afraid of your voice or something? God calls us to worship him and he wants us to worship him with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength. And that includes vocal cord strength as well. So we’re supposed to worship God actively. And it’s a good thing to evaluate in our households how well our children are learning to sing praises to God. We’re not singing for each other. We’re singing for God.

What message did I receive? Whose message did I receive? In what character did I view the preacher? For whom did I hear—for myself or for others? Very important question for today. It’s very easy to start thinking of other people and what they’re doing wrong in terms of some of these areas. But we’re supposed to come here primarily to hear a message for ourselves to reform our own lives.

These are some questions you can ask to evaluate. Was the word mixed with faith? How much prayer did I mingle with hearing? You know, you don’t just come here and sit and hear a sermon. And you don’t just come and sit as part of congregational worship. You’re to be fully involved in it. In terms of the sermon, you’re supposed to be thinking it through, reflecting upon your own life, seeing what areas of conviction the spirit may be bringing into your life, making notes of how you have to amend your life upon your note sheets or whatever and really being involved in it more than just simply sitting there.

In any event there’s more but I won’t go on—we don’t have the time. But I’d encourage you to pick up one of these sets of questions and begin to use some of them. You don’t want to use all of them; you could go crazy with introspection. But on the other hand it’s a good thing to evaluate ourselves.

Okay, as we said, this is really following up on last week when we talked about holiness in everyday life. And everyday life is filled with actions of our tongue, and the tongue can be a tremendous force for good or it can be a tremendous force for evil.

And there’s a whole bunch of scriptural references warning us about improper use of the tongue throughout the scriptures. Your outline looks rather crowded and it is—just briefly touching upon this subject. We could go a lot further with a lot more scriptural references and use a lot of biblical examples where sins of the tongue really created havoc in the context of the covenant community.

But holiness in everyday life involves studying to be quiet as we said last week, minding our own business and to perform our own vocational calling. Okay? And the result of that will be an effectual witness to those around us.

Now, we’re going to talk today then about sins of speech against the body. And I want to get your attention at the beginning of the sermon by talking about the greatness of this sin, the tremendous capacity for evil that sins of speech against the body have with them and the need therefore to attend diligently to what God’s word says about the proper use of our tongues.

In Proverbs 6:19 and some of this will be reviewed from last week. Remember we said there we have recorded the seven things that God hates. God hates these seven things. And the seventh thing that God hates is he that soweth discord among the brethren. He that soweth discord among the brethren. God hates that.

Bridges—and I’ll be quoting from Bridges’ commentary on the Proverbs several times this afternoon—he wrote in the early 1800s, many good Puritan stock men so to speak who wrote upon the Proverbs. Many good commentaries out there on them. In any event on this particular verse, Bridges said that if the heavenly dew descends on the brothers who dwell together in unity—a reference to Psalm 133 where you know how blessed are those that dwell together in unity and God’s blessing is shown as coming down upon them.

Bridges says that if the heavenly dew descends on the brothers who dwell together in unity, a withering blast will fall on those whose mistaking prejudice for principle selfishly cause dissensions. Terrible is the Lord’s mark upon them who are worldly minded and devoid of the spirit. Terrible cursing from God upon those that do these things unrepentantly.

James 3 we’ll be reading that entire section all of chapter 3 before the final song today. There’s a lot of very interesting material in James 3. It’s interesting how, for instance, James says that with the same tongue we both bless and curse. We always think of that, but it goes on to say that the blessing is usually blessing toward God and the cursing is what we say to our neighbor. And it’s very parallel in thought to John’s epistles where he says if you say you love God but hate your brother you’re a liar, because you can’t love God that you haven’t seen if you hate your brother who is an image of God that you have seen.

And so same thing in James: we can come here and sing praises with our tongues then to walk away and not to build each other up in the faith but rather to tear each other down with our tongues is a terrible thing, because this should not be so.

James says that the tongue is the rudder of the whole man. The way the ship has a rudder, the way the horse has a bit in his mouth to control it, to cause it to go one way or the other, the tongue, James says, is a small thing, but it controls the direction of our lives. Certainly, our tongues control the direction of our conversations. And if what we’re talking about is making our conversations pleasing to God and edifying to our brother and sister, then our tongue is the key to that.

The conversation will go this way or that way, and our tongues will direct it like the rudder of a ship to goodness or to badness.

James says it’s a very impossible thing to fully control the tongue. We all sin in this area. James makes that clear. He says in verse 6: “the tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity. So is the tongue among our members that it defiles the whole body and setteth on fire the course of nature and it is set on fire by hell.”

You know, you couldn’t get much stronger words, right? The tongue’s a fire. That fire is set on fire by hell and it causes discord or dissension in our universe. It defiles our whole body.

Jesus said, “It’s not that which goes into your mouth which defiles you. It’s what comes out of your mouth.” And what comes out of your mouth, speech, the actions of the tongue. Speech is a tremendous gift that humans have. It’s an image of the person of God. His word speaks to us. He gives us the tremendous capability of speech. And we’re to use that speech for good. But all too often the speech is used for evil and it defiles our whole body.

I mentioned this up in Seattle: you know that those who spend more time thinking about what they put into their mouths in terms of their diet than about God’s law are way out of whack. And if you want to look at this verse the same way, if we spend more time being introspective about the food we eat as opposed to evaluating the speech that comes out of our mouth, you see, we’ve got it all backwards. We’ve got it all backwards.

God says, “Evaluate your speech. Think of it very carefully.” This is an area in which our children—this is a central part of the upbringing of our children is to teach them to use their speech correctly and it can have a tremendous effect for good and teach them to get away from speech that is evil or slanderous or tearing each other down.

Psalm 140:3 says that they’ve sharpened their tongues like a serpent, poison is under their lips.

See, now in the context of the extended household of God, particularly here at RCC, of course, we’re not going to have this kind of a problem, are we? I don’t think there’s anybody here—I’m sure there is not—who would self-consciously go out and get their tongue all sharp like you’d sharpen a pencil and put poison on it and go out and attack other people in the congregation here. You’re not going to do that.

But because you don’t do that, don’t think that you might not fall in other ways. We’re much like the Thessalonians in church. As I’ve said before, we abound in love toward each other. I had this last week an example. And I cannot share with you the details, but it involves a couple here at our church, and I was amazed at the lengths they took to avoid a potentially divisive issue from becoming divisive in the context of the body.

And they did it particularly by putting some very severe restrictions on speech about a particular topic. Very exemplary pattern. I wish I could share it all with you, but I can’t. They very self-consciously thought through the possible damage that could come out of a particular incident by way of their tongues. And they took steps then to control that. And I think that’s the kind of church this is. We abound in love to one toward another.

I’m not trying to put anybody down here today, but I am trying to say as Paul warned the Thessalonians, don’t sit on your laurels. Abound in love. Continue to grow in that love for one another. Increase more and more of your love for outsiders as well, outside of our own church, for other members of the body of Christ. And so we all have much to learn. We all have sins of our tongue. James makes that clear.

Well, they may not be as bad as sharpening the tongue like a serpent, but it is bad. And we’ll see as we go through this material that most of us have areas for improvement in this particular area.

I might just mention here that in terms of the bigger picture, Christian Reconstruction, I think, has suffered a lot because of evangelical and dispensational Christians not taking these sort of verses to heart and maliciously attacking this church among other things. I’ve heard this church attacked by people who have no idea what we’re doing here, who have no way of knowing who we are or what we do. And yet they’ve referred to us in various very uncomplimentary ways and Reconstruction in general has suffered that same sort of attack.

Our job is to make sure we don’t respond in kind. And there are elements within the Christian Reconstruction community that also have called upon themselves the wrath of God and God’s judgment because of the improper use of the tongue. It’s a two-way street is what I’m saying.

And the battle that goes on between reconstructionists and dispensationalists and reconstructionists and other evangelicals or even Presbyterians, a lot of times that battle is over improper use of the tongue one way or the other. And so the real issues that need to be thought through and that the whole church of Jesus Christ, everybody together needs to think through and come to grips with those become not addressed because Satan has diverted the whole thing off by causing slander and dishonest speech to enter into the discussion.

Terribly divisive thing and Satan will make every use of it as he possibly can.

So speech is important and sins of the tongue are an important thing to get your attention by. Here a couple other things real quickly. Romans 1:30, you remember Romans 1 is the picture of the downward progression of people into sin. Romans 1, most Christians are familiar with it today because it talks about homosexuals and there’s been a lot of controversy the last few weeks about homosexuals.

And certainly homosexuality is a capital crime according to the scriptures. No doubt about it. And I believe that’s true today as well. But don’t get too cocky because Romans 1 goes on to talk about other sins in this downward progression that are just as bad. And in verse 30, one of the specific sins put right next to haters of God are backbiters. Backbiters.

The very thing we’re talking about: backbiting in the scripture, the Greek word means simply to talk against somebody. Okay? To backbite is to talk against somebody without them knowing of it, of course. And so backbiter is put in the same category as those wicked homosexuals and the haters of God.

Conversely, Psalm 15:3, and by now I hope you’ve memorized or understood and heard often enough me say this, and your children should start to get it too, that Psalm 15 is an entrance liturgy. It says, “What is required of those who will worship God, understanding that the only way the covenant can be completely kept is through the work of Jesus Christ.”

We’re not talking about earning our salvation, but we are demonstrating the grace of God that has been brought to us in salvation in Christ by various activities. And Psalm 15:3 says: “He that backbiteth not with his tongue, nor doeth evil to his neighbor, nor taketh up a reproach against his neighbor.”

Three-fold repeated injunction there: not to backbite, not to hurt your neighbor, not to take up a reproach against them. That is a bad deal according to God’s word. And we’ll see some case laws about this later on as well.

Now, Proverbs 12:18 says, “There is that speaketh like the piercings of a sword. Slander and backbiting speaks like the piercing of a sword.” But Proverbs 12:18 goes on to say, “The tongue of the wise is health.” So on one hand, the tongue can be extremely devastating. On the other hand, the tongue can be a tremendous force for good in the context of our world and in the context of this church.

It’s very important to realize that going in to put off the old way of speaking and put on a new way of speaking. Okay.

So hopefully now I’ve gotten your attention and you’re saying this is an important subject, a very important subject on which I should be evaluating myself on a regular basis. I should be evaluating my children and I should be teaching them as well what the proper use of the tongue is all about.

Well, hopefully I’ll remember this in the correct order. And one other thing I wanted to point out here at the beginning is that remember the context for this in 1 Thessalonians 4. Paul says, you are doing great in brotherly love and I want you to abound more and more. He’s talking about geographically as well. And so when we think of correct ways to speak and incorrect ways to speak, we should just be thinking now primarily—that’s the context of the covenant household here.

But beyond that, we should be thinking of other Christians as well. And we should be thinking of dispensationalist churches and Presbyterian churches and evangelical churches and charismatic churches. There are Christians in all these fellowships. And we have to be very careful the way we speak about other churches and other believers according to these injunctions we’re hearing today.

So if you think you got it made in terms of treating everybody here, okay, then begin to analyze and evaluate how you’re treating people outside of our own church.

It’s interesting. I heard a sermon just this morning as I was getting dressed. I don’t even know where it was from, but he was talking about Mr. Dhan who is not Reformed but who has a TV ministry. And he was saying the one way to evaluate whether or not you’re truly loving your brother or sister in the church is to think of them and then think what’s the first thing that comes to my mind about that particular person, and if it’s a negative thing you probably are not doing good.

Now, we’re all—we all have faults. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying ignore those. We’ll get to that a little later. But primarily, we should be putting on a correct way of thinking: bowels of compassion, tenderness, and forgiveness toward our brothers and sisters. And so we should be putting on minds like that as well, and we should correct our thinking accordingly.

This man this morning gave the example of a boy who went to—I guess this actually happened, I don’t know—to Fred Meyer’s recently. He wanted to buy his mother a slip. He was about 8 years old, something like that, for her birthday. “I’m going to surprise her.” And he didn’t know her size, of course. And the sales lady said, “Why don’t you describe her to me?” And the boy said, “Well,” and when it got right down to it, he said, “Well, I don’t know. She’s just perfect, you know, in every way.”

And so the lady gave him a size 34 slip. And then, of course, a couple of days later, the lady had to return the slip because she was actually a size 52, okay?—large lady. But to the boy, he believed the best about her. Thought of her in the best terms possible. And it wouldn’t have occurred to this particular boy who’d been raised well to think of his mother incorrectly, to look at what might be seen as some sort of imperfection to other people and to relay that to others.

And that’s what I’m trying to get us to do is to sensitize ourselves to think that way about other believers in this church and outside of the church as well. And then particularly to teach these things to our children. Okay.

The typical pattern of this sin among Christians is this next point of the outline. How does this normally work? And from last week, we talked about idleness becoming meddling, meddling becoming talebearing, and talebearing becoming false witness. Now, that’s a very typical pattern laid out in the scriptures.

And it’s interesting that the Proverbs we just read responsively, Proverbs 26. See, I think that the Proverbs are far more linked than many people think. Many people think they’re just a collection of odd proverbs. I do not see it that way. More and more often, as I study in Proverbs, I see connections in terms of the verses that are placed in a particular place.

We see in Proverbs 26, a description first in verse 12 of a man who is proud—the responsive reading we just did. And then verses 13 through 16, the sluggard. And then in verse 16, the sluggard is wiser in his own conceit than seven who can render a good reason. Okay, so the sluggard is related to pride. And the sluggard, the slothful man is idle.

And then it says in verse 17, he that passeth by and meddleth with strife not belonging to him. It’s like when he taketh of the dog by his ears, he gets into then a discussion of meddling, and from meddling the proverb goes on to talk about talebearing and false witness.

So right there in that proverb—I didn’t pick it for that reason but right—I noticed that as we were responsively reading it earlier. I think you see that same pattern going through.

So these things typically begin with idleness. Now we read some scriptures last week, but I’ll just briefly touch on them again. In terms of the Thessalonians, as we said in 2 Thessalonians 3, Paul spent most of the chapter dealing with the same problem. The brief instruction he gave didn’t work. And so he had to expand upon it.

In verse 11 of 2 Thessalonians 3, he says, “For we hear there are some which walk among you disorderly, working not at all, but are busy bodies.” And then he says, “We command and exhort by our Lord Jesus that with quietness they work and eat their own bread.” Okay. So he says the same thing that he said back in 1 Thessalonians 4—that idleness and failure to work which leads to minding other people’s business and that leads to a tongue that needs to be ceased or working actively to quiet that tongue that we talked about last week from 1 Thessalonians chapter 4.

Again in 1 Timothy 5:13, speaking of widows, unmarried widows, “And withal they learned to be idle, wandering about from house to house, and not only idle, but tattlers also and busybodies, speaking things which they ought not.”

See, you got idleness. You got busybodies involving themselves in things they shouldn’t be involved with. But then also speaking things as tattlers—idleness, meddling, talebearing, and slander.

What happens? That’s the progression normally.

Now, let’s just remind ourselves of a couple of facts here before we start saying, “Well, we’re okay because we’re not too idle and we don’t go about from house to house very much.” Remember that these epistles are written to people that worked a lot. They worked long hours of work. We don’t have long—a 40-hour work week is a modern thing. You know that, don’t you? And all the devices we have in our home to save housewives labor are very important as well.

And if you—you know, even if you’re doing your job right now, homeschoolers—it’s a little different. That seems to take up every bit of full time if you’re doing it right. But if you’re not homeschooling, you do have a lot of idle time. And you have to be very careful. It doesn’t mean that leisure is bad; it probably means too much leisure is bad.

After all, the commandment tells us, “Six days shalt thou work, do all thy labor.” You’re supposed to be busy six days. And the seventh day is the day of leisure. But in any event, there is a lot of idleness about in the world today.

And secondly, in terms of going from house to house, my wife reminded me this morning that you know, we’ve got a lot easier way to go from house to house today than they used to have. That telephone, you know, you don’t got to go walking or driving. You just pick up the phone and start dialing numbers. And the telephone’s a great thing, but it brings with it a tremendous temptation to people who are home a lot to get on that phone a lot and spend too much time on the phone, not dealing with things that really are your business and starting to go off—then as the conversation lingers—into other people’s business and you get into that idleness and then you’re meddling. Now getting going from house to house, getting stories, and pretty soon you start transferring those stories to the next person you call up on the phone, speaking about somebody else or even speaking about the person you just talked with but they don’t want you to pass things on.

And so the telephone is a tremendous temptation to housewives today in the country context of our culture, and you better know it. You know, temptations can be avoided. God gives us grace. No temptation is too hard for us. He always gives us grace with the temptation and provides the means of escape. But you know, awareness of the temptation is one of the means God uses to cause us to be delivered from those temptations. So be aware that is a potential temptation to many people today. Okay.

Moving on to meddling. And here I’ve got—and I just tried to categorize some of the scriptures that deal with meddling in the scriptures in different ways. And the first pattern I saw developing was that there are various dangers of meddling that the scriptures point out to us.

We read verse 17 of Proverbs 26 responsively. One of the dangers about meddling is it’s like picking a dog up by the ears. Now, we got friendly dogs in our house that know us. They don’t mind getting their ears pulled. If you go up to an unknown dog who doesn’t know you or who’s upset and take him by the ears, by the time you let him go, he’s going to want to bite you. And so there’s danger to the meddler himself. He can get in a lot of trouble.

1 Peter 4:15: “let none of you suffer as a murderer or as a thief or as an evildoer or as a busybody in other men’s matters.” So you can suffer as a result of this. And this is the sort of suffering—later we’re going to talk about suffering. Probably next week, maybe—at this afternoon we’re going to talk about suffering in terms of being suffering people speaking ill about you, that is a good suffering God commends it. But this sort of suffering because you’re a busybody and other men’s matters—God does not commend. It’s simply punishment, discipline, chastisement.

Another problem with meddling is that you can’t put the genie back in the bottle so to speak. Proverbs 17:14 says, “The beginning of strife is as one letteth out water. Therefore, leave off contention before it be meddled with.” You start to let water go and pretty soon it just finds its own course. “The ringing of the nose produces blood,” and the blood is a hard thing to stop up. It’s another proverb. So the beginning of strife is the same way. When you get a problem going, you may not be able to handle the whole thing and pretty soon you got a tiger by the tail and you’re hoping you don’t get somebody calling you or something doesn’t happen, or you don’t know what you’ve let loose.

The thing can begin to take on lots of permutations as it begins to travel about. And so there’s dangers to meddling.

I might just mention here though, I think one of the key ways that Christians are enticed into this particular sin—another temptation besides the phone—is that, and this is the context that Paul places it in 1 Thessalonians 4: the love of the brethren. We have a proper need to know each other and to know how to pray for each other and to know how to assist one another. We have a proper compassion that God gives us for each other. But that proper compassion can be twisted.

And one of the chief ways that meddling occurs is when people take up offenses for other believers. They see somebody do this to somebody else. They’re nothing to do with it. And maybe it’s been handled, maybe it hasn’t been handled correctly, whatever. And they want to get involved in it and take care of it ostensibly because of a good motivation to help out. But the Bible says, “Don’t do that.” Uh-uh. Uh-uh.

You’re not the only means that God has to take care of problems. You’re not God’s gift to problems. You’re not God’s only problem solver in the universe. He’s got lots of them out there. He has lots of ways for his will to work. And if he doesn’t have you as part of a situation, you should not intrude yourself into it normally.

Now, there are occasions where you should obviously—the Apostle Paul, whose life was spared by somebody who heard a conspiracy against his life in the book of Acts and then went to Paul and said, “They’re planning to kill you, brother.” He got involved. And there are clutch situations where it’s proper to do that. But primarily, to take up an offense for someone else is a big mistake. It’s not your problem. You’re beginning to meddle.

I mentioned idleness at home. Idleness in conversation is another precursor to meddling. And again this idea that the tongue is the rudder that stirs conversation. And if you like to talk on the phone or in person, whatever it is, and now you’ve run out of the various things you should have to interact with that person about—the business that you two both have to conduct. After all, all our activities are supposed to be promoting the kingdom of God, right?

You run out of those sort of things, you still keep talking and in an excess of words, sin is unavoidable, the scriptures say. And frequently those conversations then can start to talk about other people. We love to do that. We love to have secret knowledge of other people, affairs that we have no idea. We like that information. It is a sin that just sits there at the middle of us festering away and it’s a black hole that’s easily fallen into.

I was thinking as we were singing today and as we’re approaching God in worship that maybe that’s really the model for all these problems with slandering and being meddling in other people’s affairs. You know, if you burst into through the temple and into the Holy of Holies, the instructions that God had given the Levites were that you were to be killed. The guy standing there with arrows and spears and the guy comes in and bursts in where he’s not supposed to go—right through him. See, that’s what you’re supposed to do to guard the Holy of Holies. And if you don’t do it right, God will and does judge people who break in illegally, kill them, give them leprosy in the scriptures, whatever.

God has a means of accessing the Holy of Holies. It’s not like he wants us out, but he wants us to come and worship him on his terms. And his terms are that we are aware of our sin and of our need for a mediator. And when we’re not aware of that and we try to worship God in our own strength, somehow that we’re good enough to get into the temple of God—uh-uh. That’s when you’re thrust through by God’s darts and you’re judged.

And there’s a proper place for confidence sharing. Now, I might just make this caveat here that all that I’m going to say about sins of the tongue today and probably next week as well—it’s taking a little time to get through these—but I want to do this slowly. All of this context, with proper caveat, is that within husband and wife, I think the scriptures teach you have one person there that information goes back and forth. And I tell people who tell me things confidentially, I always speak to my wife about things, okay? I share with her. She’s my counselor. And it’s good to have other counselors as well. And it’s good to know things about other people sometimes when it’s proper.

But we seem to want that knowledge when others don’t really invite us in to have it. A way of weedling that knowledge out and bursting in as it were into another person’s life. And God wants us to treat each other in a very deliberate fashion so as not to cause each other problems and only to come in when you’re invited in.

God does not want us going over and banging on people’s door or kicking the doors in and coming into their lives uninvited. If you do that in the Old Testament, the assumption is you’re a thief and you’re there to kill him in the night time and you could be killed yourself by a person protecting his house. And so God says there’s proper ways of access and relationship.

Correct relationship to God precedes access to correct information from him. And proper relationship to each other is the necessary precursor for correct access to information of a restricted sort. The gossip, the talebear, the meddler wants information where it isn’t his business. And then he wants to tell people things about the Holy of Holies that they have no right to know. It’s not their business. See, they have no need to know it. Okay?

Idleness and conversations, idleness at home leads to meddling. And meddling—there is a real problem.

One other thing about mentioning the perversion of the good sympathy we have for other believers and the unnecessary taking up of offenses: this sin is particularly devastating as well because it can tend to feed upon itself. And the person that becomes involved in affairs that are not their own can frequently be seen as some sort of sympathetic person then and somebody that can be dumped on all kinds of information that is improper.

So because we love to talk about other people so much and love to engage this particular sin so much, and have to really train ourselves that it’s a bad deal—because that’s true. If we find somebody that we can talk to other people about a great deal, we’re going to like that and we’re going to build a relationship with that person more often than not and we’re going to make use of that. See?

And so you have to be very careful when you find lots of people sharing lots of intimate details of their lives with you. It’s probably not proper and you probably have to evaluate your own life and say, “Why is this going on in my life? Am I some sort of talebear? Am I meddling? Am I hearing things I shouldn’t hear about another person’s husband, about another person’s wife, about somebody else in the church? Have I done wrong here?” You got to be very sensitive.

Our heart is deceitful above all things. We have a tremendous capacity for rationalization as sinful creatures. “The heart is deceitful above all things. Who can know it?” Apart, I believe, apart from the conviction of God’s spirit, we can’t know our hearts. We don’t know when we’re sinning and God’s spirit brings conviction to us and we should pray for that sensitivity in the context of the family.

One of the things you can have a good close counselor in your husband or wife for is to be that voice of the spirit sometimes, reminding you this is contrary to scripture. Back off here. See? Important thing we have to do one for the other. Okay.

So first of all the source is idleness, and then meddling. Meddling is spoken against. There are dangers to it. And then secondly, we have various sources of meddling enumerated in the scriptures.

First of all, hatred. Proverbs 10:12: “Hatred stirreth up strife, but love covereth all sins.” Now, notice the horns of the dilemma that we’re on. We can either exercise hatred, stirring up strife, or the other alternative is love covering all sins. No neutrality is what I think is being pointed out here.

Bridges in his commentary said that hatred, however varnished by smooth pretense, is the selfish principle of man. Like an underground fire, it continually stirs up mischief, creates or keeps alive resentful coldness, disgust, dislikes, envyings, and evil surmisings. It finds fault with the infirmities of others, aggravates the least slip or resents the most trifling or even imagined provocation. Hatred does these things.

Additionally, you could work the other way around. If hatred stirs up strife, and if your actions are stirring up strife in the context of the covenant community or the Christian church extended, or even with your neighbors, if you’re stirring up a lot of strife—not always, but sometimes that can show you that you’re actually involved in hatred. And what you should be doing for your brother or sister, particularly according to 1 Corinthians 13, is to cover sins and to think the best of people and not to expose them and hold them up.

So the question here in terms of evaluation is: do we really love each other? This is what Paul was saying. If we love one another in the context of the community, we will protect each other. We will not stir up strife and keep kindling the fire over and over. Unless of course there’s a sin that must be dealt with, and then there is a proper procedure to deal with that sin—we’ll talk about a little bit later. But generally speaking, stirring up strife is seen as a very bad thing in the context of the scriptures.

And Proverbs 10 says that one of the sources of meddling is actual hatred. Be and that’s what you’re supposed to put to death is your hatred one for another. James says the same thing: “Why do these things happen? Envying, strivings.” There’s hatred that you have for your brother at the bottom of our relationships. Unregenerate relationships—there’s real hatred for other people who are challenges to our autonomy, coming and to us being God. That’s what unregenerate man thinks: he’s God. And anybody that’s going to challenge that is going to get his wrath.

And you know, God hates anybody that purports to be God as well. The difference is he is God and we’re not. And he has a proper hatred for those who would seek to be gods.

Well, this hatred sits down there. When we’re regenerate—yes, God gives us the capacity of the Holy Spirit to love each other—but it doesn’t happen like that. We said last week it’s something that must be worked on. Paul said, “I press toward that mark. I work real hard to try to do these things.” And I think the proper interpretation of the verse last week is: work real hard. Be very diligent to keep quiet. Work real—if you get a piece of information because of your improper meddling and idleness about somebody else, you work real hard to keep it quiet. Don’t you open your lips and speak that to somebody else without going through the biblical mechanism for conflict resolution. Don’t do it.

We got to work real hard to put off that hatred and to put on love which covers all sins.

A second source of meddling is pride. Proverbs 18:6: “A fool’s lips enter into contention, and his mouth calleth for strokes.” He gets into that battle like picking up the dog by the ears, and he’s a fool is what verse 18:6 says. Proverbs 20:3: “It’s an honor for a man to cease from strife, but every fool will be meddling, meddling, meddling, meddling.”

Looking for perfect justice. There is no perfect justice apart from the consideration of the work of our Savior and then God’s eschatology as well. Now the fool in the scriptures is not an idiot. You know, we think of the fool as the village idiot who doesn’t know what he’s doing. That’s not the biblical picture of a fool. The fool is the one who has said in his heart there’s no god. There’s no consideration of God in all his thoughts. He’s God and he’s going to right every wrong. And if he sees two people in a problem he’s going to get in there and take care of it and he’s going to say, “Let there be strokes to this person.” Uh-uh. God is alive and on the throne. And the fool who sets himself up as God, as a result, enters into meddling.

The fool is self-assured according to the scriptures. Lawson in his commentary on the Proverbs written just before Bridges’ commentary a few years before said that the fool is so self-conceited he can bear no contradiction. The fool is so impertinent that he’ll have a hand in every other man’s business. The fool is so proud that he cannot bear to be found in the wrong. And the fool is so stubborn that he’ll have the last word, though his lips prove his destruction.

Now, that’s a good way to evaluate ourselves and our relationship with other people. Are we so self-conceited that we can bear no contradiction? Or do we take into account when people bring contradiction to us and try to even analyze and evaluate it? Are we so impertinent that we’ll have a hand in every other man’s business, or do we know the limits that God has called us to and that the primary place in which we’re to work and exercise conflict resolution etc. is in the context of the home, taking care of our own business?

Now certainly there’s things that happen in the church that need addressing in the community as well. The primary sphere of our activity and the group that God has given us to disciple in terms of the family are the children. That’s who you’re supposed to be working with primarily. A fool is impertinent enough to think he’s got a hand in every other man’s business.

Are we so proud that we cannot bear to be found in the wrong, or are we so stubborn that we have to have the last word? If you’ve always got to have the last word, if you always have to rationalize or justify your actions, that’s the mark of foolishness in the scriptures.

You know, I do counseling in terms of the church, in terms of our own family. In my own life, I see it as well. You get two people who have a conflict and you say, “What’s your side of the story? What’s your side of the story?” It doesn’t usually do much good because they both have a reason why they do the thing they do that bugs the other person. Usually, if they’re a Christian, not in any kind of obvious sin, it’s a pretty good reason. It’s selfish. It doesn’t take into account the other person really, but other than that, they’re perfectly legitimate reasons for doing this, for that particular activity.

But see, God wants us to be married. Now, some are called to be single, but normatively we’re to be married. Why? Because he doesn’t want us to be selfish. He wants us not to think of ourselves first. And so when you get in a couple counseling and you begin to go through the problems and you ask people why they do certain things, they always have good reasons, good rationalizations, or even really good reasons for why they did it.

But the scriptures say we’re to evaluate those reasons on how they affect the other person. Forget the wife and the husband’s actions may be totally justified. Or forget the husband and what the wife is doing may be totally justified. Forget, you know, if two brothers arguing—the other person and the actions are completely understandable, very logical. Fall right out, you know, it’s easy to see, “Oh yeah, I see why you did that.”

But put the other person in the equation and it shows the spotlight on the person’s actions that they’re sinful because they’re self-oriented. They’re not thinking of how that communication affected the other person and how that action could have had impact upon this person’s reputation and how this particular action could have involved other people in the affair who had no reason to know about a particular conflict between brothers.

Maybe you don’t care, but maybe the other person does and maybe it’s going to hurt their reputation as well. You see, the fool doesn’t even think that he could be wrong somehow. And he doesn’t. And the reason is because he doesn’t consider that other person sitting there in the room with them. So self-justification is a sure sign of foolishness in our lives that need to be driven out and need to be meditated upon.

The bottom of all this, of course, is the pride of the fool. And so, Proverbs 28:25 says that it is he that is of a proud…