FBC Daily Devotional – April 27, 2021

Well, a good Tuesday to you. I hope your day is going well so far and that your soul is not disquieted or at unrest after we looked yesterday at Psalm 43 that encourages us to preach to ourselves to hope in God when our soul is so disquieted.

If you didn't catch yesterday's devotional, I encourage you to go back and look at it or at least at least take the time to read Psalm 43. Well today I want to focus on just the one verse in our reading in Proverbs 10 and verse 18 and really I'm actually going to zero in on the latter half of that verse.

The Folly of Spreading Slander

Verse 18 says this, whoever hides hatred has lying lips and whoever spreads slander is a fool. So I want to zero in on the second half of that verse, whoever spreads slander is a fool. Now when we think of slander we typically think of it in the narrow definition of the word which means to defame another person's character by spreading false information about that person just to make them look bad.

But really the word has a broader meaning than that and therefore broader application. It means literally to cause to give a bad report. Slander is to give a bad report. So clearly you can see how that could refer to the defaming of a person's character and so forth.

But again the giving of a bad report can be can be broader than simply attacking an individual.

By.

Telling something bad about him that is largely untrue or a distortion of the truth. So I want to encourage us today to avoid any kind of passing on a bad report and a report that's bad would be for example a report that is misleading.

So you can manipulate for example everybody talks about how you can manipulate statistics to get them to say whatever you want them to say. Well, that's a form of a misleading report, a bad report. When you know here here are the statistics, but you slant them in a way to either defame a particular position or to inappropriately bolster your own.

That's a bad report. A bad report can also be one that is intending to tear somebody down and it can be.

Even.

Telling a measure of something that has a measure of truth to it. It may not be the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but it's got a measure of truth to it and it's an it's enough to color that person in a bad light and to therefore discredit him.

And this is a this is a you know really a logical fallacy. It's called an ad hominem argument when you you don't have a good argument against another person's position on something and so what you do is you attack the person.

That's the folly of passing along a bad report. Another way we can we can pass on a bad report is blowing something out of proportion. Something that is relatively small and minor and insignificant. We can, like the old saying goes, we can make a mountain out of a molehill.

Why do we do that? Why do we do that? I think a lot of times we make a mountain out of a molehill because again, we're trying to make somebody look bad or make their position look bad and that's that's an example of the folly of passing on a bad report.

And obviously, of course, a bad report would be something that is just downright false and we're we're passing on information that is untrue about another person about another person's position. So and I want you to think about this those of you that may be on Facebook or whatever one of those social media platforms.

How often this how often this occurs and it doesn't matter what where you are right, left, centrist. It doesn't matter. You pay any attention to Facebook at all and go through the posts and you're gonna find that there is plenty of stuff that's passed on.

It's just.

Either.

Plainly false or misleadingly misleading, not clearly accurately relaying the the perspective of the other party. And then of course a bad report is something that's just mere propaganda, mere propaganda.

And yeah, we're getting a lot of propaganda these days and we're getting it from the top down, aren't we? And from from our government and so on. Used to be in Nazi Germany, for example, there was a minister of propaganda and his whole job was to take something that happened and and blow it either out of proportion to make it look much worse than it actually was.

Like for example when the Germans would attack the British and they shot down three planes, you know, they would talk about this being a great victory over da da da da da da and you know make the make the Britons look bad, the British look bad, make the Germans look like they're the conquerors and make everybody feel good.

Make everybody feel like yeah we're achieving victory and and Germany was very proficient of that at that right down until the end of nearly end of the war. These days communist China is another purveyor of propaganda, but it doesn't have to be on such a large scale.

It really doesn't. It can be very personal. Any fool can give a bad report that is nothing but propaganda. And then another bad report is one where we dredge up old news. We dredge up stuff that should be buried in the past.

I.

Think this is possibly one of the biggest problems in relationship conflicts, husband-wife conflicts and so on, where something that is old news, something that happened in the past, it was discussed, it was dealt with, it should have been buried, it should have been forgotten.

But it wasn't. Instead it was gunny-sacked. I like to use that term. It was gunny-sacked. It was put into a bag just waiting for an opportunity to bring it back out again. Well, when you do that, what you're doing is you are giving a bad report.

And I just want to encourage you. Be careful with what you say. Isn't that a constant emphasis in Scripture and especially in the book of Proverbs? Be careful about what you say. The things you post on Facebook, the things you say to other people.

Make sure that you're avoiding the folly of a bad report. Oh, may God give us grace to do just that. So let's pray and ask him for that wisdom. Father, I pray, give us wisdom. Deliver us from this folly of giving a bad report, of sharing slander, of defaming, of passing on false information or overblown information, any way dishonest.

So Lord, deliver us from that, we pray. Help us to be faithful in our words, truthful, accurate, and we pray it in Jesus' name. Amen. All right. Well, have a good rest of your Tuesday and may God give you great wisdom today.

Good day.