The Eleventh Commandment | Ep. 8

So, the very nature of a public platform exposes a person to pushback. If someone is so thin-skinned that they make a statement about God, about his holy word, and make that public on Facebook, and then complain about any pushback against it, the problem is not with you.

It's not that you're not being nice. They made a public teaching, which they're then responsible to defend.

The Myth That Jesus Was Always Nice

And welcome to Off the Cuff. I'm Average Joe Gormley here with Pastor Jeff Kluwer, and we're going to talk about being nice today. So, what a topic. Yeah, it's a nice one. It's a nice topic. So, the question that we got, you know, every week we get, and so let me just say this first off too.

Every week, one of our favorite elders, Ivan Solero, sends us some questions, and one of them that he sent in today is on the topic of the 11th commandment, which is...

Thou shalt be nice.

Everyone knows the 11th commandment. In fact, it's almost as popular as Don't Judge Me in the atheist circles. So, I just want to get into this topic right away. So, why is Thou shalt be nice such a popular thing for people?

Well, what was that book?

It was at Dane Ortlund who wrote a book called Gentle and Lowly or something like that. And all it does is it takes the aspects of Jesus when he's being gentle and personifies Jesus as if that encapsulates everything that he was or did and empties the harder side.

So, when you read Matthew chapter 23, there's nothing nice about Jesus's interaction with the Pharisees. 23, 23.

That's like my favorite verse. I think we talked about that a couple weeks ago. Which one is 23, 23? So, that's the tithing of mint and dill. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And you think he's... You should tithe your oregano and your garlic.

Yeah. Well, I... Yeah. You should have done the weightier matters of the law, too. And you're a brood of vipers.

Brood of vipers. Yeah. That's right. Brood of vipers. Like, the way our culture has redefined Jesus in terms of just this nice guy, always nice, would never say a harsh word, never rebuke. It's a complete mis-personification of him.

It's a false Christ, really, because it doesn't want a person to repent. Right. It wants a person to be affirmed in everything. And anything short of affirmation isn't nice.

And so, probably the well-read Christian, when they engage with somebody who starts speaking like that, should say, oh, this is a person who hasn't really read scripture and there's an opportunity to love them by guiding them to the truth, or do we need to do something else?

Pastoral Reproof, Rebuke, and the Call to Preach the Word

Well, I think people want their pastor to be nice. Okay. As kind of the overall, kind of 11th commandment. This is the most important thing for a pastor. But a genuine pastor takes the charge of his ministry.

So, when I got my ordination certificate, it quotes from 2 Timothy chapter 4, verses 1 to 5. Preach the word. And everybody, all the people said, amen, we want to hear the word. And then it goes on to say, reprove, rebuke, exhort, be ready in all seasons, in season and out of season.

Well, nobody wants to be reproved. Nobody wants to be rebuked. This isn't nice. Right. So, that's the aspect of ministry, which is actually the harder part, to say the hard thing. So, if somebody has wandered off into sin, of course, they want to be coddled or affirmed in that area of sin.

And it could be any area of sin. It could be a gossip kind of spirit. It could be slander, or just a lack of submission to biblical ecclesial authority. Those things are coddled in churches because of the 11th commandment, but the pastor can't do that.

Are we conflating slander with niceness? Are we conflating? Oh, yeah. Yeah?

How does that work? Conflating slander with...

Right. I mean, so, when I speak about somebody, and I say that, well, you know, he shouldn't be sleeping with so-and-so. Right. Oh, you shouldn't speak about them. That's slander. Well, I've been meaning to tell you I should go talk to them.

And I've been talking to them, you know, and I'm trying to get your opinion. So, I mean, I guess people are, I guess my question is, are we trying to say that we need to be more careful with our speech and not get into gossip?

Or are we really saying, no matter what, you should be nice?

Matthew 18, Love, and Church Discipline

Yeah, I think Matthew 18 comes into play there. The culture would say, be nice, as in mind your own business, affirm the person, encourage them no matter what. But Matthew 18 would say, the loving thing to do, not the nice thing in terms of how the culture views it, the loving thing to do is to go one-on-one, not gossip about them, but you alone with that person, bring the area of concern to them.

If they don't repent, then it's not gossip to talk to another person, another witness involved in this, and bring them and the two of you confront the person. That's actually loving because it's seeking their repentance.

It's seeking their good and their deliverance from this sinful pattern of behavior. Yeah.

So we're not talking about that. We're talking, when we say thou shalt be nice, we're talking about people who are afraid to speak critically in the public square.

Yeah, or kind of going back to the situation I had with our denomination, I wrote a book which addressed the intrusion of the social justice ideology into the denomination. And I gave very specific examples of that.

Who said what? And direct quotes without misquoting anybody. But the answer that was given to that book was never at the level of truth. It was only at the level of niceness. So the answer was, you weren't nice to do that.

You didn't have the right tone. Who are you talking to? These are leaders within the denomination that then read the book. Instead of ever dealing with even one of the truth claims of the book, they made it all about the 11th commandment, that to even question is not nice.

So yeah, I think this is how, it's almost like how people can protect themselves from having their sin exposed. Their sin brought into the light.

Did you go through a different communication process before writing the book? Oh yeah.

I talked to the district superintendent of our East, it was Eddie Cole at the time, on multiple occasions, and then our new DS as well. It wasn't getting anywhere. And so, and the thing was, the book only addressed public teachings.

So if there was a public statement put on the national website, I would then quote that and refute it. So a public answer, Galatians 2 is the model here, Galatians 1, where Paul is rebuking Peter publicly in the presence of everyone because it was a public issue in the church.

So there are some things that are Matthew 18, as we discussed, which is private matters, and that's really actually referring to within the life of a church. This isn't national speakers who are training all of evangelicalism.

This is within the church, Matthew 18, you go to the person. But if you're addressing someone that you've never met in your life, you're addressing their public teaching, I actually did try. In the book, I addressed David Platt.

I contacted his secretary and even went through people who knew him. This family that used to come to our church used to be very close with David Platt. They thought they could arrange a meeting, but ultimately he said no to each of those, and then his name appeared in the book for how he brought McLean Bible Church in the woke direction.

So yeah, you try that behind the scenes, and you want to do that as much as possible, but public teachings, it's not, there's no 11th commandment that says you have to be nice and you can't talk about it.

But no, the command of scripture is to uphold the truth, and you see that again. You have, again and again, you have to uphold the truth.

Public Teaching, Truth, and the Responsibility to Defend It

So what you're talking about could be really helpful for us, I mean, us average Joes, just on how to deal with our public speech on social media, for example. So what I hear you saying, correct me if I'm wrong, is if it's somebody out there making a public statement, right?

We go to Galatians 1 and 2, and we see how Paul handled public statements, and we can copy that, and we, in fact, we should, we spoke about courage in a previous episode, we should be courageously going after people who are speaking against the truth.

Yeah, well, so the very nature of a public platform exposes a person to pushback. If someone is so thin-skinned that they make a statement about God, about His Holy Word, and make that public on Facebook, and then complain about any pushback against it, the problem is not with you.

It's not that you're not being nice. They made a public teaching, which they're then responsible to defend. Now that's very different than if you're in the privacy of your home, or you're in a private conversation in church, or in a classroom somewhere, and a person says, you know, I've been toying with this idea of annihilationism, you know, that there's no such thing as eternal conscious torment.

Right. And they're struggling with it. If you go make a podcast about them, what are you doing? They talk, yeah, that's private conversation that's very different than public media interaction. So yeah, if somebody is going on Instagram, or Facebook, or Twitter, and pushing views that are contrary to Scripture, you are a truth warrior, because in 26 of the 27 books of the New Testament, there is some exhortation to defend the truth against false teaching.

Right. It's just replete through the Scriptures. Wow. It's a huge emphasis. Wow. You know, entire books are devoted to it. Right. The book of Jude. Yeah. He wants to write about our common salvation and say, nice, stay positive, but he knows he must contend for the faith that's once and for all handed down to the saints, because certain people have crept in unaware, and they introduced destructive heresies.

And he compares them to all of these other false prophets. And so, yeah, you have to stand up in that case.

Church Hurt, Impartiality, and Speaking Truth in Love

Building on what you're saying there about, you know, public heresies within the church, how do you deal with these kinds of, well, let me step back. A couple weeks ago, you talked about Church Hurt. That was the name of one of your sermons.

Yeah. How do you deal with Church Hurt and say someone is hurt, maybe not by a pastor, elder, or leadership, but maybe in that scenario as well, and how do we disseminate that within the church? Because sometimes that, especially if it's a heretical thing, how do you communicate that to other people who could be hurt as well?

A couple of things there.

One is differentiating between niceness and love. Love is the biggest command. So even when you are speaking the truth, you do it in love and for the purpose of their good and seeking to forgive and restore and with that genuine desire to help them, not to elevate yourself by putting them down.

And some people have been hurt for that reason. But the other side of this coin is very often people who suffer from Church Hurt, they bring this complaint, they've been harboring this bitterness, they are not necessarily a victim.

They're claiming to be a victim and they might be a victim, right? So you have to approach every situation like this impartially. What does impartiality look like? Well, it's to listen to both sides. So Proverbs 18, 17, the man who states his case first seems right until another comes to examine him.

If you're going to delve into this world of their Church Hurt, they've left some church because the pastor was mean or not nice or whatever. Didn't pay enough attention to me. Didn't have time. Didn't have time.

Yeah. If you want to delve into that world and help them overcome that and they want to dredge up the past, then you're going to have to do more than just listen to whatever they say. Right. But what you can do if you don't want to go down that road of contacting former pastors and working that all through, you can encourage them, hey, listen, love covers a multitude of sins.

Yeah. Peter doesn't teach us that you have to address everything that's ever been done to you. Right. You feel like you're wronged. Can you forgive and move on and build from here? Or is this going to be your bitterness and now your unforgiveness and grudge that's tainting everything that you do?

Yeah. So it depends.

Every situation is different. So, so, so what I hear there is, you know, sometimes when we're claiming we want someone to be nice, we're really saying you weren't loving in that situation.

Yeah. I mean, if somebody is complaining that somebody's not nice, there might be an actual ground there that they haven't been loving. They haven't been compassionate to somebody who's hurt or whatever the case may be.

So, you know, just because there are those who make this the 11th commandment doesn't mean that we shouldn't be nice. Sure. I mean, loving and kind. Sure. It's just not the overarching principle of scripture.

But we can't sacrifice truth at the altar of niceness. Right. Right.

Judging, Discernment, and Making a Right Judgment

Yeah. And often the people who complain that someone's not nice are the people who know that person least. Yeah. I just found it really ironic that those who, you know, in the controversy with our denomination claim that he's not nice or anything like that, don't know me from Adam.

You know, there would be those who would stand up and speak to my character who've never spent time. They don't ask my wife or my children or the elders or the friends, people that are interacting with me all the time, what I'm like.

They use this as just a knife that they want to put in your back because who can refute it?

So everybody knows Jesus told us to not judge hypocritically. Right. But we're talking about judging with inadequate quantities of information. Yeah. Yeah.

Right. Right. Right. And that, so in, in Matthew 7, 1, it says, do not judge, right? Lest you may be judged. Right. Well, it goes on to say in that same chapter that you're to watch the fruit. You'll know the false teacher by the fruit.

The false tree bears bad fruit. Be patient. And, but you're supposed to, to judge the fruit. That's gaining the information as you're watching. Right. The problem in, in the John, in Matthew 7, 1 is hypocritical judging.

But do you judge? Yes. Yeah. Well, Jesus says in the book of John, stop judging by mere appearances. Right. But make a right judgment. To get to that point of a right judgment means you've chased down the information.

Right. You know, a mere appearance is just your initial thought, your feelings is usually what it is. I feel hurt. I, I think this is wrong. I, whatever the case might be. Yeah. And the, you jump to a conclusion based on appearances.

That's hypocritical judging. Right. Or hypocritical judging could be condemning someone for the same thing that you're actually doing behind the scenes. You know, you're a hypocrite because you aren't dealing with the log in your own eye, you know, while you're trying to get the splinter out of somebody else's.

But judge, you must, Jesus said it, make a right judgment. Right.

He tells you to judge. And there is, is, what are the other scriptures where, where we're called to judge? I mean, there's, there's, is, what else, what else are, or should we be thinking about, you know, when we think about judging?

Well, so making a right judgment is with regard to people, you know, rightly assessing. Okay. You have to, if you're going to qualify an elder, you know, this person is potentially an elder, you have to look at a list of qualifications and that's the objective standard.

That's judging. You're judging them. It's an objective standard, but you have to make a judgment at every point. And there's a bit of subjectivity in that, right? Yeah. Is this person overbearing? Is this person, does he have a good reputation with outsiders?

All of those things, there might be outsiders. There are a lot of outsiders that hate John MacArthur, probably more than, than not, right? Because in the world, everything he says offends them because he's telling the truth, right?

Right. So that there's a subject, subjectivity to holding him to that standard. You're weighing that by all of scripture. So tota scripture, all of scripture comes into play and you have to make a judgment.

You have to judge. Is he a qualified elder? Now, of course, John MacArthur is a qualified elder in his church. No Christian with an ounce of discernment would deny that. But you have to make a judgment to qualify an elder or to choose a Sunday school teacher or to say, no, I don't think this person should be in that position that they're vying for.

I don't see that as a right fit for them, even in their skills, let alone their biblical qualifications, whatever the case might be. So there's judging all the time in the Christian life. When you listen to someone and reject somebody else's counsel, you're making a judgment.

And this is the growth of discernment. Discernment is so important. So in Hebrews 5, 14, that concept there is stop just drinking milk and move on to solid food. And it talks about training the powers of your discernment to distinguish right from wrong.

That's what judging is. It's making a distinction. This not that. And you have to train in that to get better at it over time. And how would you get better? It's by knowing the truth, that your mind is more sanctified by being in the word.

And as your mind is conformed to the mind of Christ, you make better judgments.

But it's constantly judging. Who are some people that we have a tendency to just be nice to and not tell them truth that would lovingly help them because we're afraid of hurting our own pride or our own idea of, well, I don't want to not be nice.

It varies from person to person, but often it is the more aggressive people that you fear their wrath. You know, you'll see it a lot, unfortunately, in marriages where you have an overbearing wife and the response of the husband is to become extremely passive because he doesn't want any more wrath.

He just wants to live, you know, better to live on the corner of a roof than inside the house with the quarrelsome woman. So what does he become? More and more passive. He gives up more and more leadership.

And that's the worst dynamic because now you have the woman more and more dominating and more and more aggressive, and he's unwilling to say anything back to her. That's the dynamic in the Garden of Eden with the curse that her desire shall be for her husband, but he shall rule over her.

And it's the created order of headship, which then gets reversed in the garden and in that curse. And you see it in even Christian homes. You see it in churches. Many churches are failing and completely falling apart because it's dominated by women in their over-assertive leadership.

So that's a place where you see it. But it's not only that. You also have men that are overbearing. You have men that just, that it's my way or the highway, and they don't listen to the other elders. There's no consensus building.

It's my way. And then that usually crumbles. You know, you see the Moses model, you know, pastor who falls into sin and into some kind of destruction. So yeah, it's everywhere. It could be in any particular thing, but it's very often where there's fear of what's going to happen if you say something.

Courage, Abortion, and Speaking Against Cultural Cowardice

Wow. So I was thinking about some of the cultural sins that we don't want to be nice. I mean, some of the cultural sins where we're called, you've got to be nice. Do not say this. Things you're not supposed to talk about at work.

Things that might be controversial and we're called to be nice. Are we being cowards?

Yeah. Absolutely. So if you look at where is our culture right now, look at the elections that happened yesterday. Overwhelmingly, the Democrats won because of my body, my choice. It was the abortion issue, right?

How weak has the culture been, the Christians in the culture to not stand for the life of these babies that a majority of people are comfortable outwardly saying a woman should be able to murder a baby because that baby is inside of her body.

Two different heads, two different sets of DNA, four hands, not two. This is a distinct person inside the life of a mother and Christians for so long have been unwilling to teach that simple biblical truth or to train their people that to any way support that is sin, right?

So you have people that can go to the voting booth and vote for someone who is in the chain of that murder, right? They're voting for the politician. You notice Roe versus Wade has fallen, but state after state is enshrining abortion laws in their state law, even Kentucky and Montana and Kansas.

Now how do we even get, this is a...

That's a state of evangelicalism because these are where evangelical, 60 of the population is claiming to be evangelical church going people and yet they don't have the basics of Christian morality.

So at some future episode, we've got to talk about how come when we have this horrific law get approved by an individual court case, it becomes the law of the land, but when they reverse it, it's not the law of the land.

We'll have to unpack that. I mean, I've got some ideas.

I'm sure you do too. Well, what would you say about that? So Roe versus Wade, that didn't make it the law of the land, right? Right. That's just a Supreme Court decision, but it's not passed by the legislature as our constitution set it up.

And what kind, well, according to the constitution, what kind of decision is it? It's an opinion. Right. And it's an opinion on a specific case. Not something that should trickle down to all the states, but somehow it does.

Right. What's happening?

Yeah. So that the judiciary is legislating from the bench is what's been happening.

And somebody in the back doors is saying, yeah, we're all in on this. Yeah. I mean, I'm sorry. Oh, absolutely. I wasn't going to call me a conspiracy theorist. Well, you are. I am. Your average Joe. Well, I was a conspiracy theorist until a few years ago when everything came out in the open.

Everything was proven. Right? So there it is. It's not theory anymore. Right. But yeah, so let's stick on the niceness topic since we're doing that. What cultural things, and listen, I think this is a good time to say to the audience, hey, if you have a question and something we're digging into, we would love to hear from future episodes.

Say you have an idea about something that's, should I speak into the culture or should I not? Am I not being nice? Or should I not be nice? Should I be more aggressive? Am I being cowardly like we're just talking about by not speaking about a topic?

And we can talk about that. Yeah. So the best thing to do would be to email OffTheCuff at CornerstoneSJ .org, right? Very good. So, but back to that, I think one of the things that we're going to talk about in an upcoming episode, we already discussed this, is the problem with transgenderism and speaking.

Speaking the Truth About Transgenderism and Pronouns

How do we speak to somebody who struggles, let's just say sexual sin, let's just call it that. Yeah. Although we may differentiate between different issues. How do we speak to people lovingly, but directly, and oh, here's a good one.

When should we be more direct and when should we be softer? Okay. Let's do that next time. Okay. There you go. Because that would be a perfect transition.

Because that's a big topic. It is. I think it's a huge one. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So next time on OffTheCuff, we're going to talk about transgenderism and how to deal with that in your family. What about pronoun hospitality?

Oh, yeah. Isn't it nice? Isn't it nice? Be hospitable and use the preferred pronoun that they identify.

Yeah. Are you engaging in Is it sinful? Yeah. To call someone something that they're not. Yeah. Is that very

In which direction is that sinful? And how do you do so with a loving attitude? Wow. Yeah.

Next time on OffTheCuff. Well, Adam's not going to have anything to write about next week, so that's going to be a problem, but I know he's going to send good stuff. So thanks for coming in and listening to OffTheCuff.

Hopefully we see you out at Cornerstone Church in Mount Laurel, New Jersey, or listen to the sermons. There was a good one. When was the one a couple weeks ago that we were talking about in the episode?

About Church Hurt? Yeah. Church Hurt. Go check out Church Hurt. Was that two weeks ago? It was a couple weeks ago. YouTube. CornerstoneSJ .org. Thanks.