This transcript was generated by whisper.ai.

(upbeat music) This is day four of our look through 2 Corinthians chapter 10.
We're going to look at verses 12 to 15 today. In these verses, Paul talks about his
accomplishments and it reminds us that one of the keys to facing criticism is
you have to handle your accomplishments well.

You see, when criticism comes, we tend to want to wear our accomplishments like
badges of honor. It's just the automatic response. When someone criticizes you,
the response, the automatic response is how can you criticize me?

Look what I've done. And we make this list of all these things that we've done.
Now, it rarely works.

In fact, I'd say it never works. It makes, first of all, it makes you sound
defensive. And secondly, it can lead very quickly to a prideful spirit.

So what do you do about the things you've done? Somebody criticizes you for the
work you've done. You don't want to make this list of I did this, I did this, I
did this.

You don't want to sound defensive. So how do you handle it? Paul gives us an
example here.

Inspired by the Holy Spirit, he's criticized and he talks about his
accomplishments. He deals with his accomplishments. So what do you do?

How do you handle your accomplishments well? Well, you do two things. You learn
how to think about your accomplishments and you learn how to talk about your
accomplishments.

First, you learn how to think about your accomplishments. Paul says in verse 12,
we do not dare to classify or compare ourselves with some who commend
themselves. When they measure themselves by themselves and compare themselves
with themselves, they are not wise.

Paul says there's something I don't dare to do and that is compare myself with
someone who commends themself. You start that process and you inevitably become
a critic. You inevitably get caught up in pride.

Now, what really Paul is talking about here is two choices we have in life. You
can either measure yourself by other people, measure yourself by yourself, by
other people, or you can measure yourself by Christ, the two choices. First,
Paul says there are people who measure themselves by themselves.

He says that's not wise. It is so tempting to classify all your accomplishments
by what those around you are doing. And so if you pray more than those who are
around you, you feel super spiritual.

If you witness more than the friend down the block, you feel like I'm a bold
witness. If you give more than anyone you know, you feel like I'm a very
generous person. The problem with that is you tend to surround yourself with
immature people, people that are less mature than you, if that's how you're
going to evaluate yourself, 'cause it makes you feel better about yourself.

You want to play on a field where you can look like, wow, look how big I am. But
the truth is, there are people who give more than you. There are people who pray
more than you.

There are people who witness in greater and bolder ways than you in this world.
And if you were around those people, you'd feel like a spiritual, a spiritual
failure. And I know many of you feel that way right now, 'cause that's how
you're comparing yourself.

You're comparing yourself, and you're not coming out with a feeling of pride.
You're coming out with a feeling of failure. That's what happens when we measure
ourselves by ourselves, and that is not the goal.

If I measure myself by other Christians, then I'm secretly hoping that other
Christians will fail. 'Cause if they fail, it makes me feel better about myself.
When instead, the scripture tells us clearly, we are supposed to encourage each
other to greater faith.

The only way to do that in the end is to all of us together measure ourselves by
Christ. He's our standard, he's the one we're looking to. So you use Christ's
example to evaluate your relationships.

Use the example of Christ to evaluate how you're doing in praying. Use the
example of Christ to evaluate the way you speak to other people. Now when I say
that, you think, well, I'm not going to come out very good on that one.

Boy, you talked about feeling like a failure when I evaluate myself based
against other people. How about feeling like a failure when I base my self-image
on how Jesus did? Remember, Jesus is our example and model, and we know he's God
in human flesh.

We know he's perfect, and we're not. So we can look to him together as the
perfect example, realizing although I may never get there while I'm on this
earth, I can be drawn steadily and more and more closely to be like him the rest
of my life on this earth. The question isn't are you perfect?

The question is, are you growing? Are you growing to become more and more like
Jesus? Not are you growing to be better than your neighbor, but are you growing
to be more and more like Jesus in the way you think about people, in the way you
talk to God?

Now remember, as you walk through life, that God's interested in developing your
character. So he's going to allow circumstances and difficulties in our life that
help us to develop our character. He did that in Jesus' life.

In Jesus' life, he allowed circumstances, terrible circumstances, and in those
circumstances, even though Jesus was perfect, the Bible tells us that he
experienced, he learned obedience through those circumstances. He expressed
obedience, and God's going to give you experiences to express obedience in the
circumstances of life. So you learn how to think about your accomplishments.

You don't measure yourself by other people. You think about your accomplishments
in relationship to what Jesus did for us. And then Paul says you learn how to
talk about your accomplishments.

And this is a tough one for many of us. We don't know how to do this. We don't
know how to handle talking about our spiritual accomplishments.

Paul gives us some wisdom here in verses 13 to the first part of verse 15.
Here's what he says. We, however, will not boast beyond proper limits, but we
will confine our boasting to the field God assigned to us, a field that reaches
even to you.

We are not going too far in our boasting, as would be the case if we had not
come to you, for we did get as far as you with the gospel of Christ. Neither do
we go beyond our limits by boasting of work done by others. Paul here says it's
okay to talk about what God has given you to do, but there are some limits.

And one of those limits, he says, is you boast in the field that God has
assigned. So you talk about what God has given you to do. While other people
boasted of themselves, Paul boasted in the work that God gave him to do.

Now, Paul is also indicating here that while many people boast of what they
might do someday, you hear these big ideas, big dreams, this could happen
someday, Paul limited his talk to the responsibilities that he'd been given.
Now, they were large responsibilities. He'd been told to preach the gospel to
all the Gentiles.

The whole world or all the Gentiles in the world. That's a pretty large
responsibility. But he limited his boasting, his talk about what God was doing
to that.

Now, if you're wondering about this word boasting that keeps coming up again and
again, we're going to focus on this a little bit more tomorrow. But Paul is saying
I'm limiting my talk about what God is doing through my life to talk about the
responsibilities he's assigned to me. And he says also I'm limiting my talk
about what God's doing in my life to talk about what I've actually done, he's
boasting, he says, in the work that's done by myself, not by others.

Some people, it seems like when they talk about what God's done, they seem to
draw like a vacuum cleaner, everything that everybody else around them has done
and somehow make it seem as if they did it too, as if they were the one you
should be impressed with because all these people together did this thing. You
see this on a sports team when at the end the star receiver acts like there was
no quarterback at all. It was just about him catching the ball.

Well obviously that's a huge mistake, that's a huge pride. So Paul says I'm just
focusing on what God's given me to do and I'm just focusing on what I've
actually done. Now the truth is most of us are afraid to do this today, to talk
about what God's given us to do with joy that he gave me that task and he's
fulfilling that task in my life.

We're afraid to talk about what I have actually done. In fact we're so afraid of
this that most of the people who are doing most of the talk about what God's
done with a few notable exceptions are doing it out of pride rather than out of
humility. Most of the examples we have out there, many of them, are people who
are pridefully talking about God did this for me and God did this in my life.

So the only examples we have are prideful examples. We gotta change that. We
need more people who will think and speak with a humble spirit about what God is
doing through their lives.

Humble enough to realize it's not me doing it, it's God doing it. But also with
enough faith to realize God's doing it so people need to hear about it. It's not
faith when you hide it all the time.

It's not humility when you hide it all the time. It's humility when you take the
credit for it. But when you talk about what God's doing in your life, how he's
working in your life, and you recognize that God has the credit, people can hear
that.

That's the humble talk about what God's doing through the lives of his people
that we need more and more of today. And these last four days we've been talking
about what do you do when you're facing criticism? And maybe you're facing
criticism right now at a job, in a ministry, in your family, from a neighbor.

What do you do when you're facing criticism? Or maybe you've been dealing out
criticism lately. How do you stop?

We've talked these last few days about resisting the temptation to use the
world's weapons. We've talked about looking past appearances to see God's
authority. What's God doing?

What's God asking me to do? And today we talked about you gotta learn how to
think and to talk about your accomplishments. Those are some of the keys to
dealing with criticism in your life, to setting aside criticism in your life.

Now tomorrow, we're going to hear the final word together on this whole issue of
boasting. But today, as we end today, I want to take some time together to talk to
the Lord about this issue of criticism in your life. Father, when we face
criticism, when I face it, it is so easy to become defensive.

It's so easy to fight with the world's weapons and the weapons of anger, the
weapons of cynicism and criticism. Jesus, help me look to you as example. When
you face criticism, you set aside those words.

You were silent in some situations. When you face criticism, you trusted in God
rather than feeling like you had to defend yourself. When you face criticism,
you showed me how to be meek and gentle.

I need your power to do that, Jesus. I need your power to walk through this,
your wisdom. So bring the right people into my life, bring the right scriptures
into my life, bring the right leadership into your spirit through my life.

Lord, instead of withdrawing from this situation or instead of attacking in this
situation, help me to walk the road of humility in this situation. I need you to
do that. I ask for your strength in your name.

Amen.