Life seems perfect when everything is going as planned, but it is precisely during these moments that complacency can lead to mistakes. In this episode, we delve into the importance of remaining vigilant and accepting criticism even when times are good. Drawing lessons from historical figures and King Solomon’s wisdom, we explore how power can cloud judgment and how staying open to correction can keep us grounded.
The CEM Network is pleased to present Ronald L. Dart and Born to Win.
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So how is your day so far? Is everything about like you planned it? Nothing has come unstuck. The children have behaved well. Nothing has burned on the stove. Your boss gave you a raise today. Life is working just fine, right? Congratulations. I’m happy for you. In fact, I’m here to help you hold on to it. Because it’s at times like these, times when everything is going your way, these are the times when mistakes are made that can bring the whole thing down around your ears. In fact, there is something inside a normal person that knows that. You know the feeling. Things have been working like gangbusters. Life is good. Everything is percolating along, and you turn to your best friend and say, something’s wrong. Everything is going too well. Something’s going to happen. We’re just nervous about it all. King Solomon learned this the hard way. He learned that at the very height of success, Foolishness is apt to set in. In Ecclesiastes, the fourth chapter, about verse 13, he says this, Better is a poor and wise child than an old and foolish king who will no more be admonished. Better is a poor and wise child than an old and foolish king. And what makes this king foolish is the fact that he will no longer be admonished. Power does that, you know. I mean, who’s going to go up to the king and tell him he’s mistaken? Who’s going to go up to the king and tell him, well, you’re wrong again, you old guy. You’ve got to get yourself straightened out here. Who’s going to tell the king that he’s wrong? Well, this is one of the saddest things about life, that men of power… become foolish. What happens to them is they begin to think that they are above the law, that the laws that apply to ordinary folks like you and me don’t apply to them. Now, I wouldn’t want to pass judgment on anybody in the White House, government, the State House, administrations, or so forth, but you sure hear a lot of that from people these days of concern about people in government acting like they think the laws that apply to the rest of us don’t apply to them. Of course, so many things and so many people in government these days came from law schools. They sometimes practiced law, sometimes didn’t. But law and the study of the law and the practice of law has been their life. And because they are the lawyers, well, they can, by and large, handle the law. They can manipulate the law. And then they get into government. And they think, well, they’re making laws for you and me. And they forget that they apply to them as well. They’re in charge. They can execute their will. And they become foolish and sometimes stupid in the way they administer the law, or better yet, the way they ignore the law and get themselves in trouble. One of the reasons also, I think, why men of power get in trouble is because they develop this sense of destiny. They think that somehow God is with them or destiny is with them, that they are destined for greatness, and that therefore their folly cannot cause them to fall. Some years ago, I read a book by Barbara Tuchman entitled The March of Folly. And she made her way through numerous historical examples, the old Trojan horse example. She dealt with the way in which the king of England lost the United States in the war of 1776. She dealt with the Renaissance popes and how their folly over a long period of time through four successive popes led to the Protestant Reformation. And she analyzed them from the point of view of how their wrongheadedness, how their stubbornness, how their pride, their exaltation, their sense that they could do no wrong, I guess, led them to acts of folly and stupidity that caused the loss, in many cases, of a lot of lives and changed history. Let’s put down for ourselves one more great principle, a principle that’s important in making your life work. It is the acceptance of correction and admonition. Better is a poor and a wise child than an old and foolish king who will no more be admonished. The acceptance of correction, the ability to listen to and accept gratefully, criticism is one of the things that makes all the difference in the world in your life. In Proverbs, Solomon developed it a little further, and there are some important things said here that I think I’d like to tell you. In Proverbs 15 and verse 10, Solomon says this, Correction is grievous unto him that forsakes the way, and he that hates reproof shall die. Over the years, I’ve kind of noticed that there are people you deal with that if you’re the boss and they work for you, you go to them and you decide, well, this fellow’s not getting it right. Rather than just fire him out of hand, I’ll go to him and explain what he’s doing. I’ll give him some correction. Now, correction is not a big deal. Correction simply means I come to you and I say, you’re putting that together wrong. If you continue putting it together that way, it’s going to come unstuck. So let me show you how to do it better. Now, a sensible person will sit back and say, yes, please show me what I’m doing. The fool will say, I know how to do it. Leave me alone. Now, it’s, of course, possible that the person carrying out the task knows better than the person who’s trying to explain it to him or correct him, but the fool is the one who refuses to even listen to the correction. He hates it. It’s grievous. And the person that hates reproof that can’t stand it when someone tells him he’s wrong, shall die. Hell and destruction are before the Lord. How much more the hearts of the children of men. God can look down at the heart of man. He knows what’s going on inside of us, and He Himself takes in hand to hand out correction to us from time to time. But in verse 12, Solomon concludes, A scorner loves not one that reproves him, neither will he go to the wise. It’s in that last phrase, I think, that your salvation can come. The ability to go to the wise. Oh, sure, not everyone that takes a hand to give you advice is right. Oh, certainly not everyone that tells you you’re wrong or offers you criticism deserves that much of a hearing. You don’t necessarily have to follow everything that they tell you. The question though is, will you go to the wise? Will you take your hat in your hand, go to someone you know is wise and say, look, I’ve got a problem. Can you help me with this? And are you capable of really appreciating someone who cares enough about you to tell you when you’re about to get hurt? I remember once on a visit to South Africa where I I was a stranger. I was not entirely familiar with the sensitivities of that country. It was my first visit down there, the first of many. And on that visit, I really didn’t know my way around and made a couple of public speeches in which I said some things that were really not the best. I would have been much better off if I had not said them. The fellow who worked for me down there didn’t tell me. didn’t come to me, didn’t say a word about those mistakes, and I did it again. I was rather angry with him when all was said and done because I really wanted and expected him to tell me where the mistakes were, to tell me where I might hurt someone, to tell me where someone might misunderstand something I was trying to say. I, at that time, had no trouble in appreciating someone who would tell me that I was wrong. Now, the word reproof, well, it goes along with rebuke, I guess, and we don’t like to have somebody reprove us. It sounds like we’re being scolded or put right. Well, I’ll have to have you think about this a moment. It’s a whole lot better to be reproved than to make a mistake that’s going to hurt you for the rest of your life. Stay with me. I’ll be back in just a moment.
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Join us online at borntowin.net. That’s borntowin.net. Read essays by Ronald Dart. Listen to Born to Win radio programs every day, past weekend Bible studies, plus recent sermons, as well as sermons from the CEM Vault. Drop us an email and visit our online store for CDs, DVDs, literature, and books. That’s borntowin.net.
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I used to teach a class in public speaking and a part of the training included student criticism. When the speech was over and the student sat down, I would turn to one of the other students in class and say, and now Bob will give us an evaluation of the speech we just heard. And then sometimes we would go on from there into a discussion of the principles of speech, the illustrations we could draw from the speech just given to help us learn how to be better speakers. Some of their criticism was pretty tough. In fact, they were far harder on one another than I ever was. In fact, sometimes I found myself in the role of patching up the bleeding wounds and healing up the scars and stitching up the cuts that they inflicted on one another. And so once in a while, justifiably, I suppose, there was some anger because of a stinging or unfair evaluation. But I remember one lecture I gave them early on in the year so they would understand what was happening to them. I said, your critics may not be right. They may even be fools, may be spectacularly wrong about what they say about your speech. But even then, they have given you something valuable. They have given you some intelligence. They have revealed to you how your speech affected them. If you’ve got a person in your audience that, for example, that did not understand what you were trying to say, became angry at what you were trying to say when they didn’t need to be, it’s good that someone in an evaluation of a speech will come back to you and tell you, I found your speech annoying and here is why I found it annoying. Now, he may be wrong, but he has given you something useful. And I try to teach them to respect their critics properly. to listen to what they had to say, take it and evaluate it, and then go on and do what they believed was right. Not to follow their critics, but to respect them. Now, you cannot become wiser by ignoring your critics. Now, to be sure, they may sometimes seem to deserve to be ignored, but you can’t afford that. Look your critics in the eye, evaluate what they say, and then act on it or dismiss it. But don’t dismiss it until you understand it. An awful lot of the criticism we get in life is inaccurate and unfair. Fair enough? Would you agree with that? I know certainly a lot of it that’s come my way has been. However, even then, it is revealing. Now, if you try to please your critics, they will slowly drive you crazy. The objective of listening to criticism and of carefully evaluating criticism is not to please the critic. You really only have to please God and yourself when all is said and done, right? If you can just be sure that what you are doing does please yourself, that it does advance your goals, and listening to your critics, hearing what they have to say, weighing it in the balances, can help you know whether you’re really accomplishing what you want or something different. Your critics are a valuable resource. Cherish them, but never assume you have to please them. One reason you should do this is that somewhere in the welter of criticism, there is truth. Somewhere out there among all the people who either don’t like you or disagree with you or think you’re full of it again, somewhere out there in this welter of people who are talking about you, talking to you, there is a wise, knowledgeable person who can help you. And if you don’t listen to your critics, you don’t evaluate your critics, you may never find that person who can help you. You know, in the course of living a life, you’re a very lucky person if you have two or three people who care enough about you to tell you the truth, who care enough about you to take you in hand and say, try this, experiment with that. Are you really sure you want to do that or are you going to get yourself in trouble when you do it? King David, in one of his psalms, said something I thought was beautiful. He said, Let the righteous smite me. It shall be a kindness. Here I am. I’m a student. I’m trying to learn. I’m being mentored by a really good man. David says, Let him hit me. It’s a kindness. When he smites me with correction, when he makes me see my mistakes, when I go home at night and I grit my teeth and I am shamed by the embarrassment of it all, I have learned something valuable from this man. Let the righteous smite me. It shall be a kindness. Let him reprove me. It shall be an excellent oil which shall not break my head. Oh, yeah, sometimes you think it’s going to. Sometimes you think it’s going to crush you. Sometimes you have to shed some tears. And oftentimes the realization of the truth of the criticism is what makes it really hurt. And that’s why the tears really flow. But in the long run, it’s a kindness. And it’s a good quality oil which can lubricate life ahead. And the tears that we shed… under just criticism, under fair criticism, from a righteous, wise person, are really the lubrication of the rest of our life. Solomon said in Proverbs 27, really an interesting passage through here to help us understand what to do, how to respond to people. In Proverbs 27, in the very first verse, he says this, Don’t boast yourself of tomorrow, for you don’t know what a day may bring forth. It’s the first volley, the opening shot, as it were, in a set of warnings about hubris, a set of warnings about getting cocky, because cockiness, self-assurance, being so sure of ourselves— is one of the things that puts the blinders on us and causes us to walk in harm’s way and to get ourselves hurt. Don’t boast yourself of tomorrow. You don’t know what a day can bring forth. Then he says in verse 2, Let another man praise you and not your own mouth, a stranger and not your own lips. Boy, we’re really doing great here, aren’t we? Man, we’re really making a great deal of progress. Everything is working wonderful. Well, maybe, but oftentimes when things are looking good is the prelude to disaster, and one of the reasons it’s a prelude to disaster is because we stop asking ourselves the hard questions. We begin to praise ourselves and maybe sometimes even listen too much to the praise of other people, and we think, well, we’ve really got it by the tail. We’ve got it all right. Vanity and pride and cockiness lead to trouble for a very simple and a very logical reason. They begin to eat away at your judgment. When you get too pleased with yourself, when you’re self-satisfied, and when you’re no longer listening to other people’s criticism of you and no longer weighing it and taking it seriously, you are beginning to lose your balance. You’re beginning to lose your sense of judgment, and that judgment is the thing which helps you to make good decisions as opposed to bad decisions, helpful decisions as opposed to those that hurt and bring things to grief. When your judgment begins to erode, you start to make bad decisions, and then as things begin to go bad, you blame anything except your judgment. In other words, it can’t be my mistake. It’s bad luck. It’s not my fault. It’s government regulation. It’s the government that’s caused this to be here. And yet that government’s been there all along, and other people are working under that same government, and other people are taking it into account and saying, I can’t do that because the government’s in the way, so I’ll do something else. I’ll find a way around it. The fool. just blames government rather than saying government’s a reality. I’ve got to learn to deal with it. I’ll make my way around it. Maybe it’s not the government. Maybe it’s my business partner. Maybe it’s my wife. Maybe it’s my friends. It’s their fault. Well, it’s anybody’s fault but mine. The truth is that that cockiness, that self-assurance, That blindness that begins to set in corrodes your judgment, and as your judgment begins to go, you don’t blame yourself. You blame others. Solomon continued in verse 5 to say, Open rebuke is better than secret love. Open rebuke is better than secret love. Can you appreciate someone who is able to look at you and say you’re wrong openly more than you appreciate someone who sits there and says absolutely nothing and is your admirer and has admiration shining from their eyes? Solomon says the open rebuke is better. Now, why would that be? Well, because the sitting there and soaking up of the admiration of people who, it pays them to admire you. It doesn’t put anything, any bread on the table, doesn’t put any money in the bank, doesn’t advance you towards success. But open rebuke when you’re wrong. Somebody openly saying, don’t do that, you’re going to get hurt. What’s that worth? Stay with me.
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I’ll be back in just a moment. For a free copy of this radio program that you can share with friends and others, write or call this week only and request the program titled Making Life Work No.
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6.
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Write to Born to Win, Post Office Box 560, White House, Texas 75791 or call toll free 1-888-BIBLE-44 and tell us the call letters of this radio station. We’re talking about what makes life work.
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Solomon says this, Faithful are the wounds of a friend, but the kisses of an enemy are deceitful. Now, if you ask me to choose between a wound and a kiss, well, that’s a hard decision, isn’t it, when you think about it? But along comes Solomon and says, When a friend wounds you, it’s usually for a purpose, and it’s usually because you need it. And if you’re not big enough to handle it, it could destroy your friendship. In the long run, it will destroy you. Because truthfully, the wound of a friend who’s trying to help you is far better than the kiss of an enemy who’s trying to take things from you. Solomon continues to say, The full soul loathes even a honeycomb. If you’re full, it doesn’t taste good. But to the hungry soul, every bitter thing is sweet. In the times of success… When life is really working good for you, you just don’t feel like you need anything. And you’re in very high danger, I would say. It’s the hunger in us that drives us. It’s because we’re hungry that we work. It’s hungry and hunger that causes us to press forward. He continues to say in verse 9, Ointment and perfume rejoice the heart. So does the sweetness of a man’s friend by hearty counsel. And you know it’s true. Hearty counsel means the counsel that is strong, firm, good advice, steady, honest advice from a friend. You know, it is a sweet thing to be able to sit down with someone who is a good friend, a reliable friend, someone you know is wise, someone with experience, and someone who really cares for you and isn’t just seeking his own way. It feels good to talk to someone like that. Then he says, your own friend and your father’s friend don’t forsake. Don’t go to your brother’s house in the day of your calamity, for it’s better to go to a neighbor that’s near than to a brother that’s far off. Now, I think that scripture is fascinating. And there’s a lesson in it, I think, that’s very important. That little segment that says, go to your father’s friend. You know what that means? It means here is a person who is a friend of your family and has helped your family before. I heard someone once say this, and I’ll pass it on to you for what it’s worth. He said, if you’re ever in trouble and you need help, do not go to someone whom you have helped yourself. The fact that you have done all sorts of things for them, that in a way you would think that you have a lot of chips to call in. You have favors that you could ask back. You could go to them, and this person, because he is so grateful to you, will help you out of your present distress. He said, basically, don’t go to someone like that. You’re going to get hurt and you’re going to be disappointed. Go to someone, this person who was advising me said, go to someone who has helped you before. And I thought, yes. Yeah, there’s a sense in that because someone who has helped you before is someone who cares about you, knows about you, and has got a reputation. I mean, they’ve done it before. They’ll do it again. And you have no such assurances from someone who ought to be grateful to you. I would say people who depend on the gratefulness of other people are going to get the disappointment that they deserve when they do so. And to young people who maybe have not had the chance to develop that many friends, the advice is go to your father’s friend. Don’t go to somebody who owes a favor to your father. Go to somebody who has been a friend to your family before and has done things for you and has helped you before. That’s the direction from which you can find it coming back again. He says in verse 12, A prudent man foresees the evil and hides himself, and the simple pass on and are punished. I guess in a way, The vanity, the pride, the ego, the self-importance that comes upon great and successful people and that tends to creep up on lesser mortals like us when things are going well for us, that these things that come to us cause us to put the blinders on. We think we’re okay. Everything has worked so well so far. Nothing can go wrong, surely. A prudent man, though, realizes that everything isn’t going to be good forever. He foresees evil. How do you do that? How do you know that evil is coming? Well, I’ll tell you one way you do it. You do it by listening to people, by paying attention to your critics. Yeah, the people who will tell you you’re wrong when you are, the people who will come to you and correct you when you need it, the people who will show you a right way when you’re pursuing a lesser way. Listen to those people. It’s in talking to them that you can foresee the evil and hide yourself from danger. Are you afraid to make decisions? Relax. You’re normal. But if you’re so afraid that you can’t make decisions, you need help. If you’re utterly without fear in making decisions, you’re sick. I have a message I delivered a few years ago that might help you. The title is Stick Your Neck Out. There’s a time to hide in your shell like a turtle, but even a turtle knows he can’t make much progress unless he sticks something outside of the shell. Drop me a line or give me a call. Write to Post Office Box 560, White House, Texas. Or call toll-free 1-888-242-5344. Or just remember 1-888-BIBLE-44 and ask for Stick Your Neck Out. But I’m a little off message here because what I’m talking about is a person who doesn’t know enough to duck. I think what happens to some people is that they begin to depend for results on something other than wisdom and judgment and work. They depend on their luck, which has never failed them. They depend on their quickness of wit, not knowing that it’s losing its edge because they’ve been right one time too often. It’s funny. Just because you were right yesterday does not mean you’re going to be right tomorrow. So I guess the message is, when your life is working, don’t assume that it always will. You’ve got to keep on doing the things that you did before. You’ve got to keep doing the things that made it right. So until next time, this is Ronald Dart reminding you, stick your neck out.
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You were born to win. The Born to Win radio program with Ronald L. Dart is sponsored by Christian Educational Ministries and made possible by donations from listeners like you. If you can help, please send your donation to Born to Win, Post Office Box 560, White House, Texas 75791. You may call us at 1-888-BIBLE44 and visit us online at borntowin.net.
