Archive for year: 2020

Author: William Williams | Editorial Department, Living Church of God

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Have you ever been in a situation where you knew something you planned to do wouldn’t “look right,” but since you believed you weren’t going to “do anything wrong,” you went ahead with it anyway?

Perhaps the “Mike Pence” rule just seemed inconvenient that one time—especially if the circumstances really didn’t seem like the kind where anything truly compromising could happen. Maybe there wouldn’t be time for anything to happen. Maybe you and the people you planned to be with have good reputations, and people just know you better than to think you’d misbehave in some particular way or another. And maybe people should “mind their own business”—especially when such situations don’t always involve spending time with members of the opposite sex, but could simply be the kind of happenstance that maaaybe would look like you were doing something inappropriate on the Sabbath—when you weren’t—or juuust might seem like you were staying out late drinking and partying—which you don’t!

Of course, life is full of decisions, and not all decisions or actions can be helped regarding how others perceive them. If we worried about how our every single action might be perceived, we would certainly wastea lot of time. But we also know that God cares about how our behavior affects others, so it isn’t always worry but consideration. And when it comes to something that could seriously affect your reputation—or cause others to stumble—the matter deserves consideration.

The Appearance of Evil

“Reputation and the Appearance of Evil” was in fact Dr. Scott Winnail’s most recent Living Education address, and an especially vital topic for Christians today. Analyzing situations where individuals knew their decisions might give others “the wrong idea” was a chief part of his lecture. However, far from simply mowing down the assembled students with a list of “do’s” and “don’ts”, Dr. Winnail instead engaged in a give-and-take session about why people might inadvertently put their reputations at risk and how to avoid the appearance of evil—and he reminded them of the oft-repeated quote by Warren Buffett that a good reputation can take decades to develop, but be destroyed in five minutes.

Dr. Scott gave several examples of situations that can potentially tarnish one’s reputation, and what stood out most importantly to me was the absence of condemnation. Leaving behind most discussion of when people do fall into sin when they “skirt the edge of the cliff,” his focus was mainly on how to maintain a good reputation and make sure that pure motivations go hand in hand with—and even promote—pure perceptions.

Assume or Presume?

Throughout the discussion, a singular thought crossed my mind: presumptions lead to assumptions! We all know (or should know) that assume is a dirty word, but what about presume? If assuming is jumping to a conclusion when we don’t have all the facts (the very thing we don’t want people to do regarding our actions) presuming is assuming ahead of time how a certain thing will or should turn out (or how people will or should respond to those same actions!). And if, as Henry “the Fonz” Winkler was famous for saying, “Assumptions are the termites of relationships,” then presumptions are the overlooked food source that attracts them!

Dr. Scott suggested some questions his listeners should ask themselves before taking certain actions, including, “Why do I want to do this?,” “What are the possible outcomes?,” “How will my actions be perceived?,” and “Could someone imitate me and thereby fall into condemnation?”

In every case, here’s one bit of handy reasoning to add: “Don’t presume too much about how others will perceive your actions!” I’ve been told many times that “You can’t control what other people think,” but here’s a secret: you can, to a certain degree, by your own choice to “walk circumspectly” (Ephesians 5:15).

What looks like a duck…

As always, the best lessons are the ones we apply to ourselves, and thus I turn the lens around: Justifying something based on what people should think is a presumption. Thinking people will always know my future actions are honest based on my current reputation is a presumption. And stating that people should “mind their own business” is a naïve presumption at best—and a rejection of Philippians 2:29 and Romans 14:13 at worst. (Not to mention the fact that saying it out loud can easily become an example of just exactly what I’m talking about when someone takes it the wrong way and thinks, “Whoa, what a jerk that guy is.” If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck…)

With that, I can conclude:

• I’m not the arbiter of what others should think—so I should think out my own actions before committing to them, as Dr. Winnail stressed.

• I’m not the paragon of virtue I’d like to think of myself as—and I can’t place the burden of exonerating me on others, who have daily struggles and distractions all their own to think about.

• And I’m not by any means the one who gets to decide where others should be on the path to their conversion, such that I can blame them for “minding” my business—especially when my business breathes the same air God gave everyone else to swim around in.

Or so I should presume.

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Author: Thomas White | Editorial Department, Living Church of God

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“My brethren, count it all joy when you fall into various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces patience. But let patience have its perfect work, that you may be perfect [mature] and complete, lacking nothing.” – James 1:2-4

We can memorize the verses. We can recite them to ourselves. We can thank God as we look back and recognize how past struggles and losses have benefitted our spiritual growth. But whatever we do, whatever we know, it’s still really, really hard to make ourselves feel truly okay with the fact that as long as we’re human, we’re vulnerable—we can, and will, be hurt.

Mr. Gaylyn Bonjour gave the most recent Living Education assembly, and one of the many biblical truths he addressed was that in order for us to develop the spiritual fruit of longsuffering, we have to suffer for a long time. That, in a nutshell, is what James is saying up there: We can’t achieve holy, righteous character without suffering.

Paid in Character

Dr. Jordan Peterson has talked about how when we work, we’re essentially “sacrificing the present for the future.” We might not feel like working at present, but we know that if we work, we’ll get paid, and if we keep working and keep getting paid, the future will be better, because we’ll be able to buy… you know, food, among other things. Work usually feels pretty tolerable, because we know it’s for something, we know it’s building a better future. As the modern proverb goes, “Ya’ don’t work, ya’ don’t eat.”

Suffering also works that way, in a sense. When we go through a difficult time, or suffer from a loss, God is actually paying us for it in the character He’s growing in us through it. Our hurt and our struggles are “sacrificing the present for the future,” because the character we’re building allows us to show compassion, our struggles make it possible for us to develop empathy. If we don’t work, we don’t eat, and if we don’t suffer, we don’t love.

Saving for a Sunny Day

Now, people sometimes corrupt that truth by saying, “We can only achieve righteous character through suffering,” and that’s on a level of sheer bogus akin to “You should feel guilty if your life is currently pleasant.” Nonsense—if we were paid for our work, but never stopped working long enough to do anything with what we were paid, our work would be pointless, right? Likewise, God knows that if we only suffer, the character we build during all those trials isn’t really going to benefit anybody, because we’ll be too busy dealing with the trials to share it.

So He sends good times our way, too, and during those times, when life actually seems to be going pretty well, He does something extraordinary—He pays us for spending our paycheck. The catch, though, is that we have to spend it on someone other than ourselves. If we use the character we’ve been building through our trials to help others make it through trials of their own, we, in turn, build even more character—and help them to build it, too.

We shouldn’t go looking for new and exciting ways to suffer so that we can build more character—James says that we fall into various trials, not jump into them. But as we struggle, as we go through times of hurt and continue making deposits into our character account, we can be encouraged by the knowledge that we’re sacrificing a tiny, forgettable present for an eternal, beautiful future. 

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Thomas White was one of the onsite Living Education students for the 2018-2019 semesters. He also has a Bachelor’s Degree in English. Thomas currently works as an Editorial Assistant for the Living Church of God. According to his wife, he eats pizza in entirely the wrong way.