The Judgement of Charity

Listened to a sermon by R.C. Sproul this morning. Part of a series entitled "The Development of Christian Character," this sermon dealt particularly with the spiritual fruit of love, and examined practical ways it manifests itself in a Christian's life. He made several salient points that I thought were worth sharing:

1) He told a story that in speaking to one of America's most prominent Christian leaders (who he did not name), the individual commented that one of his greatest hopes was that during his funeral, there would be five people in attendance that would not check their watches even once during the ceremony. R.C. Sproul elaborated that this comment wanted to make him cry, that it was such a reflection of the desire to be truly loved by people and how sad it was that this prominent leader only expected five people to love him so much. In fact, he postulated that most people would be thrilled to just have one person love them that much. He then went on to say that if we want others to love us in that way, we need to love others in that way!

2) While defining a concept he called "the judgment of charity," he stated that one of the ways it is lived out is the practice of the benefit of the doubt--he states it is a skill that can be learned through practice, thus implying  that it is a choice. He insists it is neither a naivete that denies the maliciousness of people or a refusal to believe others capable of wrongdoing, but that it is more loving to err on the side of overtrusting others than refusing to give them the benefit of the doubt. He points out that most of the time when someone hurts you they often have no idea the weight of their behavior. Even more convicting, he specifies that the one person we love to give the benefit of the doubt to, in terms of motives, etc., is ourselves!

3) Another aspect of the judgment of charity is practicing recognizing the best case scenario and refusing to become one who focuses only on the worst case scenario. He says that when we look to the worst case scenario, it is of grave importance to recognize it because it is not of God.

These were definitely convicting thoughts for me. I thought they were great practical applications of the concept of living out the spiritual fruit of love--I never would have connected having a worst case scenario attitude to being unloving! These principles are definitely in direct conflict with how the world would have us live and treat our fellow man. How convicting to examine our hearts are realize how far we fall short of God's standards for what it means to love your neighbor. How fantastic that we have Jesus himself as our help and hope to change our hearts.

Funniest post on a comments board ever

Ever heard of "LibraryThing?" It is a website where you can catalog all the books you own in an online library. After re-acquiring "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" after I lost it, (don't ask how, that book is so huge it astounds me that it got misplaced), I wanted to catalog my purchase and put the rest of the series into our online catalog. Found this post listed under reviews for "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," and it made me laugh so hard. I love how he goes from talking about the book and then moving on to mathematics and finally talking about drinking orange juice mixed with wine. WTF?! The quote follows below: 

"Well, that's that. What a great series, I didn't think they would get quite so evil there at the end. Extremely well-written, consistently deep as far as character and world development, plenty of twists and turns, what more is there to expect from a story. For some reason, the last volume seemed much longer than any of the priors, maybe the typeface was smaller. Maybe it needed to be that long to be great. Still, this ranks as one of the best fantasy stories ever, right up there with Tolkien, Tad Williams and R.E. Howard. When I finished after a mini-marathon session of about nine straight hours, this popped in to my head. The greatest books are fun, clever, well-written, serious and accessible, in that order. Everyone's definition of fun is different, I used to really enjoy reading my calculus textbook, staying weeks ahead of my class. It was filled with sidebars on historical mathematicians and on occasion, something laugh-out-loud funny would pop up. Like this dandy of a technical definition that I still chuckle about: 'A region is unbounded if it is not bounded.' Wow, what insight into the realm of three dimensional vector systems. My calc III professor had a boatload of funny things to say, like when we arrived at a non-existing solution, he'd say 'Well, it does exist, but only in the hallway.' I could go on, but I won't. I actually drank quite a bit of wine mixed with orange juice. Great with a cheap, bland muscat white wine but I wouldn't dare bury a good white in OJ, just out of respect for wine snobs. Try it sometime." (  )