A critical spirit will not survive where humility is thriving. If we want to root out critical speech and thoughts, we must ask God to give us humble hearts. We must see ourselves as finite creatures and God as the only truly omniscient One. We must surrender our plans, ideas, strategies, and advice to the Father and trust His sovereign providence to make things right—or to leave them alone—for His glory.

I promise I’m not critical. I just happen to know how to do things the right way, and I want to use my gift of correct-ness to help others. Is that so bad? Actually, it is. And, actually, I am critical.
From grammatical errors in the book I’m reading to what songs we should sing (or not sing) in church to how my husband chooses to do the dishes (yes, he does the dishes, and I’m still critical!), I often have a critical heart. My heart loves to be right and has firm opinions what exactly that looks like in almost any circumstance in which I find myself. I hope that maybe you can identify at least a little bit.
A critical heart bears fruit like complaining, gossiping, authority-questioning, arrogance, and other nasty traits. While I see this first and foremost in my own heart, I also see it in society at large. National news sites teem with clickbait headlines lambasting political figures and celebrities; social media overflows with articles, tweets, posts, and memes aimed at criticizing one foible or another. Late-night comedy and satirical sketch shows exist in order to be critical for the sake of comedy.
Let’s face it. We love to be critical.
A heart that rejoices in finding fault in others may align with contemporary culture’s values, but it falls short of the character of Christ. As followers of Jesus, we must fight our sinful critical flesh and renew our minds to be transformed into the image of our Savior. This change can happen because we are already new creatures in Him; the old has gone, and the new has come (2 Cor. 5:17). Not only that, but we’ve been indwelt with the Holy Spirit, so we do not fight alone. But fight we must. And the first place we must “wage war against our fleshly passions” (1 Pet. 2:11) is on our knees before the throne of grace. After we finish, we take up the sword and go about our day fighting to put our flesh to death (Col. 3:5); but first, we must seek the aid of the God who fights for us (Deut. 3:22).
If, like me, you want to crucify your critical heart, here are four requests to bring to God and traits to put on in that fight. If you want to remember them, just memorize Colossians 3:12.
Therefore, as God’s chosen ones, holy and dearly loved, put on compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience, (Col 3:12)
Request #1: “Give me a heart of compassion.”
According to Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary, compassion means “a feeling of wanting to help someone who is sick, hungry, in trouble, etc.”1 At first glance, perhaps this definition seems far from the topic of being critical, but let’s take a deeper look.
When I’m being critical of someone else, I’m thinking chiefly of myself (and how I’m right). I may deceive myself into thinking that I’ve got the greater good of the family or church or organization at heart, but, in reality, I’m concerned about my own interests. Just ask a football fan on any given Monday morning between September and January. If their team lost, they will have plenty of “constructive criticism” for the coach, quarterback, and most of all, the officials.  Are they concerned with the individuals whom they’re critiquing? Or are they angry that their Sunday was ruined by a lopsided score?
A critical heart says, “I can do better” and doesn’t care about the heart of the person being attacked, criticized, or maligned. A critical heart is totally outcome-driven—an outcome that pleases me.
On the other hand, a compassionate heart wants to reach out to a hurting individual. A compassionate heart recognizes that the person being criticized is an image-bearer of the living God and an eternal soul with an eternal destiny that may hang in the balance. In short, a compassionate person looks beyond the outcome and sees the person. Sounds a lot like Christ, doesn’t it?
Christ didn’t avoid Samaria like other “good Jews”; He went right on through so He could talk with a woman at Jacob’s Well (John 4). He knew that the Sabbath was made for people, and not the other way around (Mark 2:27). He told Martha she was worried about too many things as she bustled about the house making sure everything was perfect and commended Mary for sitting at His feet (Luke 10:38-42). Jesus cared about people, not outcomes.
Lord,Give me heart of compassion. Forgive me for critical thoughts and words. I have been too concerned with the outcome of a situation and forgotten about people. 
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April Lexi Lee and Renee Wong have been best friends since they were 12. After supporting each other through the highs and lows of life, school and boyfriends, they took their relationship to the next level by becoming platonic life partners.
When Lee, 24, moved from Singapore to Los Angeles for college, the best friends became long-distance but remained emotionally strong. And as the pandemic hit and they both graduated, they felt this “gravitation” towards each other.
“We work so well together. We’re such great partners and support each other and love each other so much. We never see each other leaving each other,” Lee explains, recounting their train-of-thought. “So why is this not a stable foundation to start life and start a family and all those things? Why is that not as stable, even more stable, than a traditional, romantic marriage?”

Then it clicked. Wong moved to the United States to become Lee’s platonic life partner.

“I wasn’t even interested in marriage to begin with, neither of us were,” Lee says. “But then with each other, we suddenly saw the future and we were like, ‘This fits. I would do this with you.’ ”
She describes the partnership as “a deep platonic love and also a commitment to each other, like marriage, where we are trying to build the next step for our lives together.” This includes things that “typically married couples would do” like starting a family and having a joint bank account to achieve their goals of buying a house and more.

Why People Choose Platonic Life Partnerships
For Jay Guercio, 24, a platonic life partnership “just made sense” after realizing how much her life goals aligned with her best friend Krystle, who she first met in 2012 and had filled her life with “companionship, love, laughter and adventure.”
“We want to raise kids the same way. We have the same ideas as what finances should look like. We are already symbiotic in how we work,” she said. “There’s no reason to keep on waiting to hopefully find a partner who is going to align with all those things that also happens to be romantic and/or sexual in nature when it just made sense to start building the life that we wanted to live together.”

Fast forward and now they raise their adopted son together after getting platonically married in November 2020.
Guercio describes a platonic partnership as “a committed relationship to someone that doesn’t involve romance or sex.”
Cyndi Darnell, a certified clinical sexologist, therapist and couple’s counselor, says platonic partnerships can “absolutely” be as successful as a traditional marriage, because “partnership is based on shared values.”
“If you want to create a partnership based on values that are meaningful to you as individuals… I actually think that that’s a better model than the notion of romance, which we know is fickle,” she adds. “To rely on something as unreliable as romance for a contract as heavy as co-parenting and marriage seems to be why these things seem to be diametrically opposed on some level.”
Historically, marriage also hasn’t been about love, she points out.
“When we think about the origins of marriage, it was never about love. And it was certainly never about romance. It was about asset management.”
Guercio agrees partnerships like her own are centered around “mutual benefit.”
“It’s about purposefully deciding to live the life that you want to live together because those things align. It’s not just getting into a committed relationship with someone because you have sexual feelings.”
Darnell doesn’t view this as a bad route.

Because Jesus lives, death doesn’t stand a chance. The Son of Man has all authority in heaven and on earth, and the tombs answer to him. When the Lord returns, death shall be no more. We have this hope because we are united to Christ by faith. In Christ we will rise to experience what the tree of life held out for us: glorified bodily life.

In the beginning there was life—and so shall the end be. The power of God and his faithfulness to every promise ensure the triumph of life over death. This is the Christian hope of resurrection, or the raising and glorifying of our bodies.
The Bible has much to teach us about this glorious hope. In the following sections, we will meditate on bodily resurrection in several ways. We will see how the Old Testament authors taught God’s death-defeating power. We will notice how the defeat of death will establish what God designed for his image-bearers: immortal physical life. And we will rejoice in the gospel news that Jesus has been raised from the dead, inaugurating bodily life without end—a life that will belong to all who are united to him.
Martha’s Words About Resurrection
Near the end of Jesus’s public ministry, his friend Lazarus died (John 11:14). Even though Jesus learned earlier that Lazarus was ill, he did not make a trip to see him. He waited, but not because of callousness or busyness or misunderstanding. As we can infer from John 11:3–4, Jesus planned to show the glory of God in what happened next. For that reason, Lazarus would spend four days in the tomb when Jesus finally showed (John 11:17).
Martha met with Jesus and said, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died” (John 11:21). Jesus’s reputation as a miracle-worker preceded wherever he traveled those days. Martha knew that Jesus could have healed Lazarus’s illness. Jesus told her, “Your brother will rise again” (11:23).
Faithful Jews had a concept of bodily resurrection because of what the Old Testament authors taught. This understanding is why Martha said, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day” (John 11:24). There she referred to her brother’s future bodily resurrection. The dead would one day rise, and Lazarus would be among them. This she believed, as she had been taught.
Waking from the Dust
A conviction in the Four Gospels that the dead would rise was based on God’s revelation in the Old Testament. In the clearest expression of resurrection hope in the Old Testament, Daniel 12:2 says, “And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.” Pictured as waking from bodily sleep, the dead will awake from the dust and live.
The language of dust takes us back to Genesis 2–3. The Lord pronounced judgments and consequences to the serpent and to the human couple, and Adam heard these words: “By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return” (Gen. 3:19).
Being “taken” from the dust recalls the creation of Adam, where the very first instance of “dust” is used. The Lord “formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature” (Gen. 2:7). Because of the words in Genesis 3:19, however, the dust signifies not just Adam’s life; he “shall return” to the dust, which means death. Like Adam, going to the dust is our earthly end. But as Daniel 12:2 reminds us, life will once again come from the dust. In Genesis 2, the granting of life was creation. In Daniel 12, the granting of life will be resurrection. At death, we go to the dust, but we do not go there to stay.
Made for Embodied Life
Bodily resurrection is what will accomplish God’s design for his image-bearers: embodied life with him. When God made Adam, the man was not a disembodied spirit who was later given a body. God created Adam as an embodied creature, so the only kind of life Adam knew was embodied. Death disrupts bodily life because the body dies even as the soul lives. Resurrection is the recovery of God’s design because the body is raised and re-united to the soul.
We were made for unending bodily life. Consider, as evidence, the tree of life in the Garden of Eden. God put the tree of life in the midst of the garden (Gen. 2:9). And when God exiled Adam from Eden, he was barring Adam from the tree of life, “lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever” (3:22). The tree of life represented immortal physicality. The question for God’s image-bearers, then, is whether we will ever experience what the tree of life held out. The answer is yes: through bodily resurrection, we will, as Daniel 12 puts it, “awake” from the dust unto embodied immortality.
As we affirm the kind of life God created us for and will raise us to receive, we can discern more of what our Christian hope entails. Our ultimate hope is not to die and leave this world as mere souls. Paul says that at death, believers are absent from the body and present with the Lord in heaven (2 Cor. 5:6–8). To die is gain indeed (Phil. 1:21). But if our future was only disembodied life with God, then death would hold our bodies in its cords forever.
Paul, speaking about our earthly bodies, told the Corinthians, “For in this tent we groan, longing to put on our heavenly dwelling” (2 Cor. 5:2). Our earthly tent—marked with moans and groans—will be surpassed by our heavenly dwelling, our risen body. God is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory (4:17). And if we knew the glorious future of embodied life that will be ours, we would long for it like Paul did. The body’s “light momentary affliction” can’t compare to the body’s future glory (4:17–18).
Proving a Staggering Claim
When Martha told Jesus that Lazarus “will rise again in the resurrection on the last day” (John 11:24), she was correctly understanding the Old Testament hope of God’s power delivering the bodies of his people from the cords of death. But she probably wasn’t prepared for Jesus’s response. He said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live” (John 11:25).
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