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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In textbooks, sermons, and classrooms, salvation is often conceived of as the reception of something Christ has acquired for us rather than as the reception of the living Christ. In other words, salvation is described as a gift to be apprehended rather than the apprehension of the Giver himself. To put it yet another way, the gospel is portrayed as the offer of a depersonalized benefit (e.g., grace, justification, or eternal life) rather than the offer of the very person of Christ (who is himself the grace of God, our justification, and our eternal life).4

Personal Union with Christ
In far too many evangelical expressions of the gospel, the saving work of Christ has been so distanced from his person that the notion of a saving personal union with the incarnate, crucified, resurrected, living Jesus strikes us as rather outlandish. We are content, more often than not, to refer to the “atoning work of Christ” or the “work of Christ on the cross” as the basis for our salvation. Yet, as important as such expressions are for a robust evangelical soteriology (the study of salvation), we are in dire need of the reminder that Christ’s saving work is of no benefit to us unless we are joined to the living Savior whose work it is. When we entertain the notion—consciously or not, intentionally or not—that we can be saved by the work of Christ apart from being joined to him personally, we are deepening a fissure that, left unrepaired, will continue to move us away from our biblically faithful theological heritage.
The sixteenth-century Protestant Reformer John Calvin insisted that we must never separate the work of Christ from his person if we wish to understand the nature of salvation. However much we may rightly extol and magnify the saving work of Christ on our behalf, however highly we may esteem what he accomplished in his life, death, resurrection, and ascension, we will have missed what is utterly essential to this good news if we fail to understand that our salvation has to do with his very person. The saving work of Christ is not to be thought of as abstracted from the living person of Christ.
Calvin’s way of expressing this is striking and emphatic:
First, we must understand that as long as Christ remains outside of us, and we are separated from him, all that he has suffered and done for the salvation of the human race remains useless and of no value to us. Therefore, to share in what he has received from the Father, he had to become ours and to dwell within us . . . for, as I have said, all that he possesses is nothing to us until we grow into one body with him.1
If Calvin’s insistence on the intensely relational aspect of salvation—the personal indwelling of Christ—seems somewhat foreign to us, it may be because contemporary evangelical soteriology2 has largely lost sight of a profound mystery that lies at the heart of the gospel, a mystery that the apostle Paul describes as “Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Col. 1:27). The mysterious reality of our union with Jesus Christ, by which he dwells in us and we in him, is so utterly essential to the gospel that to obscure it inevitably leads to an obscuring of the gospel itself. For a number of reasons, contemporary evangelical theology has routinely failed to incorporate this mystery into the heart of its soteriological understanding.
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Written by Sinclair B. Ferguson |
Thursday, November 11, 2021
He came to undo what Adam so disastrously did, and lead us back through the jungle to the garden. He crossed the ravine, the unbridgeable gulf between sinful man and holy God. And He did this as the Second Man, but now the Man of Faith, trusting in and living by every word that comes from the mouth of God.

My last contact with the late Professor John Murray — to whose writings and influence I, like many others, owe a lasting debt — was particularly memorable for me, partly because I asked him a question to which he gave the answer: “That is a difficult question!” As a somewhat diffident young person it was something of a relief to know that my question wasn’t totally stupid. It is a question on which I have continued to reflect.
So, what was the question? It may seem a rather recondite one. My question was about the translation and the theological significance of the word used both by Peter (Acts 5:31) and the author of Hebrews to describe our Lord Jesus: archegos. It appeared once before in our studies of Hebrews: Jesus is the author of our salvation who was made perfect through suffering and as such brings many sons to glory (Heb. 2:10). Now the same term reappears towards the end of the letter, in Hebrews 12:2, where our Lord is now described as “the author of our faith who brings it to perfection.”
This explains why, while we are encouraged to read about earlier heroes of the faith (Heb. 11), it is only on Jesus Himself that we are to fix our gaze. If our eyes should stop on anyone who came before Him we will have missed the whole point of the chapter. The Old Testament heroes of faith never received what was promised; they lived before the time of fulfillment. They exercised faith, but they were all trusting in the promise that would be fulfilled in Christ. By contrast, Jesus is the “author” of faith and He is also the one who experienced and expressed it to the full. It is wonderful to think about Jesus in this way. But how do we do so? What did this mean for Him?
Archegos describes an inaugurator, a trail-blazer, a pioneer — someone whose achievements make it possible for others to experience the benefits of what he has done. The school our two eldest sons attended held an annual “Founders’ Day” service at which the two brothers who had first begun the school centuries before were remembered and honored. They had begun something the benefits of which our children entered into and shared. They were archegoi.
But we might describe other religious leaders in these terms, as founders of great movements.
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