BE CAREFUL HOW YOU STAND
If we look in the Word of God at 1 Corinthians 10:12…
We need to really be very careful how we stand, and one of the areas that we need to be very aware of is that we don’t take everybody’s comments to ourselves. Flattery is a very dangerous thing. I looked up the Oxford Dictionary to find out the meaning of the word and it says ‘to give an unrealistically favourable impression of.’ In other words, it’s not realistic. When we flatter somebody, sometimes we do them a lot of harm. I read an article written by the late preacher Smith Wigglesworth, who had an incredible healing ministry and he tells a story of a young man who had tremendous potential and the people were so excited about him. He got baptised in the Holy Spirit, he was speaking in another language, they were so excited, they were so expectant how the Lord was going to use this young man as a leader in their midst. And the one woman started saying that you are going to be the next John the Baptist and everyone was patting him on the back and they continued to lift him up, and eventually he actually started to believe what they were saying about him, without getting confirmation or approval from the Word of God. Then eventually he was going around town telling everybody that he was John the Baptist and sadly eventually they took him and detained him.
People ruined a young life by telling him something that he wasn’t and eventually he started to believe it and ruined his ministry completely. We need to be careful what we say, it is very dangerous to lift people up. I’m not talking about encouragement, encouragement is something totally different, we need to encourage one another. I need a lot of encouragement, I think everybody does, but flattery, we must deal with it from whence it comes and it is definitely not there to help anybody. Sometimes a gentle rebuke has more benefit than to be flattered because we are concerned about building people up, not breaking them down. Be careful how you speak, sometimes we need to count to ten before we say something and often we won’t say it after that.
May God bless you as you encourage, but not flatter, your fellow man.
Jesus bless you
Angus and Jill Buchan