If you try to speak truth in our culture, you will be attacked viciously and hated by many people. This is a guarantee. So what can we do when the hatred and backlash comes our way? As with everything else, Jesus has the answer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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| So the number one question that I hear when I travel around the country and I meet people at speaking events and that kind of thing, by far, without a doubt, the number one question I get is, how do you deal with all the hatred? | |
| I guess people have noticed that I tend to attract quite a bit of vitriol and hatred. | |
| A lot of people don't like me. | |
| And they are very eager to let me know that they don't like me and to let me know every day, all day, constantly, and in very strong terms. | |
| Now, bring out the violin and I'll tell you more of my sad tale. | |
| No, I mean, I'm not the only one. | |
| I probably attract a higher volume of it than most people just by the nature of what I do for a living, but I'm certainly not the only one. | |
| I'm sure you have noticed this as well in your own life, that if you try to speak any kind of truth whatsoever, people are going to come after you, and you're going to deal with it online and in the real world. | |
| And I assume that when people ask me this question, the reason I get it so often is that people are looking for insights they can use in their own life. | |
| Not because they want to hear my life story. | |
| Usually when I'm asked this question, the answer that I provide is, I think, unsatisfactory because I'm put on the spot. | |
| But now that I've had time to think about it, I want to try to answer it again. | |
| And I think the first thing that we have to do if we're going to talk about how to deal with the hatred from the world, the backlash that you get from defending your belief system, First thing we have to do is reiterate again and understand and embrace and accept that it absolutely will happen. | |
| You will get this hatred. | |
| We know this. | |
| We know it from our own personal experience. | |
| We also know it from Scripture. | |
| Jesus warns us about this repeatedly, and His warnings certainly apply to our culture probably more than most, but they do apply to all cultures throughout time. | |
| Now, that's true, but on the other hand, it seems almost counterintuitive because we also are a culture of indifference. | |
| People are lazy, apathetic, indifferent, and you would think, if you didn't know any better, that one of the advantages of living in a lazy, apathetic, indifferent culture is that you can say and do whatever you want and nobody will pay attention or care because they're all too busy watching their five hours of TV a day and their online And they're, you know, obsessed with movies and video games and everything. | |
| And they're too immersed in that world to even care what you're saying. | |
| And that is true most of the time. | |
| Most of the time, you can say what you want and do what you want, and nobody will care. | |
| Because part of that, that's why so many people will say, you know, let people do what they want. | |
| As long as they're not hurting me, it's fine. | |
| And they feel like that's some sort of virtuous moral code to live by. | |
| So as long as they're not hurting me, I don't care. | |
| I let people live. Live and let live, right? | |
| But everyone who really lives according to that motto, it's just pure laziness on their part. | |
| It's just because they don't care. | |
| It's not like this is not some virtuous restraint on their part. | |
| They really just don't care about anything or anyone, and they just want to watch TV. That's what that means. | |
| But here's the problem. | |
| These people, the average American who is living in this deluded world and is just entertaining himself into oblivion. | |
| And I do believe this applies to the average American. | |
| I know I'm taking a dim view of the average American, but I'm sorry, I think it's the reality. | |
| This is how the average American works. | |
| They're floating along on the current, don't care about anything, and they're just staring at screens. | |
| Not ever taking even a moment to really think about anything. | |
| The only thing they're thinking about is, what's the next show I'm going to watch? | |
| When can I get the next video game? | |
| What am I going to eat? That's what they care about and that's what they're thinking about. | |
| So, to live in this world of comfort and luxury and entertainment And moral numbness. | |
| In order to really live in that world, you cannot accept any truth. | |
| Every truth in your life has to become your own version of that truth. | |
| Because a truth has a hard edge, you know. | |
| And once you inject truth into your life, well, then now you have to kind of start conforming yourself around it. | |
| And you can't live entirely according to your own whims. | |
| So if you want to live that way, you must, in the end, reject all truth. | |
| And we're seeing this play out in our culture. | |
| So, people that are in this fog of indifference, if you come in and you inject any truth into that fog, it doesn't matter what it is, if you introduce any truth, that's when they're going to detach themselves from the screen for long enough to devour you and rip you to pieces. | |
| And then go back to what they were doing before. | |
| When you threaten this indifferent, lazy life that they're living, which is the only thing they really care about, when you threaten that, when you interfere with it, that's when they come after you. | |
| When you criticize, when you cause them to look at themselves in the mirror, When you criticize their precious, sacred lifestyle, because these days, that's the one thing you're never allowed to do, right? | |
| Anything can be justified as long as it's my lifestyle. | |
| I can say, well, this is my lifestyle. | |
| It's how I choose to live, so you can't criticize it. | |
| Actually, I can criticize it because I think it's wrong. | |
| Just because it's a choice that you've personally made? | |
| Well, it's a personal choice, so that means it's right. | |
| No, I mean, a lot of personal choices are wrong, and I think it's wrong, so I'm going to tell you I think it's wrong. | |
| Sorry. But once you take that attitude and that approach, that's when they will descend upon you. | |
| So then the hatred is inevitable in that case, and it's going to be very, very vicious. | |
| So how do you handle it? How do I handle it? | |
| Well, the honest answer is I have historically handled it very, very poorly, I have to admit. | |
| I'm trying to do better. | |
| I'm working on it, but I have handled it poorly. | |
| But I have found through trial and error that there are three serious mistakes you can make when dealing with the hatred of the world, and I have made all these mistakes. | |
| So let's talk about the mistakes first. | |
| The first mistake is the obvious one. | |
| The first mistake is to take it personally and to be offended by it and hurt We should never allow ourselves to be personally offended by the sniping and the vitriol from the world. | |
| Particularly when those personal attacks come because you said something true. | |
| Never take it personal. It's illogical anyway, because when someone comes after you and says the most awful things about you, it's not personal. | |
| Now, it may be about you, you know, on the surface, what they're saying may be personal, and they may be talking about you on the surface. | |
| But really, they don't care about you. | |
| It doesn't matter. You don't matter. | |
| It's what you said that they hate. | |
| It's your belief system. | |
| It's the conviction. It's the thing that you said, the position that you took. | |
| That's what they hate. | |
| And because they're too lazy and they lack the intelligence and the energy to engage the belief system itself, they will instead take the lazy shortcut approach and attack the person who holds the belief because that's the easiest thing to do. | |
| They don't want to apply their minds at all. | |
| Or expend the energy required to listen to what you're saying and then try to refute it. | |
| So instead, they'll listen for long enough to understand that they disagree, and then they'll just try to rip you apart personally. | |
| Maybe bring your family into it, whatever they can do to hurt you and shut you down and make you afraid, and then they can go back to what they were doing before. | |
| I will admit that I made this mistake early on when I first started doing this, when I first gained an audience online, and I was giving my opinions to a relatively large group of people. | |
| The first couple of times that I experienced a massive blowback and backlash for something that I said, Where, you know, it's hundreds and thousands of people that are attacking you, and there's hate mail, and there's comments everywhere, and it's just... | |
| First couple of times, I'll admit that I was overwhelmed, and I did let it get to me. | |
| And I read some of the comments, and I did take them personally. | |
| I know we're not supposed to admit this, but I did. | |
| It's a difficult thing. | |
| You know, when you're not used to it, it can be very hard. | |
| So I made that mistake. | |
| Don't make that mistake. Second mistake is on the opposite end of the spectrum. | |
| The second mistake is to enjoy the hatred. | |
| There are people that they get the hatred, the blowback, and their first reaction is to recoil from it and to be kind of afraid of it, and that's normal. | |
| Now, we have to overcome that reaction, but it's a normal human reaction. | |
| But then there's the people who, and these are internet trolls, basically. | |
| This is what ends up A person like this with this reaction could eventually become an internet troll, an infamous internet troll. | |
| That's someone who thrives on the negative attention and likes it. | |
| There are a lot of people in the pundit commentator class, conservatives and liberals, who that's the case for them. | |
| They really like to be hated because it's attention. | |
| It's a lot of very energetic attention directed at them, and they like that. | |
| Now, me, I've also made this mistake. | |
| At the beginning, I experienced the blowback. | |
| I was overwhelmed. I was taking it personally. | |
| And so then I thought, well, the best defense mechanism is to try to like it somehow. | |
| And so I tried that. | |
| As a defense mechanism, to shield myself, I tried to put on this thing of a, you know, well, I'm living rent-free in your head, you know, and to really take some sort of pleasure in it. | |
| It didn't last for me because it didn't come naturally to me. | |
| So I couldn't stay like that for very long, but I did try it. | |
| And what I can say is that thriving on hatred is as bad as being hateful yourself. | |
| It's probably worse, really, to actually enjoy it. | |
| It's a sick, demented thing, but there are a lot of people in that camp. | |
| That's a mistake. The third mistake is the mistake that I settled on for a long time, which is to be numb to it. | |
| I'm very guilty of this third mistake of, you know, not being afraid of the hatred and not enjoying it either, but just feeling nothing much of the time. | |
| And I think most people think this is the right approach. | |
| You hear people all the time declare, oh, I don't care what anyone thinks. | |
| I don't care what anyone thinks. | |
| And we sometimes will confuse this attitude with strength. | |
| We'll think, well, that's what it means to be strong, is to not care what anyone thinks, right? | |
| Isn't that what we always say? Well, you shouldn't care what the world thinks. | |
| Don't care about it. Don't care about their opinions. | |
| But that's not strength. | |
| If you really don't care, it's kind of like a sociopath Who has literally no fear or emotion at all cannot be courageous even when he puts himself in harm's way because fear is an element of courage. | |
| Courage is feeling the fear and acting anyway. | |
| If you have no fear whatsoever, then you cannot be courageous even if you're doing something that looks courageous. | |
| You're only doing it because you don't have that natural human reaction of fear. | |
| So being numb to the opinions of the world and being numb to the hatred, well, that doesn't make you strong. | |
| That actually makes you weak. | |
| That means that you've been worn down and beaten down, and now you're just sort of this flat line of not feeling anything. | |
| What I've realized is, after a long time of kind of taking this approach of saying, well, I really don't care what people think. | |
| Even if 50,000 people are saying the worst things about me, I really don't care what they think. | |
| I feel nothing. After a while, I realized that, you know, this doesn't seem right. | |
| I think I should care what they think. | |
| I should feel something. | |
| Now, that thing shouldn't be fear. | |
| It shouldn't be pleasure, either, on the other end of it, but I should feel something, right? | |
| Doesn't seem right to feel nothing. | |
| I mean, how can you feel nothing? How could you have swarms of angry people shouting at you and feel nothing? | |
| That doesn't seem human. | |
| And what I've realized is, well, I mean, look at what the Bible says. | |
| Pray for those who persecute you. | |
| Turn the other cheek. So that's what we should feel. | |
| We should feel moved to pray for them. | |
| We should feel pity for them. | |
| So we should care, not because we care what they think in the sense that we want them to like us, so we're going to adjust our opinions to make them like us, but when people hate us, I think we should care for their own sake, because they're wallowing and stewing in this hatred, and we should pity them for that. | |
| Pray for those who persecute you, turn the other cheek. | |
| We tend to gloss over these parts of Christ's teachings. | |
| We basically gloss over everything he says, but especially stuff like this. | |
| We gloss over it because it's become kind of a cliché. | |
| We've heard it so often, especially turn the other cheek. | |
| We hear it so often it's become just kind of part of the vocabulary, part of the language, and it's become a cliché. | |
| That's the worst thing, really, that can ever happen to the Bible is when it becomes a cliché, when we turn it into that, which is what we've done. | |
| If we really thought about it, if we didn't gloss over it and we really confronted these teachings, turn the other cheek, pray for those who persecute you, we would see that these are radical, really challenging commands that Jesus is giving us. | |
| Really, I mean, it seems almost crazy. | |
| Turn the other cheek? | |
| What? Pray for people who are attacking me? | |
| Pray for them? I think most people, although we look at that and we say, oh yeah, sure, turn the other cheek. | |
| Yeah, that's great advice. Thanks, Jesus. | |
| Thanks for that advice. And we'll say, oh yeah, I do that all the time. | |
| Yeah, definitely. Sure, sure. | |
| I think if we were to be honest, we may look at our own lives and realize that we have never turned the other cheek. | |
| We have never prayed for those who persecute us. | |
| At a certain point, I realized that. | |
| I looked at it and I said, you know what? | |
| I don't think I've ever, I got all these people attacking me. | |
| I don't think I've ever prayed for them, ever. | |
| I like to think that I have, but I don't think I ever really have. | |
| Now, part of the issue with these aspects of Christ's teaching is that they seem, at first glance, to be kind of in contradiction. | |
| They seem to contradict other things that he said, because this is also the same Jesus who famously fashioned a whip out of cords and drove the money changers out of the temple, flipping over tables. | |
| This was vandalism and assault. | |
| He was assaulting people with a whip and turning over tables. | |
| I mean, it's a crime what he did, right? | |
| This is also the same Jesus who says, I did not come to bring peace but a sword, dividing families. | |
| This is the same Jesus who said that I wish you were either hot or cold, and because you're lukewarm, I spit you out of my mouth. | |
| But lukewarm is a synonym for mild, but at other points it seems like he's telling us to be mild, but not lukewarm, telling us to turn the other cheek, but yet over here he's flipping tables and using a whip. | |
| I mean, it seems like how do you make sense of all of it? | |
| And you realize that you make sense of it this way. | |
| What Jesus is saying is, when you personally are being attacked, when your own personal honor is being assaulted or questioned, that's when you turn the other cheek. | |
| That's when you don't respond with this kind of force, right? | |
| When you personally are the victim. | |
| But when God is being attacked, when your faith is being attacked, When we're dealing with heresy and sacrilege and blasphemy, when truth is being attacked, even when your family is being attacked, well, that's different. | |
| Then we are supposed to rise up and respond with force, respond vocally, even be militant in our defense of God's honor and of truth and virtue and of good and holy things. | |
| Now, we tend to get this backwards, I think. | |
| A lot of times. What we'll do is we'll see the world attacking God and our faith and truth and committing the sacrilege and heresy and blasphemy. | |
| And that's when we say, oh, we'll turn the other cheek, be the bigger man. | |
| But then, when the hyenas, when the pack of hyenas move on from there to us, and they start personally sniping at us, that's when all of a sudden we're not so willing to turn the other cheek, and that's when we want to rise up in defense of ourselves. | |
| But it's supposed to be the opposite. | |
| Because that is strength. | |
| That's what strength is. | |
| Strength is being willing to, you know, Put yourself in the midst of it and to jump in to defend these things that are beyond you and above you and are bigger than you. | |
| But when it comes to personal hatred and personal persecution and people coming after you personally, that's when we're not supposed to muddy ourselves by flinging mud at the mudslingers or debase ourselves by trying to defend our own personal honor. | |
| It's a people who don't really care about our honor anyway, so there's no point. | |
| Forceful and vocal in our defense of God's honor and of truth and virtue, but when it comes to personal attacks, personal insults, personal affronts, to those, to those specifically, Christ says, turn the other cheek. | |
| That's what a strong man does. | |
| He doesn't cry. He doesn't snicker like a little troll and find some perverse pleasure in it. | |
| He isn't morally exhausted and numb. | |
| Instead, he's resolute, he's confident, and he's uninterested in getting involved in bickering or back and forth. | |
| And, um... When people personally insult him, he's not going to get down there and try to say, no, I'm not that. | |
| I'm not stupid. | |
| You're stupid. That's weak. | |
| That's childish. But he does feel something. | |
| Like I said, he feels pity for his attackers. | |
| He feels sorry for them. | |
| He sees how pathetic the whole scene is, how miserable these people are, how empty their lives are, and he prays for them. | |
| He prays sincerely for them. | |
| And Christ gives us the perfect example of this approach, of course, during His Passion. | |
| Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. | |
| He said that while He was nailed to a cross in unbearable agony. | |
| And we're never going to attain that level of heroism and selflessness, but we can still follow it and use it as a model. | |
| And I think that many of us have never really tried this, but it is possible to pray for those who attack you. | |
| And I'm still... Like I said, I am not the perfect model of this whatsoever, so I don't put myself forth and say, do what I'm doing. | |
| Instead, let's do what Jesus does. | |
| But I am trying, and what I've found is, you know, for me right now, most of the time, when I get personally attacked, if I'm personally attacked, and if I turn around and pray for the person attacking me, the prayer that I'm saying silently in my head Is not 100% sincere. | |
| I want it to be sincere, but it's not, because I'm still ticked off at the guy. | |
| But I'm at least right now, I'm just at the point, at the very beginning, I'm just trying to form the habit anyway. | |
| I'm trying to develop at least the habit of being attacked, and the first thing is to respond by praying for the person. | |
| And so right now, it's not 100% sincere. | |
| I'm still, it's very novice level stuff. | |
| But I think that's what we have to do a lot of times in life is, even if your heart's not in it, even if you're not feeling it, do the right thing anyway. | |
| Do the right thing. | |
| Lead with your actions. | |
| Go through the motions, at least in the beginning, and then eventually your heart will start to change along with it, especially when God sees you putting in the effort and really trying. | |
| It's like it's not enough to be really, you know, to be good, to be good people. | |
| I don't think we can leap all the way there. | |
| First, we have to really desire to be good and to do the right thing. | |
| We have to at least want, we have to, maybe we need to desire, we have to want to want to be good. | |
| You have to want to want to do the right thing. | |
| I think that's the first step. | |
| And once we take that first step, then hopefully the rest will follow. | |
| So right now I'm trying to develop the habit. | |
| And so when people ask me, how do I deal with the haters? | |
| I guess the real answer is I'm working on it. | |
| And maybe we can all work on this together. | |
| Because the other thing is, look, last thing I'll say is it's the only thing That works anyway. | |
| You know, this is also good practical advice. | |
| Like so much in the Bible, these are moral truths, moral commands. | |
| But also on top of it, it is also good practical advice for how to live. | |
| It isn't merely that. | |
| We can't turn the Bible into merely a collection of life advice, you know. | |
| So it's not just that, but it is also that. | |
| So when it comes to personal attacks, it's like there's nothing else you can do anyway. | |
| When people are personally insulting you, to get down in the mud with them and to try to defend yourself, that's how insults work. | |
| That's sort of the point of them, is that no matter what you say, once you're insulted personally, no matter what you say to defend yourself against that insult, it's only going to end up reinforcing whatever the insult was. | |
| So there's no point. We might as well just take the higher approach that Jesus is prescribing for us, because on top of being the right approach, it's also the only one that works. | |
| All right. Thanks for watching, everybody. | |
| Thanks for listening and have a great day. |