Criticism

Sunday I taught on How to Handle Criticism. It was the first in the People's Choice series.

The quick recap is that there are 3 right ways to deal with criticism.

1. Listen if it is actually constructive criticism.
There is a time that people who actually want to help you, can encourage you with some things you might need to change. Be open enough to hear it, if they are healthy.

2. You might need to answer the criticism.
Sometimes critics don't know the whole story, and are criticizing because they think they know the whole story. In this case you need to give them an appropriate response.

3. You need to dismiss invalid criticism.
Those who are constantly critical, unfortunately, rarely change. When you are receiving criticism from those critics you need to just let it go.

Hurt people hurt people.

We can really only effectively please God. Too often we spend so much time pleasing others, that we fail to even recognize that we haven't considered pleasing God.

Our first and most important objective in life is pleasing God.