Message Description

Dr. Kurt Bjorklund continues the message series from the Book of Proverbs "Better" by illustrating 3 different triggers we sometimes use to block us from learning from negative feedback.

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Message Transcript

Well, good morning. Welcome. So if you didn't track all of that, here's what's happening. On March 15th, we will have our last service in this space and at that time we will go into construction mode, which means this space will be shut down and we will thrive during construction. Yes, it will be a little bit of a pain, but we also know that there are great things on the other side. And so what we'll be doing during that time is having a service in the chapel and in the gymnasium simultaneously that should accommodate many of the people who worship here during a 9:30 or 11:15 service. However, we do need, as you heard about 150 people, if our Math is correct, to choose either the 8:15 service, which is the liturgical service that's currently happening in the chapel or Saturday night, in order to just help facilitate having enough chairs on a regular basis for the people who come.

If you would be willing to do that during the construction period, it'll be four, five, six, seven months somewhere in there. We're not really sure, but they're saying five plus months. There's a card that you have here, if you would fill this out and just give it to somebody at the connect desk on your way out today, what that would do is it would just allow some of our administrative team here to contact you just to talk about how that could go. Now you're not committing to saying, "I'll never come at 11:15 or 9:30. What you're saying is your base service for the length of the construction just to help facilitate having enough seats that you would go to one of the other options that we have. And in case you didn't know, daylight savings time is coming, 8:15 allows you to get to the golf course sooner, the beach, all kinds of great things. Yeah, in April, you're going to go to the beach. I know.

This is what's coming and as you think about this, also on March 15th at night, we'll have a final celebration of what God's done in this space. So watch for those details. But as you think about this, what we're hoping will happen, and we've talked about this now for a long time, is that through this renovation the updates that this space will actually become even a better space for corporate worship, for engagement than what it's been. And sometimes this space can be cavernous even with a full room and so by dropping the ceiling, we should be able to hear one another, sing a little better and our hope is that even in the time that we're in the different spaces that there will be some increased just engagement for all of us.

I hope that you'll just make being here, being part of that still a priority and that this will be a great time for us as a church family. Next weekend, Terry Thomas will be here. I'll be speaking in our Strip District campus, Mike Chilcoat who has been around the church for about a year as the Regional Director for Young Life will be speaking in our chapel service. And then we'll just have a couple of weekends left here in this space to gather. So let's pray and we'll jump into what we're looking at today. God, thank you for just each person who's gathered. And God, we ask today that you would speak to each of us, wherever we're coming from, whatever we're bringing. God, I pray that my words would reflect your word in content and in tone and in emphasis. And we pray this in Jesus name. Amen.

I have a guess and my guess is this, and that is that you don't like being criticized. It's a pretty safe guess and nobody enjoys when somebody else looks at something they're doing and says, "That's not great. You could do it better." And I also have a guess and that is that you have been criticized, and that you've experienced a reaction to that criticism, and maybe you've even gotten to a point where you said, "No matter what I do, it feels as if I can't avoid being criticized." At least with some people in your life. There's a story about a old man who lived in an ancient community and he had a donkey. And one day he went to run some errands with his donkey and he took his grandson with him and he had his grandson sit on the donkey and he walked and he heard the other villagers just critique them and say, "Why do you have the child ride the donkey when you who are an old man should ride the donkey?"

The next day he went out and went to run some errands again with his grandson. He had his son walk or his grandson walk and lead the donkey while he sat on the donkey. And again, the villagers started to talk and just say, "Can you believe this man that he makes the child walk? I mean this is insane." So the next day he goes out and again going to run some errands with a donkey and his grandson and both he and his grandson walk and they just lead the donkey. And soon everyone's like, "What are they doing? They have this animal that they're not using." And so the next day he decides to go out and he decides to carry the donkey. And as you can imagine, people were still critical.

Well, do do you ever feel that way? Like no matter what you do maybe with your spouse, maybe with a boss, maybe it's an employee, somebody who works for you, maybe they don't tell you, but you know that they're constantly chirping behind your back, critiquing you. Maybe it's a brother or a sister, even athletes are critiqued by their fans and artists by their fans. And so criticism's fairly inevitable. And here's what happens to many of us, and that is when we're critiqued or criticized, we decide to shut it down to say, "I don't want to hear from you."

Now, sometimes that's valid because sometimes when we're critiqued we may say, "What you have to say is wrong." Or maybe, "We don't care for the source." But I want to show you what proverbs says, and we've been in this series in Proverbs to start the new year that we've called Better. And Proverbs says something very clearly about how we respond to words of critique, words of reproof, words of instruction. And this series has been a little different than a lot of the teaching we do here at Orchard Hill in that Proverbs is more thematic.

We're jumping all around Proverbs rather than working our way through a text systematically, which is more often what we do here. But here's what we see in Proverbs, Proverbs 12:1, this is from the expanded translation of the bible. It says, "A person who hates being corrected is stupid." I don't how know about you, but I don't like being called stupid especially by the bible. But what does that say? It says if you hate being corrected, you are stupid. And then the message, which is a paraphrase of the bible, puts it this way, "How short sighted it is to refuse correction." In other words, if you don't take correction seriously, if you just simply say, "I'm shutting down as much criticism as I can, as much of the negative words that I hear from anybody in my life." That it's shortsighted and it's stupid.

And then Proverbs 29:1 puts it this way, and you heard this right. It says, "Whoever remains stiff-necked after many rebukes will suddenly be destroyed without remedy." In other words, if you decide that you're not going to heed words of instruction or a warning that there is something coming that could be disastrous for you. It reminds me of a story I heard once about a ranger at a national park who was leading a group on a guided hike, and as he was leading this group on this guided hike, the walkie-talkie that he was carrying that had him communicate with other rangers started to just have a lot of chatter and it was annoying to him and to the people in his group. So he turned the volume down on his walkie-talkie. And as he turned the volume down on his walkie-talkie, it created peace in the moment until he and the group encountered a grizzly bear.

They were all okay, they made it out, but as he came back to base, he started to talk to the other guides and he was thinking, "Why didn't you warn me?" And what he realized was that when he turned the walkie-talkie down, that was what all the chatter was. In other words, if you and I do not heed rebuke, do not listen to correction, if we're not teachable, if instead we choose to be obstinate, that's why we're saying it's better to be teachable than obstinate, if that's what we do, what we're in essence doing is we're turning down, figuratively speaking the walkie-talkie that might be the insight and the words that we need to forge a better future. And so Proverbs says that in essence, the wise person will heed rebuke and instruction.

Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen wrote a book a few years ago called, Thanks for the Feedback. They're lectures at Harvard Business School. Sheila Heen actually has a strong christian faith background. And they wrote this book about feedback and it actually gives a lot of principles about how to handle feedback many of which I think could be gleaned from the Proverbs. They don't do it in the book. It's written for a broader audience, but here's what they say at one point in their book. They say, "Doing what feels good now, finding a way to make negative feedback stop maybe costly in the long run, you are left fired or simply stagnate. And what is healthy in the long run, understanding and acting on useful feedback, may be painful now."

In other words, part of the premise of their book, and I think it's a summation of what Proverbs teaches, is that you and I have a choice, a choice to say, "I'll either receive feedback from people in my life, some of it which will be painful now and it will help me in the future, or I will choose in essence to say, I'm going to minimize feedback now." And although that feels good in the moment, in the future, it will create some bigger challenges. And so here's what I'd like to do this morning and that is I'd like to just look at some of the reasons that we resist feedback.

And I'm going to use the structure that Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen used in their book they talk about three triggers, three reasons that we basically resist feedback, say no to feedback. And I'll draw and show where I think these things are found in the book of Proverbs. But here's the first one, and that is truth trigger. And what a truth trigger is, is where we look at something and we say, "I don't believe the feedback itself. I think you have something wrong in what you have to say to me." Now, certainly a wise person will evaluate something for whether or not it's real. So they won't just say, "If you say something to me, it has to be real." But far too often our tendency is to resist something just out of hand by saying, "I don't want to hear this." And here's where we see this in Proverbs 13:1, "A wise son heeds his father's instruction, but a mocker does not respond to rebukes."

And then Proverbs 13:18, "Whoever disregards discipline comes to poverty and shame. But whoever heeds correction is honored." Now, there are some ways that we avoid hearing truth. Sometimes what we do is what I am going to call... and this is what the authors call it, wrong spotting. And here's what wrong spotting is, wrong spotting is basically saying, "You gave me some feedback and I'm going to find one piece of your feedback that's inaccurate so that I can disinvalidate the whole thing."

For example, you're at a team meeting at work and somebody says, "Hey, the way that you handled yourself in the team meeting last week wasn't great. You were a little on edge, you were kind of a jerk in the meeting." And you say, "Wow, you are so off base. I wasn't in a meeting with you last week, it was two weeks ago. So you have nothing to say to me about my behavior in the meeting." Right? That's wrong spotting. Or if one of your friends says to you, "Hey, that red dress that you wear, you don't look great in it, you should think about wearing something else." And you're like, "I don't even have a red dress. It's a maroon dress." Wrong spotting. Okay. You're saying, "I am not going to listen to your feedback because I found one little piece that invalidates it."

Now, another way that we do this is we confuse coaching with evaluation. The authors of this book talk about how there are three ways that we receive feedback. They say there's appreciation. So this is when somebody says, "Hey, I noticed you did this. Thanks for doing this. Good job." We all like to get appreciation. And many of us are good at giving appreciation. Then there's coaching, which is when somebody says something to you to say, "I want to help you be better at something. So here is what you can do to be even better." And then there's evaluation and what evaluation is, is when somebody isn't trying to help you be better they're just simply saying, "I think that you did this poorly." So instead of, "Wear the blue dress instead of the red dress." They say, "You just look bad in the red dress."

And what happens is when we confuse coaching and evaluation, we can tend to say, "I'm going to invalidate everything you have to say." And part of why this happens is because we tend to do something that is counterproductive in our conversations and in our interactions with people. So I'm going to draw some awesome stick people here. This is somebody who is about to initiate something. And what happens is this person has thoughts. And from that they have an intention. And when they look at their interaction with somebody, this is what they see. They say, "I had a thought and I had an intention." And these lead to our behavior. And what happens is the other person who's receiving or on the other end of this, what they do is they have the impact of your action. And what they do is they build a story about it, and so this person lives here, this person lives here.

And here's why this is problematic. When you an interaction with somebody, if you're on this side of the interaction, what you do is you say, "I can't believe that he or she did this, said this, had something to say to me." The other person is saying, "Well, I just meant to help you." So let's just take a simple situation, let's say that you park in the same parking space. You have an assigned parking space, maybe the apartment you live in, the dorm that you live in, maybe where you work. And the person next to you, who has the same assigned parking spaces is always over the line taking your parking space. So every time you come into park, you're in this tight little space, you have to squeeze out of the door and it's a major pain.

Now, what do you do? Some of you say, "We'll just chill out and park in the tights parking space." But day after day, you finally say "Something needs to be said, this person should park in their line." Okay. So all of a sudden you're saying, "This person needs to park in their line." What do you do? You say, "I think it would be more thoughtful of my co-parker if they would park in their line. So I'm going to say something, because it's been weeks of me not saying anything. I'm going to say it nicely, I'm going to do it as well as I can." So you say something and this person says, "Wow, what a piece of work is that person, that they get all uptight about the fact that I parked over a line or that they... I parked over a line and they had to talk about me." And then they create a story, we create a story and we go, "That person back there is really a person who is obsessed about boundaries. They're a difficult person to work with."

And instead of ever hearing the feedback about, "I've been parking over the line." What we do is we create a story and say, "I can't hear what you have to say." And as a result, we end up invalidating feedback before we even consider it. And that's really what we need to do in terms of truth to say, "I will consider feedback before I invalidate it. If somebody has a word for me, I am going to consider it before I invalidate it". So that's a truth trigger.

Here's the second trigger. And this is a relational trigger. And this is where what we do is we will in essence say, "I will hear feedback, but I'm not going to hear it from you." Because you as we think about it, are somebody who I don't either respect or I don't think has my best interest at heart. Proverbs 23:12 says this, it says, "Apply your heart to instruction and your ears to words of knowledge." Robert Alter, who wrote a great translation and commentary on the Proverbs, put it this way. He said, "Bring your heart to reproof." In other words, bring your heart to hear the reproof that somebody has to give to you.

Proverbs 27:5-6 say this, "Better is open rebuke than hidden love. Wounds from a friend can be trusted, but an enemy multiplies kisses." Now, you may hear that and say, "Well, what does that mean? That open rebuke is better than hidden love." What part of what that means is that if you're in a relationship, you would rather have somebody who's honest enough to tell you the truth than to have people who are for you and don't tell you the hard things you need to hear. Tim Keller in writing about this verse put it this way. He said, "Real friends do open rebuke. They tell each other things that they need to hear, even if they are painful. If you are afraid to say what needs to be said, you are really an enemy of your friend's soul." That's a strong statement.

If you are afraid to say what needs to be said, you're actually an enemy of your friend's soul, you're an enemy of your spouse's soul, you're an enemy of your children's soul, you're an enemy of your parents' soul, of your coworkers soul, if you say, "I don't want to say anything." But here's what Proverbs is also saying, if you shut it down before somebody says it to you, you're foolish. That's what it's saying. Because what you're doing is you're saying, "I don't want to hear from you because I tend to think that you don't qualify, you don't have anything for me or I don't trust that you're for me."

I don't know if you've ever had anybody do this to you either literally or symbolically, but just put their hand up almost like, "Talk to the hand." Have you ever done this? Maybe you've done it to somebody else like, "I do not want to hear from you right now." What happens when you say, "I don't want to hear from you." Is it's like you're putting up your hand and saying, "I am not going to listen to anything that you have to say to me." And you might miss some of the most valuable feedback that you can get.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that sometimes the best feedback you can get is not from people that you trust and that you like. And here's why I say this. In the Old Testament, there's a story about a king named Rehoboam. And this's 1st Kings 12, and Rehoboam comes to power as a young man to be the king. And there's advisers that were in place that were part of his father's regime. And so he goes to these older advisers and he says, "What should I do as the new king?" And they said, "You should relieve the tax burden." This is not important to our current political climate, this is an Old Testament story. The advisers say, "You should relieve the tax burden and then the people will basically follow you and your kingdom will be secure."

And he says, "Okay, thanks for the advice." And then he goes and he seeks advice from his contemporaries, some of the younger men who are coming into their own with him. And they say, "Oh, no, you should double down on the taxes. You should show these people that you're in charge, you should make them know that you are the ruler." And he says, "I will take your advice." And he does it and he loses his kingdom. Now you may say, "Okay, is this about taking older advice than younger advice?" I don't think that's the point. I mean you could argue and say this was the original okay boomer moment? But actually what I think is happening here is that Rehoboam disregarded the advice of people who were not like him and probably didn't like him. And instead he chose the advice of people who were like him and who liked him.

And here's my point, sometimes the people who like you will be nice to you and won't tell you the truth. Sometimes people who don't like you and are not like you won't care as much and they'll actually give you a better perspective on what's real. Meaning if you say, "I'll only take feedback from somebody who I know likes me or I have total respect for." Sometimes you'll miss some of the best feedback that you can get. And so we need to be careful of the relational trigger.

And then there's a third trigger that this book talks about and they just call it, the identity trigger. If we need to... In essence for the truth trigger decide to not invalidate feedback before we consider it and if with the relational trigger we need to separate people from the feedback, when it comes to the identity trigger, we need to be able to see how sometimes our identity is so tied to something that we won't actually hear what people have to say and not be relying on how others see us.

Proverbs 9:8-9 put it this way, it says, "Do not rebuke mockers or they will hate you, rebuke the wise and they will love you. Instruct the wise and they will be wiser still, teach the righteous and they will add to their learning." Now, mocker is a word that's used in Proverbs for somebody who is basically unwilling to hear from anybody else and they turn everything into a joke. And what this means is that if you go to a mocker and you try to give them input, they will basically turn it around on you. But here the truth is the opposite of this is also true. And that is if every time somebody says something to you or to me, what it means is we are foolish because what we're doing is we're saying, "You can't tell me anything about me because it's going to prick myself perception."

In other words, if you always think that you're the smartest person in the room, you're probably in the wrong room. Because what you're doing is you're saying, "I'm so smart, nobody can tell me that." Or "I'm such a good man, a good woman that nobody can tell me that I parked over the line and I somehow was annoying to them." Because it doesn't fit our self perception. And what happens is once our identity is threatened, then we say, "I have to shut down anything that you have to say to me."

If you have ever taken a picture of yourself, maybe a selfie, maybe you had somebody else take it and you were like, "That is not a good picture." Anybody ever do this? Yes, you've done this. And you say, "Get rid of that picture. Take another picture." And let's assume just for a moment that you only take two pictures, a bad one and a good one. Now what do you do with those two pictures? You get rid of the bad one and you keep the good one and you say, "The good one is me." And that's the picture that gets posted to social media, the bad one never sees the light of day, right? I mean that's how this works. So which picture is you? Both of them are you. You are the person who looks pasty white, maybe a little puffy. The clothes are a little frumpy and you're like, "That's not a great picture." But you're also the person who the light hits just right, the chin is tucked up, the guts sucked in and you feel good and you're like, "Yeah, that's me." You are both of those.

But here's the problem, when our identity becomes, "This is my picture of myself." Is we can't hear anything that tells us something different about ourselves. So Just take the example of marriage, if you're married and if you're not married, you'll understand this as well. If you're married and you think, "I'm a really good spouse. I'm there for my husband, my wife. I'm present, I'm not too puffy. I'm all the things that they want me to be." And your spouse says something to you about how you could be even more awesome than you are. How you can be awesomer. And their critique is something like," I appreciate all you do, but if you could get your laundry in the laundry basket instead of on the floor, it would really be... You'd be awesomer."

And then they probably don't use those words, but if you say, "No, I am such a good spouse. How dare you tell me anything because I do all of these things and you don't have any right." Do you see how you shut it down? Or if your spouse says, "Be really nice when you drive my car, if you wouldn't bring it back empty, if you'd fill it back up that would be awesome, you'd be awesomer if you did that." And you're like, "Hey, wait a second. Do you know how many times I've filled up your car? Do you know all the ways that I've served you?" What are you doing? You're saying, "I cannot assimilate information that says, this doesn't fit my picture. My picture over here is I'm an awesome spouse and you're telling me that I'm not completely awesome." And what they're really doing is they're giving you feedback and saying, "You've done something here that hasn't worked me."

And what that means is that in order to live and receive feedback is we need to be able to say, "My identity does not rest. I'm getting an affirming word about the picture that I already have of myself, but I'm willing to hear the whole truth." Now up until this moment, everything that I've said can apply whether you believe the bible or If you don't believe the bible. If you're a follower of Jesus or you're not a follower. You can say, "You know what? It's good. I should be open to feedback and my life will be better." And Proverbs is written in such a way that it gives just very practical advice to our lives. And so you could walk away today saying... The outcome of this is to say, "I need to be more aware of critique and feedback and rebuke, reproof. And I need to be open to receive feedback better."

And you could say, "That is my take away." To say, "Yes, that is what I need to hear." But I'd like to suggest that actually being a person of faith can actually help us receive feedback better. And here's why. Do you know that God Has said something about you that fits into the truth category that you may want to deny? And that is what the bible says very clearly is that, you and I are sinful people and we deserve condemnation. How? That's what the bible says. Romans 3:23 says, "For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God." And Romans 6:23 says, "The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life." Meaning the worst thing that's been said about you ever has it been said by your boyfriend, your girlfriend, your spouse, your brother, your sister, your mom, your dad, your kids, your boss, your coworkers. It's been said by God.

And what that means is if you're able to assimilate that into your way of thinking, then you're able to say, "Whatever else you have to say about me, there's something worse." In other words, you want to say, "That crooked guy, I don't care much for." And fill in your blank, "Whatever you want to say about me, I can assure you that it is worse than what you have to say and God has seen it to the very bottom." And here's why this matters. Because if I understand that and I embrace that now what happens is instead of saying, "I'll go up and down with everything you have to say about me." I can say, "You can have an opinion of me, but my real sense of being doesn't come from what you have to say about me or not about me." It comes from something bigger.

And in terms of relationship, when you can say, "The God of the universe has said probably the hardest thing ever about me, but also one of the most beautiful things about that is that I'm loved, just as I am. That there's nothing that I'm going to do that's going to add to God's love, nothing I'm going to do that's going to distract or detract from God's love, that because of what Jesus Christ did on the cross, I have full standing in God." Do you know what's going to happen? If I believe that in my core of my being, my identity will not be so tied to me having a favorable picture of myself that I can only receive certain kinds of feedback. You see, being a person of faith, if you let that faith resonate to the core of your being will actually help you navigate an important issue in life and that is how you receive feedback. And it will give you the grounds to actually live a better life.

But if you simply say, "I'm just going to try to be better." What will happen is you'll go about a week or two and you'll say, "I'm open to feedback." But then as soon as somebody says something that's really hurt, you won't have the basis to keep being open and receiving words of rebuke and in correction. And I've always said that marriage is like putting miracle grow on character defects. And if you've gotten married, one of the things that happens is after a season your spouse will in all likelihood become one of the people who has more to say about poor little things that you do day in day out than anybody else. And here's the truth. You have a choice to say, "I will resist everything you have to say to me and separate in terms of your emotional connection." Or to say, "You're somebody who has something to add to my life."

And it isn't just spouses, you have lots of those people that God will put in your life. But the way that you can stay most open is by saying, "My identity is actually rooted in this gospel of Jesus Christ. And I worship him for that. And so what you have to say about me, for me, against me matters, but not nearly as much as this has already changed my identity." And that will give you and me the strength to take feedback well.

Father, we thank you for just how practical your word is in directing us to not just say, "I'm going to try harder to receive feedback." But to seeing how what you've said about us gives us the capacity to really live differently in this area. And God, I pray that for each of us here and now we would experience our identity in you in a way that it gives us a standing of saying, "I have come to know that what Jesus has done is the most transformative thing for me." Rather than simply saying, "I'm going to try harder to be better." And we pray this in Jesus name. Amen.