Filtering Your Speech

You may have had the experience of having conversations with members of your family or your extended family, and you don't see eye to eye on what's going on in our world. Scott Sauls says Jesus had a group of disciples who didn't have compatible worldviews when it came to society and to government. This disciples group is a group of people that included Matthew the tax collector, the big government guy, and Simon the zealot, the small or no government guy.

So, you've got a libertarian and, you know, a Marxist. You know, Jesus said to that group that included those two, by this the world's going to know that you belong to me, that you get along in ways that nobody can out there, that you love one another. This is Family Life Today. Our hosts are Dave and Ann Wilson. I'm Bob Lapine.

You'll find us online at familylifetoday.com. So, what are we supposed to do when we have friends, family members, loved ones, and we don't see eye to eye on things that are pretty important? How do we get along with each other?

How do we communicate? We're going to talk more about that today with Scott Sauls. Stay with us. And welcome to Family Life Today.

Thanks for joining us. You ever posted anything on social media where you've gone, I probably shouldn't have posted that, but too late to pull it back now? Yes, very recently. Has that happened recently? Last week, I posted this simple little comment about a controversial topic in the world.

I'm not going to get into it. Just a simple little thing. Didn't really take a stand. Just a, let's put this out there. I think I need to say something, you know? So, I didn't write a blog.

It wasn't even a paragraph, a couple words. First response, less than a minute, woman from my church. Well, guess I'll have to find a new church. Wow. That was her response. And I'm like, oh, my goodness.

She has no idea what I even think about this topic. I didn't say anything. Right. Actually, I posted it. Oh, yeah, that's right.

And Dave had to recover from it. I'm glad that she admitted that. I was trying to be nice.

I posted it, yeah. Social media is one of those environments where the first thing that pops into our mind, which is most often a reflexive, impulsive, not well thought through response to our environment. That would be me. In fact, after that, Bob, two of my three sons said, Dad, from now on, text us first before you put anything out there. And that's pretty wise. I did see somebody on social media say, I have friends who I run all my tweets by or all my Facebook posts by before I post them, and it has saved me a lot of pain and a lot of embarrassment from things that I just thought, this is what I feel like saying.

But I probably shouldn't say it in this moment. We're talking about how important our communication is because it reflects not only what's in our heart, but it affects our relationships and how we communicate love to one another. And we've got our friend Scott Sauls, who is joining us again for this conversation. Scott, welcome back.

Good to be with you all. Scott is teaching pastor at Christ Presbyterian Church in Nashville, Tennessee. He's an author.

He is a blogger. He is one of those guys that we look to for wisdom. I look to him a lot for wisdom. He's a biblical thinker, too. And he just looks wise, doesn't he? He does. He really does. It's a bald head.

It's a bald head. See, I finally got it out there. I did think, you know, wouldn't it be interesting if we're talking about, you know, should we post this and we should text to somebody first? What if we did that in our homes? Hey, should I say this to mom? Oh, we've done that.

I've had friends. My sister and I used to have this little accountability that she would call me and say, this is what I'm going to say to my husband tonight. And I would be like, no, whatever you do, do not say it. So we would practice. It's kind of like what we talked about earlier where Scott said, you look in the mirror and have that conversation in the mirror first.

And I think that's really a wise thing to do. Having communication accountability buddies who you can go to beforehand so they don't have to clean up the mess, but they can help you prevent the mess. Scott's just written a book called A Gentle Answer, Our Secret Weapon in an Age of Us Against Them.

And 2020 feels like it's been us against them on steroids. We've just had conflict after conflict, culturally at least, and those cultural conflicts filter their way into family relationships, into church relationships. You're a pastor, but you're also a husband and a dad. Are you a naturally gentle answering person? Is it part of your personality to return a gentle answer?

It really depends on the context. I think in most relationships and interactions, that's probably part of the picture, yeah. I think that when I get into discussions and especially disagreements with people I really care about and I know they really care about me, I can let my guard down more and it can get more heated.

And I say more apologies, I'll put it that way, I say more apologies to people that I know better and am living life closer to than I do with strangers or people that are just acquaintances. I have found that where I stumble in this area are in areas where I am most passionate or in areas where I am most fearful because if I'm really fired up about something or if I'm really anxious or afraid about something, that's when I will be less prudent with my speech. Yeah, I think that's really wise to recognize the association between passion and fear. Because a lot of times the things that we get most passionate and heated up about, it might come across as assertiveness, maybe as overconfidence, when in fact on the inside we're afraid that something that matters to us is being threatened. And maybe in a family discussion it could go a number of different directions, but let's just say your spouse is pushing back on you, maybe our greatest fear is being misunderstood, maybe our greatest fear is the likely silence that's going to probably follow this conversation, maybe our greatest fear is not being on the same page, maybe our greatest fear is not being perceived as being right or not winning. We have all kinds of different fears, some of them can be born out of pride, some of them can be born out of a very precious place. And so we've got to kind of analyze, okay, what am I afraid of and what do I stand to lose if my fears are realized?

Is that thing important or is that thing really just a product of an inflated ego on my part? That's a great question to ask of even why am I afraid. And I don't think it always starts with fear that we know because I think many times, at least in our marriage, it starts with anger. If anger is a secondary emotion, then the first primary emotion would be fear. So I would respond to Dave in anger, and in a family situation, we'd be in a fight, and I would be angry. He wouldn't say that I'm fearful.

Nope. But I was fearful that I wouldn't be seen, which stems from- Do you guys have any video footage of this? Actually, we do.

We do actually. A few of those caught on video, but here's one as a parent that I think we've all probably experienced. Our child, especially a teenager or older, is starting to say things or act in ways that seems like they're walking away from the faith that we've tried to ground them in their whole life. Often a parent will respond angry because we're fearful. And so it's not a general answer. It's like, what are you thinking? How do I respond? Because the posture of a parent in that moment is critical to draw them into a conversation, right? So teach us, model for us. Would it be a tone?

Would it be words? How do we respond as a dad or a husband in that situation? I think it's really smart of parents like you just did to recognize the difference between a teenager and a toddler or an eight-year-old because the younger they are, the more directive parents need to be because they're a hazard to themselves, right?

They can really get hurt if we're not directive. And those are the years, too, where they're a lot more receptive just developmentally to this is what we believe. This is why we believe it. This is who we are as a family. And then they start to develop into those years where they start to have opinions. Questions. The most threatening thing to a parent is their child's first opinion.

And questions and doubts. Doubts about things that are just dear, that are everything to us as parents, especially that have to do with faith. And what can backfire with teenagers is when we try to parent a 17-year-old as if they were still eight, where we're offering directive guidance rather than persuasive guidance, which oftentimes involves more listening than speaking, to get to the bottom of what's behind their questions and where they're coming from and what's in their heart, what's informing their questions and their doubts. You're old enough to have adult children who are forming their own opinions and thinking things through differently than maybe you've thought them through.

Here you are, a pastor who is known for what you think, and you're supposed to be influencing other people to think more biblically. And when your own kids start to post on social media things that don't reflect well on you, how do you handle that? You know, I think in a lot of ways, one of those dads who hit the jackpot, I don't think I can remember a single time where either one of my kids has embarrassed me publicly. And they've got plenty of material. If they wanted to do that, they've got plenty of material.

I'm serious. I respect my daughters for that a lot. You know, one of them is in her early 20s, the other is 18. And so even it's like a real-time example happened recently where our oldest daughter wanted to put her name on something, like a public sort of document that several people are signing. And the question was, is this going to put you in a bad place, dad, because what I want to sign, you know, she's a real advocate for certain vulnerable populations, and oftentimes that kind of advocacy can be wrongly interpreted as being partisan, you know, in one direction or another. And she's not. She's just actually a biblical person wanting to defend and advocate for people who are not getting a fair defense and advocacy.

And so she's a real justice person. And she's like, is this going to get you shot at by, you know, certain people? My pastor at church and my audience, you know, from writing and speaking is pretty mixed politically.

And as you all know, if you've got a mixed political audience, you will get shot at from the polar extremes on both ends. But, you know, I said to her, this has nothing to do with me. Like, you're your own person. God's at work in you in a unique way. You've got a unique voice. You do what your conscience leads you to do, and I can handle it.

My question is, can you handle it if people criticize me for something you do and start to use what you signed against me? And so I just told her, you know, I can handle it and you should follow your conscience. But part of that is the climate that she's created of being somebody who's very careful not to embarrass her dad publicly when she has a lot of material, you know? And so, I mean, she's becoming more and more of a peer and less and less of like a child, you know, to us, which is a beautiful thing to watch. And as parents, I think we have to recognize we raised our kids to be adults, not just to parrot everything they heard from us, but to think on their own. When they do that, it's going to make us uncomfortable, but this is really what we want. We want them to think right. We'd like them to think everything we think, but that's not realistic.

We didn't think everything our parents thought. And I love the conversation. For me, as our kids got older, I loved discovering who they were, what they thought, what they believed, and I didn't always believe and agree with their stance on certain positions.

One of our sons got married and his wife was sitting in on these conversations and she started getting up pacing around the house. We would dialogue about controversial subjects. It was one of my favorite things to do because it was out of love. It was just dialoguing, hearing his heart, hearing my heart.

It wouldn't get hot, but it would get pretty intense and passionate. And then we'd be done and we both really cared about each other and went, wow, that was a great conversation. Well, she finally said, I can't do this anymore. And she hadn't said anything. And I said, what do you mean? She goes, this is so like, I'm just so bothered by the whole thing. And our son turned and said, we do this all the time.

But she had never had those conversations where she wouldn't even talk to her parents about her views because they'd be controversial. Talk about that, Scott, in the context of a gentle answer, because different personalities and different temperaments are going to express their gentle answers differently. And we can now be the gentleness police coming along and saying you weren't gentle enough and how you said that.

And the context may have been perfectly appropriate. Yeah, so if we're all created in the image of God and Christ is God, the four of us are agreed on both of those things. Christ has three what theologians call offices. He's prophet, he's priest, and he's king. When we try to act like the king in any contested conversation, it's not going to go well. And when you have two people trying to act like the king, it's really going to be a train wreck.

And so our two remaining alternatives are to let Jesus alone be the king. And we need to ask ourselves, is this moment a prophet moment or is it a priest moment? The prophet is the one who speaks truth. The priest is the one who communicates tenderness, gentleness and humble in heart, that part of Christ and that aspect of Christ. And sometimes it's combined. And so we've got to ask, okay, do I major in prophet and minor in priest in this situation or do I major in priest and minor in prophet?

It just depends on what the situation is. But the two have to go together because as soon as you separate prophet from priest, if we're all prophet and no priest, we become kind of bullyish. And again, we're not going to persuade anybody except people in our own echo chamber, and how boring is that? And if we're all priests, then important truths might be taken off the table that need to be part of the conversation. I think you're right in there to help us figure out in our conversations with one another how we can be prophetically gentle. I always come back to John 1.14, Jesus reveals the Father full of grace and truth, full of prophet and priest. We've got to figure out if we naturally tend to be truth people, how can we amp up the grace? And if we naturally tend to be grace people, how can we amp up the truth so that we can be full of both, not try to minimize one for the sake of the other? We want to speak the truth in love, right? We do.

Posture is body language, tone is so important. I think about the woman caught in adultery. Jesus, as Jesus does, gave us the perfect example about how to handle, let's say, a situation where he got sexual immorality, right? A woman was caught in the act of adultery. First, how curious that there was no man who was brought out in public caught in the act of adultery, even though it takes two to get caught.

So, there's an injustice that's already revealed by the absence of a man being dragged into the public. So, all these, you know, sort of condemning religious men who wanted to execute this woman have left because Jesus said, hey, you know, whoever has no sin, you be the first to cast a stone at her. And of course, they all left and Jesus is the only man remaining who is also the only man in that conversation or any conversation who was qualified to cast a stone and he chose not to. Instead, he said, I do not condemn you. Now, go leave your life of sin. Priest, I don't condemn you. Prophet, leave your life of sin.

The order is incredibly important of those two sentences. If you reverse that order and say, leave your life of sin and I don't condemn you, we'll be on the other side of that, you have transitioned away from Christianity into moralism. And it's not Christian.

It's not Christian to lead with get your act together, then we'll have the acceptance conversation. It's precisely the opposite where Christ loves people before they change. He creates belonging for them before they believe and before they obey. And for some, he creates belonging for them knowing that they never will obey. Think about the 10 lepers that he healed and only one of them came back and said, thank you. And he's like, where are the other nine? And he knew what the answer to that was.

That question was more for the one who came back than it was for his curiosity. So, we don't do that well naturally, but supernaturally, we have the resources to be able to. And again, part of that gets back to the logs and specs conversation. We have all the resources that free us to be humble and to address how we contribute.

Jesus has given us every resource. You're forgiven. You're loved. There's nothing that you know about the worst part of yourself that I didn't know before you and that I don't know better than you.

You're exposed, but you're not rejected. You're known and you're loved and so get over yourself. Stop feeling like you have to be right about everything and realize that whoever it is that you're trying to confront, persuade, swing over to your side, realize that for every criticism you offer them, their heart needs 10 praises just like yours does.

Just like yours does. And just like you, every dysfunction or misbehavior that you see in this other person or this other group, just never forget this closing line from the movie Wonder or the book Wonder. Every person you meet is fighting a hard, hidden battle. There's always a battle beneath our expressions of sin and dysfunction and offense. And so empathy, compassion, I mean these are all Christ-like things, but it does take a supernatural intrusion into our hearts for us to become those kinds of people. You know, there's a verse that a lot of preachers never preach.

I've only done it a few times and it's interesting why. I'm sort of being facetious, but Matthew 5 where Jesus says, therefore if you're offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled to them and then bring and offer your gift. And I joke because pastors, they'd rather have the gift than people leave and go reconcile their relationships. But it does highlight what your book is all about. Relationships and reconciliation are more important to the heart of God.

This is critical stuff we're talking about. That's almost all the apostle Paul wrote about when it came to human relationships. He's always trying to bring Jews and Gentiles together. The church is supposed to be the place where people who cannot even get along with each other out in the world, become friends and then become as family to each other.

That's the sign that we belong to Christ according to Christ himself. You know, Lord, I pray that they will be one. This disciples group is a group of people that included Matthew the tax collector, the big government guy, and Simon the zealot, the small or no government guy.

So, you got a libertarian and, you know, a Marxist, you know. Isn't it striking that there is no record of a single political debate between those two in the gospel? You'd think because all the gospels talk about how the disciples bickered with one another. Not one on record. Three years together, they lived together, they died together.

Matthew is the one and only gospel writer who acknowledged the fact that Matthew was a tax collector and Simon was a zealot. Jesus said to that group that included those two, by this the world's going to know that you belong to me. That you get along in ways that nobody can out there. Well, I also think, I mean, if you apply this to the family, just think if I'm going to respond with a gentle answer, it can be very easy for me as a husband, as a dad, as a sibling to sit and wait. When she's going to come to me and ask for forgiveness, say she's sorry.

When my son or daughter. And no, I should go and say I'm sorry and with a gentle answer invite a conversation. That is on me.

That's right. I have to do that to model who I'm following, Jesus. And that can bring harmony to my home. And if I really mean I'm sorry, I'm going to follow it with, how can I do right by you? And invite the hard response instead of the easy, oh, okay, you're forgiven. Which reminds me of Luke 6 27, But I say to you who hear, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, and pray for those who abuse you. Wow, if we would live that out, our homes would look different.

Maybe our country would look different. And, Scott, what you're giving us with your book, a gentle answer is a coaching manual. It's a way to think differently about our communication, think biblically about our communication, and represent Jesus well in conversations with friends, family members, coworkers.

And there may be no more important time for us to be doing that. We'd love to send to our listeners a copy of Scott's book, which, again, is called A Gentle Answer, Our Secret Weapon in an Age of Us Against Them. If you can help support the Ministry of Family Life with a donation this week, Scott's book is our gift to you to say thank you for partnering with us and helping to provide practical, biblical help and hope for husbands and wives, moms and dads all around the world. Family Life Today is reaching hundreds of thousands of people every day on radio, through our podcast, using Amazon, Alexa, all the different channels that are available to us. We're seeking to effectively develop godly marriages and families because we believe godly marriages and families can change the world one home at a time. So, again, if you can help advance the Ministry of Family Life Today, we'd love to send you Scott's book as a thank you gift for your donation. Go to familylifetoday.com to donate or call 1-800-FL-TODAY. Scott's book, again, is called A Gentle Answer, Our Secret Weapon in an Age of Us Against Them.

Ask for your copy of the book when you make a donation, either online or by calling 1-800-FL-TODAY. Now, tomorrow, we want to talk about anger because, honestly, some of us are feeling angry, frustrated. No, angry is the right word.

We're feeling angry when we see things going on in our world, and we want to think rightly about that and act rightly about that. So Scott's going to be here to coach us on that tomorrow. I hope you can be with us as well. I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch, along with our entire broadcast production team. On behalf of our hosts, Dave and Ann Wilson, I'm Bob Lapine. We'll see you back next time for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a production of Family Life of Little Rock, Arkansas, a crew ministry. Help for today. Hope for tomorrow.