Winsome Conviction: Drs. Tim Muehlhoff and Rick Langer

Okay, we found, especially in this last year, that in our family, at our dinner table, the old adage, you cannot talk about politics or religion, has really risen to be true. Yeah, which is interesting because growing up in our homes, we thought, oh, this is, we cannot talk about religion, we cannot talk about politics. And I had this prideful arrogance like, but that will never happen in our family. In the Wilson Hall, it'll be perfect, we'll be able to go there.

And it has happened. But we got to the point where, don't bring it up. Welcome to Family Life Today, where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I'm Ann Wilson. And I'm Dave Wilson, and you can find us at familylifetoday.com or on our Family Life app.

And this is Family Life Today. So we need help. Yeah, we do need help. We need some really smart people to come. Oh, here they are. They're in the studio. Who knew?

Yeah, who knew that Tim Uhlauf and Rick Langer would come from California, both professors at Biola, which means you're really smart. Guys, welcome to Family Life Today. Oh, we love it.

Thank you. We're excited to have you back because we've already had a great discussion. But you've written a book called Winsome Conviction. Yeah, and I love the subtitle, Disagreeing Without Dividing the Church. What a book for these times. And what's making it more tense is we honestly feel like Americans have lost the ability to talk to each other.

And things we need to talk about, incredibly important things. We always felt the church was immune. Yeah, those poor non-Christians out there, they need our help. But as we began to write this book, we realized, oh, no, the church is in bad shape. And we just don't even talk to each other or we leave a church or we demonize each other.

We call it weaponizing a belief and now using my belief against you. And so Rick was a pastor for 20 years. I was an interim teaching pastor. And you guys are both married. And we're both married. Kids. Kids. Grandkids. All right.

And what ticks me off about, we have adult kids, what really ticks me off, they disagree with me. What? Him. Excuse me. Well, you are a genius. How could this happen?

One is graduating from law school. And I literally say something. And we were talking about a tell last time.

This is my son's tell. He goes, pfft. Oh. That's what he does? Excuse me.

You just went, pfft. Does it light you up? Oh, it lights me up. Well, Rick, have you found that in your family or do they all bow to what you believe? I'm writing a book called Successful Parenting.

Yeah, absolutely. We have difference of opinions with kids politically and all this. And I think the bottom line is the church is very analogous to the family on this point where you have, and with my kids as well, we have huge areas of agreement. It's not like everything you talk about is this area of disagreement, but that's part of the rub, is then you're hoping that you get your momentum up and you'll agree on everything.

And then they have the audacity to think for themselves, who parroted this kid? And so these are the challenges that you end up facing. Well, it sounds like you've had some of the same things happen in your family room, kitchen, dinner table that we have, but you're the experts.

You wrote a book on winsome conviction, and obviously this involves convictions. Your son and daughters have them, we have them, and there's a conversation going on. And you helped us last time with the speed bump, which was awesome.

And I don't want to go through all that again. Our listeners can go back and listen, but it was just simply, state it real quick. Oh, very quickly. When a person says something and you just feel your temperature rising, this is when the speed bump really comes in. So first thing is simply paraphrase, here's what I heard you say. And Anne, you made the point, tone is everything.

Because if I go, here's what I heard you say, that's not a speed bump. And then second, simply where do I agree with this? Even if it's very broad, like we both agree politics is important. Okay, now we're going to really disagree on how to vote. And then the third one we thought is, here's where it emotionally resonated with me.

This is where empathy comes in, sympathy. And then we like to add this phrase, here's what I think I think about the issue. I have a little bit of freedom to be in process.

I don't have this all nailed down. But you're still careful. I'm still very careful. That's why the book of Proverbs says life and death is in the power of the tongue and I need to be very careful. James says one little spark from your tongue can set a forest fire ablaze and in California we don't take that lightly.

We have wildfires all over the place. So that was very simply the point, let me make one other point from a communication process. And by the way, he is a doctorate in communication.

Yes. And Rick in philosophy and theology, this is deep stuff. So you should hear our disagreement.

I can't imagine. We actually do disagree at times. I'd like to sit in on those. Well, we wrote a book called Winston Persuasion where at the very end we took a hotbed topic and we actually disagree with each other at the end. It was moderated by a friend of ours.

We tried to apply the principles of the book, which was good for the most part, it worked out pretty well. Here's one thing I want to say is, so here's what I do, I'll use myself. So I know about the four steps, okay, that we just talked about, but in my mind I let it rip.

In my mind, I absolutely just go to town on you, my kids, I've done that about Dave Wilson in the past. So I let it rip. But here's what we know from psychology. This is called emotional contagion. The negative feelings I cultivate and allow to germinate absolutely bleed out into the relationship.

We call it getting a good or bad vibe from a person. So we need to, as Paul says, take captive these thoughts. So we want to police our internal communication as much as we police the external because the internal is going to bleed right in and poison the atmosphere before you even have the conversation. And this is what poisons marriages. Oh, totally. I've been thinking all day how my spouse hasn't met my needs, how he's feeling, and then he comes home and I don't say it, but I'm saying it.

Hey, I'm sitting right here. You're just telling the world about your spouse. Of course I don't do it anymore.

Early in our marriage. But that's just really wise for us, even as we're talking these volatile issues. I just got to say, that's really hard to do.

Yeah, it is. I mean, you quoted 2 Corinthians 10, five, take every thought captive. And I know that, and I've memorized that, and I'm a preacher, so I've preached that. And yet I'm in a disagreement and all that negativity and I'm sort of mad at you and I don't even like you right now is in there.

How do you do it? Because you're right, it's going to sort of bleed out. Let me add to this, Dave.

If you've been on social media all day and reading and you're kind of just ingesting all these thoughts and opinions and you're kind of fired up and that takes your mind to another place. Well, this is huge. Let me just say one thing. Rick. Go, Mr. Pastor. Wow.

That's really helpful. Somehow you're supposed to know what he's setting you up for, and I think you do. One of the things that I think is huge with the internal battle is just acknowledging that this is going to be an ongoing, welcome to fallen world, welcome to total depravity.

The reason Paul gives these things, these sorts of metaphors, taking someone captive, it's a war metaphor, right? And so you have the sense of your mind is like Tim was describing the tongue. It's raging around and I find this all the time, I'll be driving, working in the yard, a bunch of things that are kind of like low grade in terms of the mental effort required. My mind just drifts and I will replay conversations I've had, all this, and I have never figured out how to keep my mind from doing that. I can, once I have that moment of realization, Rick, do you realize what just went through your mind? I realized I can do something really similar and stop and think, okay, what is this person actually thinking and feeling about the issue? Take that step to empathize or to try and project. One of the things I talk about sometimes, be a speaker for the absent.

If my friend John, if he were here, what might he say? And you can do that in your own mind and you can also do that in the conversations. It's a very durable tool in that sense of just stopping and saying, wait a minute, what does this person actually think and what am I attributing to them even as I play these thoughts in my mind? But to me, it's a spiritual discipline, constant battle kind of a thing. In the book, we talk a little bit about problems that have to be managed and problems that have to be solved. And I'm a guy who loves solving problems. Solving problems gets me up in the morning. Managing problems does not. Well, are you guys monitoring your social media feeds or are you just reading everything?

Does that matter? I think you have to watch what you open your soul to. I think we have to be careful. We have a whole chapter on something called groupthink, which means the groups that you belong to, and that could be online or in person. It could be a church, adult fellowship group where all we do is talk negative about the other side because the other side is never present. They're not welcome here. Or you don't feel the freedom to give voice to the other side because the hallmark of groupthink is fidelity to the group.

I need to be a group supporter and not give a contrary perspective. So I think we have to be careful, Anne, of opening ourselves up and feeding the beast. Like, of course those people are idiots.

And I can't think of one reason you'd vote for this person. I can't believe my spouse is falling for this. I can't believe my kids are... And you're all revved up. And Rick, what I liked about rehearsing the conversation, that can be dangerous because it's like, oh, if we ever had this conversation again- Oh, you are loaded for bear. Oh, I got that one. I created an acronym.

I went to Kinko's and got colored charts. And that can be dangerous because that person brings up... So John Gottman, one of the top relational experts, he said, there's soft startups and hard startups.

If you don't monitor your internal communication, it's always a hard startup, a harsh startup. So Rick brings something up and I've been way, oh, please bring this up again. Please, because I missed an opportunity to say this. So he brings it up again. He's not even done with his sentence.

I'm like, yeah, well, you know what, Mr. PhD in philosophy, what would you say about this? And just the tone, the attitude is like- And you really haven't listened to anything he said because you've already geared up for this way long ago. No, I listened to the first time.

That's a chronic problem of Tim's, but go ahead. No, I listened to the first. And that's such a great distinction. I listened the first time and now I've rehearsed that so many times, I don't listen to the second time because I already know what you're going to say. So that's what's dangerous about just reading about the other side rather than actually talking to a person from the other side.

And obviously we're ending and we're building a case for division, not unity. We are even in our head, we're mowing the yard, I've done it, Rick, just like you said. Even with my wife, I'm like, okay, I'm ready now.

I'm ready now. 45 minutes of mowing the yard, all I did was think about this and that. And like you said, Tim, the previous conversation, I don't even care what she's going to say. There's nothing she can say.

No, I've got her. So my poor wife, I was on the debate team in college and I did standup comedy. Oh boy.

So what a combination. So you're sarcastic too. So Noreen, poor Noreen will start to bring something up and I will launch into my rebuttal. I will launch in, it is eloquent, Noreen goes, honey, that's not even what I was talking about. You know what my response is? I don't care.

But if it was, if it was. I win. That was really good. I worked this out when I was mowing the lawn and I'd like you to listen to it. Don't go somewhere I'm not prepared for it, but let me do one little digression.

And I do want to get back to convictions and conviction mapping and all that. But one thought, and Tim, you're like an expert on this because you wrote a book about spiritual warfare in your marriage. How much of what we're talking about right here, even taking your thoughts captive and even your mind wandering when you're not with the person and then coming back, how much of the enemy, and I mean the devil, the Lucifer, the enemy of our soul who wants to steal, kill and destroy, how much of this is influenced by him? And again, I'm not going to say, you know, your lawnmower doesn't start, it needs an exorcism. You know, it's like the devil's in everything. But is there some spiritual aspect to this in your family, in your church, in the world? Well, I think Jesus was, 25% of everything Jesus had to say had to do with spiritual battle. John goes so far as to say the whole world lies in the power of the evil one. So I think we'd be naive to think that these disagreements that are bleeding into our family, our workspaces and our churches, we would not just naive, we'd be supremely unbiblical not to step back and pray warfare prayers.

Here's what a word for prayer might sound like. Let's say Rick and I really do, even though we're co-directors of the Winston Conviction Project, we get into a tussle, okay? And now we got bad attitudes going towards each other, okay? To step back and say, okay, if there are demons attacking our relationship, demons, I tell you in the name of Jesus Christ, his authority, not mine, you are not to influence us negatively. Now once I pray that umbrella prayer, now it's conflict resolution 101, Rick and I need to go back and apply our four steps to each other because we kind of set those aside because now we're kind of mad at each other.

That's what I mean by umbrella prayers. And here's the difference between the modern and the ancient church. The ancient church would have assumed spiritual battle is happening.

The modern church says, you got to prove it to me. So true. And another analogy would work in this area is with lust and spiritual warfare. So I think most of us understand that we can generate a fair bit of lust on our own. This is part of our kind of a human condition in case we're short on that ability.

Hollywood has always been happy to stand in and help us out. And we're fleshly creatures. And so you have yourself, your own flesh, you have the world. And I think Satan just says, what a wonderful playground.

And so he just exacerbates things and flies up. I feel a similar process happens with some of our conflicts about convictions, political issues, in some sense, social media is analogous to pornography. This relationship to our own lust, social media does the same thing for our own kind of destructive attitudes about conversation and combat. And so there's a lot of that that gets fed in the exterior context and then Satan can do whatever havoc he wants on top of that whole structure. But grab a group that's having conflict, a Christian group, sit them down and they often bring us in. We work with pastors sometimes in churches, but ask this one question and you don't want it to be sound judgmental, but to say, okay, have you at any time prayed a spiritual warfare prayer over this conflict? And guys, the answer is zero.

I bet. It is not even a blip on our screen. So they won't even get to Ephesians chapter six is we believe before you get into conflict, you need to get dressed in armor, the spiritual arm that Paul talks about. Can you imagine if a couple before they had a conversation about something they know they're going to have a tough time agreeing on said, Hey, before we talk, let's pray or a father and a son or a church meeting. I mean, but we don't do that.

It's like, wait, wait, wait, honey, we're about to get in some, of course I'm going to be like, I don't want to pray. Let's just go, but we should say, no, no, God, we're going to talk about something really hard. Lead us, help us. I feel like we've done that.

We have. It's a speed bump, but there are times I don't want to pray because I don't want Jesus to guard my tongue. I want to use it as a weapon and I want to hurt, but to bring this into political or cultural areas that are so explosive, man, I've never thought of doing that. You know, Lord, will you just put a hedge of protection on us that the enemy can have nothing to do with this conversation. Oh, absolutely.

Wow. Let's approach each other with gentleness. What does Peter say? When insulted, I want you to bless instead. Well, man, that goes out the window pretty quickly when we hit certain hot topics. And what's sad is we already started there is we just don't talk because we've learned it's explosive. We walk away angry. Maybe our relationship with our son or daughter or spouse has been broken. And I think we even use the Bible in this way. You go to Romans 12, 18, I know you experts PhDs are familiar with this verse.

If possible, so far as it depends on you, be at peace with all men. And I think we use something like that to say, if I'm going to be at peace with Rick, we can't talk about this. So we're never going to talk about it. So that's like a cop out way of saying we can't have real conversations in our home about race, about the election, about wearing masks, whatever it is, or about theology.

Because I've had this and we've gotten in a fight. And so we, I'm going to live at peace. So I'm not ever going to bring it up again. Which is not what God wants us to do. We have to have these conversations, but how do we do it peacefully? So again, I'm bringing you back to winsome conviction is not winning conviction. It's winsome, but it also has this conviction thing. So help us understand conviction because that's where we get in trouble, but we shouldn't. Convictions are wonderful. We should all have them.

How do we have them and not lose? It's really interesting because we tend to think of there being two kinds of issues out there, matters of conviction and matters of mere taste. So you like chocolate.

I like vanilla. It's a matter of mere taste. And it's kind of hard. Some people can manage to fight about that if their whole communication climate is bad. But by and large, it's like, yeah, you know, whatever. Then there's these matters of conviction. These are moral issues, but these are the important things. And about those things, we form convictions.

So that's what's in our head. And the interesting thing is, if important, then conviction, and if conviction, then absolute conviction. Now, here's the interesting thing that Paul does in Romans 14 is he takes those two categories of taste and conviction and he pushes them apart.

And he sticks in between them a third category. So what you end up with is like a little mini spectrum of three things. You have absolute convictions, you have personal convictions, and then you have matters of taste.

And what we've lost is any kind of a vision for a personal conviction. And let me just say, with Romans 14, if you read that passage, you'll find Paul talking about it in the framework of, to put it simply, days and diets. How do you respond? Sabbath days, some people regard all days alike, but others think they're special days.

And you're like, oh yeah, right. I think I read the Gospels and as I recall, Jesus bumped into a few of those folks who really test about what he did on a Sabbath day, right? And then likewise with diet, who are you eating with?

You eat it with a tax collector, you eat what kind of food. So these are huge issues in terms of a Jewish believer, right? And these are not matters of triviality. And Paul's writing to Rome in this context, the Romans have just kicked the Jews out of their city. One of the most pluralistic cities in the history of the world was ancient Rome and they just bounced the Jews.

Okay. Now you're living in a Jewish Gentile mixed church and Paul floats this little letter by you that says, well, some people view all days alike. Some people view them differently and you can just see the steam rising off a bunch of people. Oh yeah, right. I know where this one's going. You know?

Well, here's the really interesting thing. When Paul lays that out, he says, look, I don't want you to judge each other on this matter, but I do want you to understand that Jesus will judge you on this matter. It's before your master that you will stand or fall and he will judge it. And he says he's confident he'll actually approve you. But the point is no one's getting away with anything on this area. And he says, I want you to be fully convinced in your own mind. It doesn't take a genius to do a little etymological work there and say, oh, I want you to be convinced.

This is like a conviction, right? And he's literally telling the people form personal convictions about days and diets. He's not saying who cares about days and diets. He's saying you should care because you'll answer to Jesus. But you know who you won't answer to? Tim, even if he has a PhD, it just doesn't matter what Tim thinks about it, but it does matter what you think about it and it matters what I, Jesus think about it because you will give an account to me.

This is a personal conviction matter. And that's what we're missing because we think of it's a moral matter. We think of it as an important matter, we think of it as a spiritual matter. Then we should have an absolute conviction shared by all people. Well, if you want to hint at your absolute convictions, pick up the Apostles' Creed. These are confessional beliefs and you know everyone should share it because when you walk into church, the pastor says, let's all stand and you recite the Apostles' Creed. We believe in God, the Father, the Almighty, creator of the heavens and earth. And you don't really have an option because, wow, you know, this whole creator thing, I'm not really into that.

You can't opt out, right? But these areas of personal conviction and obviously the Days and Diets issue and I've tried to underscore how important that was then. In that culture. In that culture. You can imagine it being very similar to issues about politics or immigration or things like that. And surely we should be agreeing about an absolute, about all human beings being created in the image of God. But what does that mean about current policies regarding hiring and large corporations are training people about racial sensitivity?

Wow, I don't know. And I'm happy to say you should form a conviction about that. But it would be really nice if it was a personal conviction that you held with all integrity for Jesus and with 110% of vision for it. But you gave the grace for the person beside you to say, I see that issue differently and I'm going to perform a different course. And that's our challenge. We've lost that middle area and we have to recover that in order to be people who actually express our discipleship from authentic conviction, but don't divide the church. And nobody's happy with this.

Nobody's happy with this approach. I want my personal conviction to be the conviction of this family, to be the conviction of our marriage and to be the conviction of our church. My personal take on this, because it's absolute. This is what God's saying in the Bible. And I want this to be for everybody.

And at a Christian university where there's a ton of really, really smart people, this does not work well sometimes because everybody's like, dude, you are not reading Paul. This is clear, we got to do this. This is an absolute. This is not a conviction. This is an absolute.

It's not a personal conviction. This is thus saith the Lord. And you are ignoring that. And I'd rather shut this place down than have us not follow what the Bible has to say.

That's how it gets, you know, talk about a harsh startup, right? I'm doing what the Bible says. And if you're not going to do what the Bible says, I can't be at this church. So Dave, you know what that's like. You've probably heard 50 million conversations like that. Oh, I, uh, I posted something on social media.

Um, I won't even get into it. Not even a comment, just a, uh, I just posted a simple thing saying, I love all people basically is my point. It was like, I think everyone's made in the image of God, boom. The first comment, like within 18 seconds was, I guess I have to find a new church. Wow. And think about the 18 seconds. And I was like, wow.

There was no speed bump. Yeah. And he also got, um, uh, email of a woman saying I'm leaving the church because of how you voted. And Dave never voted a certain way. He didn't say who he voted for, but he prayed for a president. I prayed for a president and she was like, you didn't pray for a former president. I'm like, oh yes I did.

I always pray on election Sunday after the thing we are commanded in scripture, pray for your leaders. I did that last time. I did it this time. And she was great. She apologized. She came up later and said, I apologize.

Cause I responded and said, I don't know how long you've been here, but four years ago I prayed for Trump and this time I prayed for Biden. She came up later, you know, like a month later, Hey, I'm the girl. I'm like, what girl? She was like sending that email. I'm so sorry. I judged you and I didn't know your heart.

I didn't have a speed bump. Kudos to her for owning up to that. That's another great move is the idea that you can navigate these waters perfectly. I'm like, yeah, not reality. And when we can bring that obviously into our churches and into our homes, you've really helped us. Cause it's like, I think we can see parents and kids and spouses having different conversations now just from the, could it be possible that they could have convictions, personal and winsome together.

I'm Shelby Abbott, and you've been listening to Dave and Anne Wilson with Tim Yulehoff and Rick Langer on Family Life Today. You know, by the power of the Holy Spirit, yes, we can have conversations with other people, conversations that are personal and hold convictions, but don't have to be intentionally argumentative, belittling or prejudiced in how we approach them. This is super important to learn, to know, to take into the center of our hearts. And you know, the president of Family Life, David Robbins, wanted to chime in on this important topic of conversation too. Yeah, this is what we seek to do at Family Life. We want to be winsome in our presentation of biblical truth in a very polarized culture.

And we want you to be able to recommend to your friends to listen to a show or to get a resource. And they may be offended by Jesus and what the scripture says, but they're not going to be offended by the tone of how we're talking and how we're sharing the flourishing that can happen in a home and amongst a family because of Jesus and the ways of Jesus. Thanks, David. You know, what a timely conversation with Tim Uhlhoff and Rick Langer. And what an important book that they've written too.

It's called Winsome Conviction, Disagreeing Without Dividing the Church. You can pick up a copy at familylifetoday.com. And while you're there, we'd love it if you'd partner with us financially here at Family Life. When you do, we want to send you a copy of Jordan Rayner's book, The Word Before Work. Jordan was a guest with us earlier this week, and his book is our gift to you when you partner with us financially. You can go online to familylifetoday.com, as I said, or you can give us a call with your donation at 800-358-6329. Again, that number is 800, F as in family, L as in life, and then the word today. Or you can feel free to drop us something in the mail.

Our address is Family Life, 100 Lakehart Drive, Orlando, Florida, 32832. I didn't know this, but the US Surgeon General has declared an epidemic of loneliness and isolation. You know, could you be the person God's put in your community to pull people closer to each other, and then consequently to Him? Well, maybe a small group is just what your community needs to connect, at last, with God and each other, while you press into your own faith at the same time. Well, we're offering an unmissable 25% off for a limited time on our Family Life group materials, some of them just perfect for those who haven't yet met God. You can pick from engaging, trusted titles and authors like Davyn Ann Wilson's Vertical Marriage, or studies tailored to your group's needs, like the Smart Step Family from Ron Deal.

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