This week I welcome guest blogger, Kirk Marks. Kirk is a retired pastor, having served 30+ years in both local churches with his wife, Debbie, and in denominational administration. He has also taught theology and led a pastoral assessment center for many years. He and Debbie, along with their two daughters and son-in-law are members of Faith Church. Kirk preached at Faith Church this past week, continuing our series on Relationships in the Church. I think you’ll find his thoughts as compelling and helpful as I did.
What is speaking life to one another?
There are some very important things in our world and life that we understand better in the negative than we do in the positive.
There are some things that are hard to define or describe as what they are, but we know very well what they are not. Take justice, for example. I have a degree in criminal justice. I have spent a lot of time thinking, talking and hearing about justice, and it is very hard to define. But we know when an injustice happens, don’t we?
The books The Innocent Man by John Grisham and Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson tell stories of people in prison for crimes they didn’t commit, people on death row for things they had nothing to do with. That’s an injustice. We may not be able to define justice, but we know what an injustice is, and that gives us a better sense of what justice is.
Freedom is similarly very hard to define. It’s so important to all of us, but it’s so hard to define. I play this game sometimes with theology students. I ask them to define freedom, just trying to trick them into saying, “Freedom is being able to do whatever you want to do.” Then I point out to them how doing whatever you want to do is chaos. That’s not freedom.
What is freedom? We understand freedom better in the negative than we do in the positive. In Russia, in the past two weeks over 400 people have been imprisoned for speaking out against Vladimir Putin as they peacefully demonstrated after the death of Alexei Navalny. Those people are not free. That is not freedom.
Here in the United States, we have the freedom of speech. You can say as much against the government as you want, and nobody can put you in jail for it. We have the freedom of assembly. We can get together whenever we want to for whatever reason.
Friday night our small group met, and we didn’t need a permit from the government to do that. In many countries in this world, people can’t do that. They need to have the government’s permission before you get people together. Those people aren’t free, but we Americans are free to gather. In our country we can demonstrate for any purpose that we want. As long as you’re not breaking things or trespassing or blocking traffic or hurting people, you can demonstrate for anything you want. You can demonstrate for peanut butter sandwiches if you want to. It doesn’t matter what it is. But in Russia people are locked up for doing that because they were protesting the death of someone who shouldn’t have died. Those people aren’t free.
Do you see how we understand justice and freedom in the negative better than we do in the positive? When we think about heaven, this positive v. negative principle is true as well. How do we describe heaven? What do we know about heaven? In heaven there’s no crying, there’s no pain, there’s no suffering, there’s no sin, there’s no evil. That’s all what’s not there. That’s all negative. What is heaven really like? Well we’re not so sure we can put good words to that, but we know what it’s not.
So as we think about speaking life, what is it not? The reason I bring up what speaking life is not is because our culture, our fallen world, is awash in the speaking of non-life. We speak death to each other so often we’ve gotten so used to it we might not even realize it.
I’ve made a list of what’s not speaking life to one another. How about complaint? How about condescension? How about negativity? Unfair judgment, misinformation, disinformation, ugliness, mean speech, hate speech, insult, etc. We hear non-life all the time, don’t we? It’s everywhere. Some people get paid to do it, make careers out of it, get elected to public office because of it, but it’s death. It’s awful.
Have you experienced people speaking non-life or death to you? If you have experienced people speaking death to you, when it happens you almost feel the life draining out of you.
There’s got to be another way. There’s got to be another way to speak to each other that is not death. We can speak differently. We can speak life to one another.
In Colossians chapter 3, verses 12-15, Paul teaches us how to relate to one another. Look at how each phrase of this teaching can affect our speech.
“As God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves.” Here Paul is not talking about what we’re wearing; he’s talking about what’s in our character, what’s in our way of being, what’s in our speaking. “Clothe yourself,” when applied to our speech, means “let your speech be characterized by.”
What should we clothe our speech with? Paul says, “compassion.” When we talk, we use words of compassion, such as “I understand what you’re going through.” Or “I’m trying to understand what you’re going through.” Or “I may not understand what you’re going through, but I’m here with you while you’re going through it.” These are words of compassion.
Next Paul says we clothe our speech with kindness. Kind speech to one another is the opposite of insult and belittling.
Paul goes on to mention humility. What are words of humility? “I’m not any better than any one of you. We’re trying together to follow Jesus.” Do you hear the humility in those phrases?
After humility, Paul adds gentleness, patience and bearing with one another. I’m so glad for the people who have borne with me over the years as I’ve gone through some difficult experiences, terrible griefs and losses. I’ve had people who’ve been with me, and stuck with me, through the ugly feelings, and in so doing they were speaking life to me.
In addition to bearing with each other, Paul teach us to forgive grievances. Think about how speaking life relates to forgiveness. Speaking life includes words of forgiveness. When people have said to me, “I forgive you,” for things I did to them, there were life-giving to me.
In Colossians 3, Paul goes on to say, “Forgive each other as God forgave us, and over all these virtues put on love.” Similarly, Jesus once said to the Pharisees, “You’re so concerned about what you put into the body, what you eat, what you touch, and that what you put into your body will make you unclean. But it’s not what goes into a person that makes them unclean, it’s what comes out of them. Because what comes out of them comes from the heart, and your hearts are wicked and evil, and that wickedness and evil is coming out in your speech.”
What if we have hearts of love toward one another? Out of that heart of love comes life-giving speech. So Paul says in Colossians 3:15, “Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts,” and that includes the things that you say, because what we say comes out of our hearts.
Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash
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