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Full of Grace

             Be wise in the way you act toward outsiders; make the most of every opportunity. Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone. (Colossian 4:5-6)

 

The commentaries I checked on this passage (only two of many available) either didn’t mention “full of grace,” described it as “the kindly, winning pleasantness which makes the talk of a good and thoughtful man attractive.”[1] I suspect that there is a lot that can be included in speech that is full of grace. There must be love and truth, not one or the other. “Love” that leaves a person under the influence of lies is not love. There should be kindness (the lending of your strength to the other,) and gentleness (the application of the least force possible under the circumstances.)

It might be better to consider what doesn’t belong in our conversation: hatred, rage, anger, bitterness, bad language, pride, dominance, assault, shame, name-calling… It seems as though some people use Jesus’ description of the Pharisees as hypocrites, and His clearing of the temple as their license to be as nasty as they wanna be. They are like (and sometimes are) the folks who can’t wait until the government comes after their guns. They relish the idea of bathing in the blood of their enemies.

Professor Willard advises his readers against the “need to be right” when it is found in their own lives. This bothers me because for too many people, their response would not be that they might be wrong, but that someone else might be wrong, and therefore we need not consider what they have to say. He doesn’t take the time even to say that he doesn’t have the time to unpack what he doesn’t mean.

There are folks who attack every Christian as a hypocrite, and as arrogant. Christians need to bow down, beg forgiveness from their accusers, and declare what their accusers say to be potentially true, and therefore true. In fact, they must not only accept the other truth as equally true, but to celebrate it as being greater, or be declared a sinner. In other words, the only way to not live out of a need to be right is by placing all their emphasis on being wrong. But the correction of an error is not to err as far in the other direction. It is to find the truth.

And once you find the truth, the next step is to find ways to communicate it – unswervingly but with as much love, kindness, and gentleness as possible. This is part of where I run into difficulties. When I was in college, I discovered Christian radio, and one of the things I discovered that I hated about the radio station is that they had women as DJs who sounded so sweet, and so nice, and butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths. I wanted to scream at them to “Get real!” As I’ve noted, “nice” is a four-letter word.

If those women were the standard set for what conversation that is “full of grace” is supposed to be, God’s going to have to work not only on my following their example, but also on my willingness to consider following their example. Somehow, I suspect that God’s goal for us in this regard is somewhere between the nasty-as-I-wanna-be folks and the butter-wouldn’t-melt folks.

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