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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