The Prince of the Power of the Air wants you under his thumb, preferably by putting you under his servants. For the vast majority of humanity, that means keeping them busy with things which don’t matter. Putting a magnifying glass in front of every molehill keeps folks from noticing the mountains. One of the primary molehills is the Fable of Nice — the fake culture of coddling and keeping people hyper-sensitive to even the slightest offense.
In a civil world, you generally care about all humanity. But you don’t have resources to invest that care into every human you encounter, so you build a series of internal filters by which you ration the minutes of the day on people who form a significant portion of your daily existence. When society is properly structured, most of us seldom encounter folks who aren’t related by blood or covenant. Thus, the filtering is by context, because the necessity of investment of resources is based on the importance of what is taking place right now. However, we do not live in such a world. Our world is perverted, and we encounter almost nothing but strangers. Thus, you cannot treat most of the folks around you as friends and neighbors in the sense the Bible uses those terms, because they assume an affinity which does not exist in modern society.
The Bible has much to say about dealing with strangers. You are honest, but not totally open to strangers; there is a privacy barrier. You spare them getting entangled in local affairs, even while you protect your kinship from prying strangers. Thus, you offer only so much as is pertinent to the context of the encounter. But you presume kindness until they offer hostility. Your response to that hostile posture depends on circumstances and context. Given the presumption they simply don’t understand what binds you, you are obliged to withdraw and cease dealing with them. If they are inside your home space, you do your best to drive them out as gently as possible. You would typically have the support of your family community, but the lowest level of defense necessary is rule.
In the more subtle social encounters we usually have every day in our corrupt Western world, we are the strangers, in some ways. In other ways, everywhere we go is God’s turf, our turf as His servants, so to speak. We bear His truth as ambassadors, as recruiters. Truth takes precedence over being nice. We have to thread our way through the confusing mess of this world in order to manifest that truth.
Our modern society languishes under the false perceptions which hinder truth. It is a cultural demand we be nice to avoid hurting people’s feelings, one of those molehills under the magnifying glass. It’s just to give every person due respect for the context of each encounter. In some cases, we need to tiptoe around fragile feelings. In other cases, bold affront is actually appropriate. Either extreme is quite rare, but our society encourages jumping back and forth between them, as if the vast ground in the middle does not exist.
When the silly cultural expectations bleed over into how the church behaves internally, we have a serious problem. Teaching church members they have to be nice to each other, by which is meant you have to tiptoe around fragile feelings, assumes bringing someone to spiritual maturity actually lies in our hands. It’s the same thing as misapplying sales techniques to evangelism. Nothing — absolutely nothing — in our hands can breathe life into dead spirits. Farther along that path, nothing in our capabilities and talents will make someone immature ready to hear mature truth. Both are a work of the Spirit. We are used to reveal, but change is wholly in God’s power.
It takes a peculiar arrogance to distrust the listener, as if some teaching was adult material kept from children. But the worse sin is creating an atmosphere where it feels like that. Countless times I’ve watched church leaders pass some non-verbal communication slyly between each other, as if no one else caught it. That’s fine with strangers, but evil presumption with members. Paul didn’t play such games in Corinth, but those Judaizers sneaking around behind him did, and it made the church folks wonder about Paul. When he taught or preached, he spared no feelings, but always revealed honestly what was going on inside his head.
Only on TV and in movies are people that stupid. You damage your own leadership, raising doubts about your honesty, when you withhold a comment, but allow non-verbal communication to indicate there is something you could say. It smacks of unspoken put-down. You create a wall of distrust, and those with whom you deal justly decide they can’t trust you. The first step is learning to communicate spiritually and truthfully, not with the false politeness of this world. If you set your heart on truth, you won’t have to worry too much about polished mannerisms. Truth makes you humble and quiet until the moment comes to proclaim the message from the housetops. So the answer is not getting a better poker face, but stop playing.
