"WHERE DO YOU WANT THE BODY?"
“For if the trumpet makes an uncertain sound, who will prepare himself for battle? So likewise you, unless you utter by the tongue words easy to understand, how will it be known what is spoken? For you will be speaking into the air.” (1 Corinthians 14:8-9)
The Apostle Paul was very good at getting people upset with him because he spoke the truth. As the book of Acts comes to a close, Paul once again manages to get the Jewish leaders upset. We read about it in Acts 28:25-27a: “The Holy Spirit spoke rightly through Isaiah the prophet to our fathers, “saying, Go to this people and say: “Hearing you will hear, and shall not understand; And seeing you will see, and not perceive; For the hearts of this people have grown dull. Their ears are hard of hearing.” That sounds like something my wife would say to me. In fact, she has gone so far as to accuse me of having “selective hearing” from time to time.
I highlighted in green a certain portion of that Scripture for a reason. Have you ever listened to someone and heard what they said, but you didn’t really hear what they said? This happened to me one time (just one of the many times in my life) in Houston, Texas. I was working for KXYZ radio covering the Southern Baptist Convention which was being held at the Astrodome. I had a long list of interviews because most of the dignitaries coming to the meeting were people who had programs on our station, and we wanted to get some comments from each one.
The interviews were going great. I had a great visit with Chuck Swindoll and his lovely wife at their hotel in Houston. Later, at the Astrodome, Billy Graham arrived for a brief news conference and I was able to get a short visit with him. Both of these interviews were very clear and to-the-point. Easy, even for me, to understand.
Later that same day, I had to go back to the convention hotel headquarters and interview another prominent televangelist from back East. I won’t mention his name because the interview was a little different than the other two. I met him and his party in his hotel room and really got started off on the wrong foot. My tape recorder batteries had gone dead, and I didn’t have extra batteries or even a cord to plug into a wall outlet. What an embarrassing moment! The man was very gracious and waited as I went to the hotel lobby and purchased new batteries.
Returning to the room, I immediately inserted the new batteries into the recorder and the interview began. I asked him questions, and he answered them...I think. In light of this man’s ministry and its relationship to the political arena, many of my questions dealt with political issues of the day and how they related to Christianity. The answers he gave certainly revealed his political know-how. I’m sure he answered my questions. I’m just not sure what he said.
This man’s mind worked in a different arena than mine. It was hard for us to communicate because he spoke in a language that only he and those in politics could understand. I believe that if he had truly wanted me to understand his answers, he should have learned to give those answers in language of the common man, not of politicians. And from that I believe we Christians should take a cue as well. Let me relate a story that reflects what I mean.
I was working as an apprentice Funeral Director/Embalmer in Tonkawa, Oklahoma, in the early 90's. The funeral home I worked for also had a crematory and I was in the position of having to handle the bulk of those. It was just a couple days before Thanksgiving when I received a call from a funeral home in Enid, about 50 miles southwest of Tonkawa, and was advised that they were sending a body for cremation, which should arrive in just a few minutes. They told me that a memorial service was planned for the next day, and they needed the cremated body [cremains] back by that evening so it would be there for the service. They offered to have someone meet me half-way between Enid and Tonkawa in order to get the deceased back to them that evening. I saw no problem, so I agreed to that. Shortly after I hung up the phone, the body arrived.
I prepared the body for cremation and went to relax in my office while the process took place. I welcomed the idea of getting out that evening, as it was to be my first Thanksgiving after my wife had died that April. I would have gladly taken the cremains on down to Enid for them just for the distraction, but the funeral director sounded like he would like to get out as well. It was an unusually beautiful evening for this time of the year.
When the cremation was completed, I proceeded to the prescribed meeting place at the crossroads of I-35 and the Cimarron Turnpike extension. It was a crystal clear, cool night with every star in the sky visible. I pulled to the side of the road in my big black car which had an ominous look about it in the moonlight. I sat back and enjoyed the brightly lit sky as I waited--and I waited-- and I waited. I thought how much my wife would have loved to come along. Our children were older now, and we were not tied to home quite as much as when they were younger. I thought about how we would have been talking about our plans for Thanksgiving, probably making plans to go to see her folks in Illinois since the weather looked so promising. We would have discussed the latest horses the family acquired, as they enjoyed breeding and training pacers and trotters for the races. That would have led to all the stories, which each of us was familiar with but enjoyed hearing over and over, about our experience with those big beasts, as I called them. I’d have reminisced again about my horrible experience of sitting that close to the rear end of a horse the time they let me sit in one of those little things the drivers rode in. She would have told me again about the neighbor lady who got her toe stomped off by one of the horses down at the track and didn’t even know it until she took her boot off and the toe fell out. We had a million of them.
All of a sudden, my mind came back to reality as a small car pulled up on the other side of the median and stopped. I thought to myself, “This must be him.” I pulled across the highway with the headlights beaming daylight all over the little vehicle as I approached it. I pulled in behind the small car, got out, and proceeded to the driver’s side of the vehicle. As I approached the car, the window rolled down revealing a young man about college age. I assumed that the funeral director had sent one of his young college workers out to get the body. I greeted the young man and then said, “Where do you want the body, in the trunk or up here with you?”
He looked at me and, with a strange look on his face, responded, “What!?”
I replied, “I have the body back here in my car. You want to pop the trunk and have me put it there, or do you want it up front with you?”
As I finished my sentence, the car window was going up, and the young man drove off. I checked closely, but it didn’t appear my car was hurt any by all the gravel that went flying as he pulled away. Being the intelligent person that I am, I came to an immediate conclusion: this was not the person from the funeral home. Poor guy. He’s probably still sharing that story today and wondering what in the world he got himself into.
I went back to my office and called the funeral director. He answered on his cell phone, and it turned out that he was still there waiting for me at the same intersection. The problem was that he was down below on I-35, parked under the bridge that carried the Cimarron. I had been up on the Cimarron with no idea he was down there. He told me to stay put and he would come on in to Tonkawa and pick up the cremains. We decided to change our meeting place in the future to a location where we could wait at a convenience store for one another.
As I look back on this event, I can go to First Corinthians 3:1 as a reference. “Dear brothers and sisters, when I was with you I couldn’t talk to you as I would to mature Christians. I had to talk as though you belonged to this world or as though you were infants in the Christian life.”
As funeral professionals, my colleagues and I would talk very directly with one another in terms that we understood. For instance, if the young man had been from the funeral home he would know that I was informing him that the cremains were in my car, and I was offering to put them in his trunk or just bring them to the car window if he wished, not wanting him to have to get out in this cold night air. But, he wasn’t a funeral professional. He didn’t have the slightest idea what I was talking about. He heard what I said, but he didn’t hear with the same understanding that I had. For all he knew, he could have been in the middle of a weird murder scenario instead of the innocent transfer of a deceased individual from one funeral home to another.
As Paul said in the Scripture above, we as Christians need to remember that when we talk to people who have not accepted Christ or grown in the Lord , we should speak in terms they will understand. That doesn’t mean we talk down to them. It simply means we need to remember that they are not as familiar, if at all, with Christian terms. Simple words like “saved” or “lost” can have a whole different meaning to them. They hear, but they really don’t hear.
A good example of this is a time in my younger life before I really began to grow in the Lord. I became severely anemic, and the doctor who treated me was a Christian. He prayed with me as we began each appointment, and one day, as I was leaving his office, he invited me to his church. He said that there was a great Holy Ghost revival taking place and the Holy Ghost was moving all over that place every night! He just knew that I would love it.
Did I go? You better believe I didn’t! I remember as a youngster going to some of those movies where ghosts flew around the room and scarred people by dragging chains or making weird sounds. I wasn’t about to go into some church where they probably dimmed the lights during the service and then watched some spook fly around the room. That was not my idea of a great evening. You see, I wasn’t a very mature Christian and what he said got twisted in my mind’s translation of it. This doesn’t mean I wasn’t a Christian at that time. It means that I had not allowed myself to grow in the grace and in the knowledge of God (2 Peter 3:18).
In First Corinthians, Paul speaks of three classes of people: carnal, spiritual, and carnal Christian. The first class is a carnal person, or that person who is living without Christ in their life. They have, to this point, rejected the Word of God and continue to live in the darkness of this world, blinded by the things the world has to offer. Because of this blindness, they are unable to really see the unfathomable riches of God’s grace in the offer of Salvation through His Son Jesus Christ. They truly lack a knowledge of what we would call “Christian Terminology.” Therefore, they must be spoken to in such a way that our Christian terms, such as “lost” and “saved,” are understood in a proper light.
Paul also talks of spiritual people, or people who have come to the Lord. When they did, they began to read His Word and began to grow in their knowledge of Him. They have attended church on a regular basis and have allowed Christ to be a part of their lives every day of the week and not just on Sunday. These are folk who understand right away what you are talking about when you talk about being “saved” or “lost.” They even understand what you mean when you mention the Holy Ghost.
Finally, Paul refers to a third group of people, the carnal Christian. This is that person who has accepted the offer of Salvation but has not continued on in reading God’s Word or seeking further understanding of God. They probably come to church when it is convenient and really don’t give God a lot of thought during the week. They remain babies. That was the state of my Christian life when invited to the “Holy Ghost” meeting. I was going to church when it was convenient, but I was still living a life that was definitely not pleasing to God.
It is that first group, the carnal people, and this third group, carnal Christians, who need the understanding and attention when it comes to speaking. They need to be able to understand, not just hear, what we are saying. We need to speak words that have clear meaning and not just assume that they understand our so-called “church language.”
People in the pews are at different levels of their Christian lives. But, as I preach a sermon on Sunday morning, I don’t stand there and think about having to preach at different levels of spiritual knowledge. God takes care of that. I preach to bring understanding to the words I am speaking and the Scripture I am quoting. I preach His word, and He reaches the hearts of those who hear. Some are reached with milk, some with pureed carrots, others with hamburger, and then others with steak. As babes in Christ, we grow on the word of God, beginning with the “milk” of His word, or those things that are basics which are necessary for understanding and digesting the pureed carrots, the hamburger, and finally the steak.
That helps to explain also how many times you can read the Bible and find something you didn't know was there. I have had many occasions when I was reading a text of scripture that I had read before but found something that I had never seen there before. It is because when I read it the first time, I was only able to digest the milk of the Word. As I read it again and again, I was then able to digest the pureed carrots and finally the steak. I developed my spiritual teeth, so to speak.
So, as we speak to immature or non-Christians, we need to be aware of how we are speaking and use language they can understand. Not that they are ignorant or stupid, but because they are not at a point where they understand the terminology that we might understand. It is like trying to speak to a preschooler in adult language. And never forget, you used to be a preschooler yourself. Don’t ever look at yourself as being better than they are, just because they may not be at the same spiritual level where you find yourself. We are all here to help one another in our journey through life.
If people misunderstand what we say, it can very easily lead to problems we did not expect. The words we speak could be taken the wrong way and cause hard feelings when that was not our intent at all.
A good example of this comes to mind as I think of the time I visited my eye doctor. I was having some difficulties, so they ran a check on the pressure in my eyes. Before this appointment, I had never really paid attention to the word “glaucoma”. I had probably heard it, but it was not a part of my vocabulary. The doctor informed me that I had it.
When I got home, my wife asked me what the doctor had to say. I told her, “He said that I have gonorrhea.”
“He said you have WHAT!?” she shouted.
I sheepishly replied, “He said I have gonorrhea in my eyes.”
“You’d better not have gonorrhea in your eyes!” she retorted. “You sure he didn't say that you have glaucoma?”
“Oh! That’s what it was! I knew it was something that started with a ‘G’.” I got a quick lesson in the difference between glaucoma and gonorrhea.
Let us speak of the Glory of God and His marvelous works in a way that others will understand and in a way that will encourage them to seek more. Let us speak wisely as we do and be fully aware of the need to speak in clear, understandable terms that will help others find Christ. And as we do, let us seek more of Him in our own lives. We are brothers and sisters helping one another.
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