Perhaps if We Talked Less and Listened More

Someone somewhere said, "God gave us two ears and one mouth for a reason." I feel fairly certain that was said as a sublte reproof because most of us do at least as much talking as we do listening. I suppose it is not really fair to indict all of you along with me, but there is another old saying that, "Misery loves company." I admit, I have done my share of complaining in 58 years of treading this soil. Then again, as most of you know, I am an introvert so my talking is, more often than not, consolidated to times when I have to talk, like when I am teaching a class. It did not always used to be so. I craved attention and was pretty good at talking for the sake of getting it. I could throw out a witicism or a barb with barely a thought about how it might be received. I have also been wounded a few times. Trust me, everyone knew about them. A couple friends even told me to quit talking about the wounds and the people who had inflicted them. I do not think either of them read this blog. They probably do not even know it exists. Then again, my guess is neither of them even remember the incidents. Still, I feel like I need to acknowledge David Saltzman and Nancy Ostini who caught me up short on two separate occasions. Thank you.

I, having said that and you having read that, can agree it is good advice to listen more than we talk, but then again, everyone knows we talk too much and do not listen enough. When we do listen, we usually listen to ourselves regardless of who is actually talking at the time. My in house human communications expert tells me that as much as ninety-three percent of our communications with one another is non-verbal. We are communicating by body language or facial expressions. Even voice inflections are considered non-verbal in this regard. When we attempt to communicate with some other person, we are trying to convey to them concepts in our mind which are not necessarily received correctly. Add to that the fact that we often hear what we expect the other person to say and/or hear what we wish the other person would say and it adds up to something well less than perfect understanding on both ends. The bottom line is that we do not hear because we do not listen.


In the last post, I mentioned I try to keep my spiritual ears open to the Holy Spirit regardless of whatever else I might be doing. Some people think that is kind of freaky or mystical or something. Virtually all those people have either not experienced the Holy Spirit speaking into their spirit or simply did not recognize it when He did. Years ago, while trying to explain the concept to a group of brilliant, young, college students (yes, I was definitely over matched intellectually) the Holy Spirit did speak into my spirit with a simile they immediately grasped. The spirit in man is like the operating system in a computer. Once it is connected to the power (Holy Spirit) and turned on it runs in the background enabling everything else to work. All we have to do activate our spirit. It probably is not productive to discuss whether once our spirit is activated, we need to reactivate it regularly. Maybe we can go there another time.

Scripture does tell us to, "be filled with the spirit" (Ephesians 5:18) I am going to throw in a little Greek lesson here, but I will not charge you extra for it. This phrase is in the Greek present tense. The present tense shows continuing action in present time. When we read the phrase in English we are inclined to think it means to be in a state of having been filled. In other words, we were filled once and we are supposed to stay that way. That would be a different tense in Greek (the imperfect tense if you are interested). By being in the present tense, a literal translation would be "be being filled" or to be in a state in which we are continually being filled. (Scripture actually refers to that as a river and a fountain in various places.) That is only possible when we stay connected to the Holy Spirit. He provides the power for our operating system, our spirit, to run in the background regardless of what we are doing or what is going on around us. This is the state of being Isaiah was referring to when he wrote, "You will keep him in perfect peace, Whose mind is stayed on You." (Isaiah 26:3) The writer of Hebrews tells us essentially the same thing when he writes, "Let us therefore be diligent to enter that rest..." (Hebrews 4:11)

Some of you long time readers are surely asking if I have confused the spirit and the soul. Not at all. The mind is what we use in our effort to activate the spirit. Prayer, praise, and worship are all activities that turn our spirit on. Our soul sits between our body and our spirit, listening to the desires of each of them as they play tug o'war with each other. We decide which direction we will ultimately go. We decide whether to do what Jesus wants or what we want. In spite of the fact we know that going head to head with Him ends in a headache at best, we often stubbornly persist in having our own way. We do this knowing the truth of Proverbs 14:12 that our way will always end in death. It occurs to me that is not always a bad thing. Sometimes that death is to our fleshly desires. That death will end up working out well, but my gosh it is so painful to learn things that way. Why not just make it easy on ourselves and listen to what the Holy Spirit has to say to us--then do it.

Maybe this is my post for old sayings. I am in this for a penny, in it for a pound. If you are coming along, it will not be long before the battle is engaged in earnest. Now would be the time to decide. Our encouragement would be to listen to what the Holy Spirit is telling you. Listen all the time. Then do whatever that is. It will not always make you the most popular person in town. That also is a lesson for another time. See you soon. God bless!