communication fuels relationships…

now it is important to realize that communication is what fuels relationships, what makes them run, what makes them work. i don’t care how great the relationship looks on the outside, if you’re not constantly putting the fuel of communication into the relationship, it’s going to get stalled.

look at any relationship that’s not working and you can guarantee that someone, somehow, someway stopped talking. and whenever that happens, it stalls.

we have been looking at bettering our communication with GOD and today we’re going to start looking at bettering our communication with each other, it’s something we need in a country where fifty-percent of wives say, “my husband doesn’t talk to me like i’d like him to.” where, in 86% of the divorces, the statement is made that one of the major reasons was “we just couldn’t communicate.” in a country where one in four kids say, “i’ve never had a significant conversation with my dad.” we obviously need some help. we need to learn to communicate.

now the world’s greatest expert when it comes to communication is JESUS CHRIST. so what does JESUS have to teach us about communication?

for HIM it starts by building trust. if you can’t trust what i’m saying, then there’s no real communication. if i wrote here, “eighty percent of what i’m going to tell you is true,” that wouldn’t make sense. what about the other 20%? you wouldn’t know what was true and what was false. if you inject any element of mistrust into a relationship it destroys all the communication.

this was important to JESUS. matthew 5.37 (niv), simply let your “yes” be “yes” and your “no” be “no”; anything beyond this comes from the evil one.

JESUS was serious about this. HE doesn’t just say it’s a bad idea. HE says if you don’t build trust into your words it comes from satan himself. that’s how important this is.

in that day, they developed this whole system of trust. that’s what JESUS is talking about. they couldn’t swear on GOD’s name. they had a law against it. so they had this system of trust where the closer you got to GOD, the more you could trust what the person says. if someone said, “i swear based on earth, GOD’s footstool,” you could sort of trust them. but if they said, “i swear based on heaven, where GOD lives,” that’s closer to GOD. you could really trust what they said.

JESUS said, here’s the way to build trust. let your “yes” be “yes” and your “no” be “no”. the more you allow what you say to be something that can be trusted, the better communication inevitably you’re going to have.

just a thought from the front porch…