Friendships Part 3 - The Wind From Your Lips

How does God want us communicating to our friends?

We’ve been talking about addressing big, slimy issues with our friends and the lies Satan tells us to keep us from helping them get the egg off their faces. Yesterday we talked about the fact that these confrontations can’t be judgmental, they must be loving, so how we approach it matters! Which leads us straight to tackling:

Lie #2: I just don’t know how to approach it or counsel her about it.

To kick it off, I want to start by discussing wind. For those of you who know me well, you are giggling right now, thinking I am going to go there. With my track record, you have every reason to think that. But rest assured, I’m not. And now that I am typing about it, it’s taking an incredible amount of restraint to not go there. Stopping to gather myself.

Ok I’m back. I want to talk about wind, for real. Let’s face it, wind can be really, really sucky. It can destroy a golf game, freeze our butts off in the stands, ruin a beautiful, brand-new hair blowout that you just spent 2.5 hours sitting in the chair for. Ugh! Don’t you hate that! I digress…

Think about how bad wind can really be. In can be harsh and frightening, destroying everything in its path, devastating people’s lives, and causing permanent damage to all it comes into contact with. I live in tornado valley, I’ve seen it. Wind can be sucky.

But wind can also be amazing. It can be soft and gentle and feel so good on the face. It can even just be good for the soul. Think about a memory that you have of a soft wind on your face or soft breeze in the hair. So refreshing. Mood changing. Wind can be awesome.

We need to think about this correlation when we are planning to use the wind coming from our lungs. When the wind from our lungs turns into words. Is our wind that turns into words going to be harsh, devastating, damaging and relationship destroying? Or is the wind that turns into words going to be gentle, soft, refreshing and good for the soul? Hopefully the latter. So how do we ensure that we are breathing those words?

The answer is in the bible. The way we should not only approach our friends, but the way we should approach our lives is stated very clearly in the bible. It's perhaps one of the most important pieces of scripture, and it's about the fruit of the Spirit. The fruit of the Spirit is the work of the Holy Spirit in us and the characteristics of Christ in us. This is defined in Galatians 5:22-23:

What this means is that these characteristics within us, do not come from us, they come from the Holy Spirit. When we have accepted Jesus into our lives, we have a communication channel to the Holy Spirit, and that helps us be better at having conversations that are loving, joyful, peaceful, patient, kind, good, faithful, gentle and controlled. So, the first step to approaching a hard conversation like this with a friend is to:

PRAY!

Praying should be the first step that you take. Pray for the Holy Spirit to produce that fruit in your conversation. Not just on your end, but on your friend’s end too! Pray for your friend’s heart to be open, for her ears to hear and her eyes to see. Pray that you do the same! Pray that God will lead every step of the conversation. Pray that He will anoint your words and soften her heart. Pray, pray, pray! And then:

TURN TO THE TRUTH!

If you are about to confront someone about egg on their face, shouldn’t you be armed with God’s truth? I will tell you wholeheartedly, Satan is not going to want you to be having the conversation. He will be sitting on the shoulder of your friend whispering in her ear a whole lot of lies. Some may be very obvious lies. Some may deceive you! When you arm yourself with the truth, which is the Word of God, it will give you power to flick Satan right off your friend’s shoulder (thank you Gail for bringing the flicking image into my life, love it). This will be the blessing that you give her! As long as you do it with the fruit of the Spirit! Then what should we do next?

TRUST GOD!

Trust that God will lead the conversation. That he will direct the whole path. That He is in control. When we give this to God, we don’t have to worry about coming across as judgmental, because it’s filled with God’s fruit. We can be confident in knowing we put it in God’s hands. When we do that, regardless of their response, we can be sure that we did what we needed to do. And we can be confident that, with God’s timing, the blessing will come.

In part 4 we cover:

Lie #3 She clearly must already know she has this problem and is just not doing anything about it

Here are some additional great verses in the bible about how to communicate: