Preaching with Our Ears // Living Life as an Ambassador of Christ, Pt 8

Have you ever met someone and … all they do is talk. They never seem to stop long enough to listen – only to figure out what they’re going to say next. They’re … well, boring.  Sometimes I think though when we’re telling others about Jesus, we think we have to be like that – all talk.  If only we could learn to preach with our ears.

It never, never, ever, ever ceases to amaze me how differently two people can see the same thing. We can be in the same situation or experience or read the same words on a page or hear the same thing on the radio or watch the same thing on television and react to it, perceive it, respond to it, be impacted by it in totally, totally different ways.

A while ago now I wrote a book about our different God given personality types called My Personality GPS and as part of that I interviewed one person from each of the personality types. Perhaps you heard some of those interviews on air a while back.

Now here's the thing, I asked each of these people exactly the same questions and I was utterly blown away by the differences in their answers. They saw the world so differently. And on top of our personality types there's generation, there's culture, there's up bringing, there's life experiences.

All of those things make us who we are and all of those things forms the lens, if you will, through which we perceive the world. Now we kind of know that I guess but a lot of the time we don't live and behave as though we know that. Our default position is, if you like, is that everyone sees the world the same way as we do. But that's just not true.

So if we want to communicate something to someone then one of the things we need to do is to understand how they see the world. In a sense we need to learn to speak with our ears.

Over the last few weeks on the program we've been chatting about what it means to be an ambassador of Christ. To live our lives, if we believe in Jesus, as one of His ambassadors. If you've been with us you'll have heard me read this particular verse more than once or twice. It's by the Apostle Paul, he said in writing to his dear friends at a Church in Corinth way back in the 1st century.

The letter is 2 Corinthians in the New Testament, chapter 5, verse 20. Paul says:

We are ambassadors for Christ since God is making His appeal through us. We entreat you on behalf of Christ to be reconciled to God.

Now one of the things that strikes me here is how strong the differences are across cultures. We've had a man recently join our team here at Christianityworks, his name is Gregory. Now you may not have noticed but we Australians are fairly direct in the way we speak.

Gregory's an American and American's on the other hand are less so. We often joke about it. Gregory will ask where the bathroom is where as I'll ask where the toilet is. We Australians are much more direct. But even more than that, Gregory grew up, spent many of his childhood years in Japan.

And so he has a lot of the Japanese culture on the inside too. A culture that is very much about politeness and face. And even though we've known each other for a long time, now that we work together every day we've both been learning that we're quite different in the way we behave.

When I ask him what he thinks I want him to actually tell me what he thinks. If he thinks I'm off with the pixies on some issue I actually want him to tell me so, so I can fix it. Forget hierarchy, I just want his direct honest input 'cause that's how we'll get results, that's how we Australians work.

He, on the other hand, can find that a bit confronting because that's not the cultural background that he's come from. That's just one example but it's a good one. Imagine if I, as direct and as blunt as I can be, were sent as Australia's ambassador to the US or to Japan, well frankly, I'd have to learn about culture before I could communicate e