Crucial Conversations

Welcome to week three of our series about what it means to do life together. I was reading a passage in the Old Testament, in the book of Leviticus, and there were a bunch of commandments, most of which you would expect… but one kind of jumped out at me.
I want to see if you notice it. This is from Leviticus 19:16-18:

Do not go about spreading slander among your people. Do not do anything that endangers your neighbor’s life. I am the Lord. Do not hate a fellow Israelite in your heart. Rebuke your neighbor frankly so you will not share in their guilt.

Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against anyone among your people, but love your neighbor as yourself.
Leviticus 19:16-18

Of course, those last words, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” are quite familiar. The phrase that jumped out at me was, “Rebuke your neighbor frankly.” Do you do that? Do you regularly go next door and say, “Oh, this décor is awful. What were you thinking? I hate your carpet, and these drapes are terrible, and your kids are just embarrassing, and your dog is ugly, and the food smells bad”?

When was the last time you rebuked your neighbor frankly? And how did this get in the Bible?

Maybe you’re thinking, “I’m actually excited to know this is in the Bible — that God commands me to rebuke my neighbor. I’ve been wanting to do that for a long time.”

Most people have no idea this is in the Bible.

So I want to talk today about this one commandment — “Rebuke your neighbor frankly.”
I want to talk about why you need to rebuke your neighbor frankly; and how to rebuke your neighbor frankly; and I want to ask you to make a commitment to rebuke your neighbor frankly starting today.

I make absolutely no guarantees about the quality of this message, but I promise — you will know what it’s about by the time it’s all done.
If someone asks you, “If I go online and listen to the message from this week, what will I learn?” you can say to them, “You will learn how to rebuke your neighbor frankly.”

Alright, here we go. I’ll start with the why — why does it matter so much that you rebuke your neighbor frankly? There’s a great book by Joseph Grenny that our staff recently worked through for the second time. It’s called Crucial Conversations, and it really gets at the need to do what the writer of Scripture calls rebuking your neighbor frankly.

The idea is in any relationship, there will be certain moments that have a disproportionate impact on that relationship and on your character and on your spiritual life.
What you say or don’t say in those moments will have an impact way beyond what might happen in hours, days, or weeks of the relationship otherwise.

We all know about this.
* You’re at work and a coworker approaches you. It’s a real vulnerable moment. They mention a person who’s reporting to you. You’re their supervisor, but you’re letting them get away with murder, and you’re not holding them accountable. What do you say in that moment? Do you get defensive?

* You go to a party and your girlfriend or boyfriend or spouse is talking way too much. They’re embarrassing themselves, but they don’t know they’re embarrassing themselves. When you get in the car to drive home, it’s clear they think it was a great time. They think they were shining lights at that party. What do you say?

* You bring the man of your dreams home to meet your mom and dad, and it’s real clear that your dad doesn’t think this is the man of his dreams for you. What do you say?

* You’re in a small group, and someone in the group drives you crazy. They talk too much, or they’re too opinionated, or they use humor or sarcasm in a jabby way, or they just want to talk about politics. It’s clear they voted for the candidate who you love the least, who you’re pretty sure even Jesus doesn’t love. What do you say to that person?

* Your mom is a tremendously needy person, and when holidays roll around, you heroically clear space on your calendar so you can spend time with her. You’re available to her from morning until night. You’re heroically empathic and sacrificially attentive to her. When it’s time for you to leave, she says to you, “Thanks so much for coming, honey. Come back again when you can stay longer.” What do you say in that moment?

There will be certain moments, and the way you respond, what you say or don’t say, is going to build a bridge, or it’s going to build a wall.
Those are moments for what the writers of Scripture call “rebuking your neighbor frankly,” or what Grenny calls “crucial conversations.”

You can recognize them by three elements.

All crucial conversations involve:

high stakes
opposing opinions
strong emotions

Now one of the ways you can look at the Bible is the Bible is a series of crucial conversations from beginning to end. The very first crucial conversation occurs when the first sin occurs.
The man and the woman disobey God. They eat the fruit. They want to have their eyes opened and be like God.

Community is broken, so God initiates the first crucial conversation.
This is so interesting. The very moment that God initiates it, the man avoids it. He runs away and hides in order to not have a crucial conversation.
Now if God hadn’t pressed the issue, how long do you think the man would have continued avoiding the crucial conversation?
He would still be hiding to this day.
Now why is that?

Is it just because he was a man, and the woman would have been much better because of course all women are way better at having crucial conversations than men are? Is that the point he’s making?
No, that’s not the point.

The problem is sin, see.

The very first crucial conversation in Genesis 3 was:

* real high stakes — it was life or death
* with real opposing opinions — the question is, “Who gets to be God?” God thinks he should be God. We think we ought to be God.
* and very strong emotions — desire, fear, shame, anger. Then one of the results of sin is a desire to avoid having the crucial conversation or to have it in a bad way. Here’s the lesson around that:

The health of a community is a function of the lag time between identifying and discussing problems.

How much of a gap is there between when I’m aware, “Oh wow, we have a problem,” and when I actually bring it up? If there’s a long lag time, something is going to happen inside of me. This passage is so fascinating. Psychologically, it’s so astute.
This is what the writer of Scripture says:

Do not hate a fellow Israelite in your heart. Rebuke your neighbor frankly…
Leviticus 19:17

Now there’s a connection between those two statements. If you don’t rebuke your neighbor frankly, you’ll end up hating him in your heart. Alright, the second crucial conversation in the Bible is around the second sin recorded in Scripture.
Cain was mad at his brother Abel because Abel’s sacrifice had been accepted by God, but Cain’s wasn’t.
He felt left out, and he was angry, and he was envious. Now God is going to initiate the second crucial conversation in the Bible. This is what the writer of Scripture says:

So Cain was very angry, and his face was downcast. Then the Lord said to Cain, “Why are you angry? Why is your face downcast?
Genesis 4:5-6

Now, of course, God is not confused about this. God knows what’s going on.
The reason he asks Cain those questions is he’s inviting Cain into a safe space to talk about what’s happening in his heart.
This is why having crucial conversations is so critical. If you don’t talk it out, you will act it out.
If you know this story, that’s exactly what Cain does. He doesn’t talk about it with God.

See, a lot of what prayer makes so alive is I bring to God what is deepest and darkest and rawest in my heart, and God will listen to anything. God will help me with anything. That’s prayer. If your prayer feels stilted or not alive, it’s probably because you’re not bringing your real heart to God.

But if you don’t do that, if you don’t talk it out with God and with the other person, you will act it out.
* It will just come out of you.
* It will come out of your face.
* It will come out of your nonverbal communication.
* You’ll go into withdrawal mode or prickly mode or whatever it is. With Cain, it’s tragic, and he ends up killing his brother. This is real critical, and there’s a huge reason why.
And this gets to the how of rebuking your neighbor frankly. What I want to do for the rest of this message is walk through this command, “Rebuke your neighbor frankly,” one word at a time.
Because at each point, there’s a decision, there’s a crossroads where we’re going to want to go the other way. The first word is

Rebuke…

This is a difficult thing to do for most people.
Some people do it with a little too much enthusiasm, but for most people, it’s kind of difficult. “What I would rather do is avoid because it’s going to be awkward, because the other person is not going to like it.”

This is especially important in churches. Often, in churches, people suffer from terminal niceness.
They will not tell the truth because they confuse loving someone with not hurting their feelings.
To love does not mean to avoid hurting feelings.

I told you about the book Life Together by Bonhoeffer. What he writes is just amazingly profound.

Reproof is unavoidable. In fact, nothing can be more cruel than the tenderness that consigns another to his sin. Nothing can be more compassionate than the severe rebuke that calls another back from the path of sin.
-Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Do I love you enough to have a crucial conversation with you? I know, I know. It’s hard. It’s awkward. Not long ago, a friend of mine did something that offended me.
So I knew I needed to have a crucial conversation with my friend… but I didn’t want to.

Now, here’s the deal. I want to introduce you to a key concept as we think about rebuking your neighbor frankly.
There’s a ladder of rebuke. All the time, stuff happens in relationships, and the more you’re together, the more often it happens — a ding here, a ding there. There’s an awkward moment. There’s a disconnect. I feel something is a little bit off.
It can be a single sentence. It can be a single word. It can be a raised eyebrow.

Now, on a scale from one to ten, this thing with my friend was like a one or a two.
And I thought maybe I’m being too sensitive. Maybe it’s my fault that I have any feelings about this at all.
And I didn’t want to talk about it with him. I didn’t want to raise it because I thought I would feel stupid. It would be awkward. I didn’t know what the outcome would be. It would be easier to just ignore it. But then there would be a little tiny sliver in my heart, and I’ll look at him and feel about him a little bit differently. Then there’s a little something else that goes on inside of me. I would know I shrunk back from having that conversation not out of bravery, not out of love, just out of cowardice. Especially in families, especially in marriages, this happens over and over and over again until the ones and twos become fours and fives.
You know where this is headed. Then it’s an eight or a nine. Then it hits ten, and love has died.

One person says to someone else not just, “I don’t love you,” but, “I never loved you.”
It’s not true. They want to think it’s true in the moment, but it’s not true, and it didn’t hit them out of the blue.

What happened is a thousand little ones or twos that never got talked about, a thousand little moments where intimacy and love could have been fought for but weren’t just built up over time, and love died. < pause>
You see, I have to rebuke. I have to have the hard conversation. I have to have the courage. And we as a church have to learn to be good at this.

This is not Community 101. This is like Advanced Community.
And this is God’s command for the whole nation of Israel. They were going to be God’s people. So rebuke. Alright, we’ll talk about the rest of this command in just a moment.

Announcement

So we need to rebuke.
Then we can’t stop with that word because there will be some people who will have no problem with rebuking; your problem is you love rebuking. Rebuking is your spiritual gift. You rebuke recreationally. The idea is:

Rebuke your neighbor…

Not the person you hate, not your enemy. This is real important. When the writers of Scripture talk about neighbor, we’re called to love our neighbor, so to rebuke our neighbor is incredibly profound. And by the way, this is not limited to the person who lives in the room or condo or apartment or house or whatever next to you. It’s the person who life brings near to you.

In our day, very often, our neighbors primarily are at work because that’s where we spend so much time.
What does it look like if people do or do not rebuke their neighbor, that coworker, frankly?

I’ll give you a picture of this.
A friend of mine works for a consulting firm where he primarily works with leadership teams on offsite retreats.
Well, he was with a management team one time that was quite young. A lot of maturity issues surfaced.
By lunch on the first day of this two-day offsite, he said every single member of the team had pulled him aside to tell him who the real problem was.
Everyone agreed the real problem was Cindy.
Now, everyone knew the real problem on the team was Cindy except one person. Guess who? Cindy didn’t know. The first day, they talked about communication and trust. Everything was great.
The second day, they talked about strategy and alignment and so on. Cindy was talking with great confidence, as though she knew she was a tremendous contributor to the team. While the other team members were just boiling.
Finally, the youngest guy on the team erupted and said, “Cindy, you’re a jerk, and you never get your work done on time.”

All of a sudden, there was dead silence, and everyone was looking down at their shoes.
You know how that goes in a group. Like, “Oh man. This is awkward. No one look up.”
Then my friend walked to the white board and wrote in the upper left hand corner the words, “Cindy, you’re a jerk.”
And down in the right hand corner, he wrote, “And you never get your work done on time.”
Then he turned to the group. By now, everyone was locked in, wondering what he was going to say.

He said, “We’re going to come back to this statement, pointing to ‘Cindy, you’re a jerk.’ Trust me. We’ll come back here, but we’re not going to start down here. Again, this is Advanced Community. This is real crucial.
A lot of times, especially in churches, when someone says something wrong, everyone in the group will rush in to rescue the victim and pile onto the guy who said it wrong, and the real problem never gets addressed because we’re just kind of into rescuing victims. My friend said, “We’re going to start with — Cindy, you don’t get your work done on time. Is that true? Does Cindy not get her work done on time?”
Everyone was looking back down at their shoes again, breaking off eye contact.
So he went around the room, “No sugar coating. No varnishing. Yes or no. Does Cindy get her work done on time?”

“No.” “No.” “No.” “No.”
Everyone said, “No.”

Rebuke your neighbor frankly.

Guess who wanted to talk next?
Cindy wanted to talk. She was humiliated. She was mortified. I know that feeling.
“I can’t believe you all would wait until a stranger is here to tell me this. It’s real clear you’ve all felt this way about me for a long time. No one has said a word to me. Why didn’t you say anything?”

Then someone asked her, “Cindy, is there a problem at home?” trying to bail her out in a misguided attempt at grace.
She said, “No.”
“Well, what’s the real problem?” someone asked.
She said, “Well, we’ve grown by more than a third in the last year, but I have no more resources. You come to me with communication needs, and I have a third heavier load, but I have no one to help, so I just keep trying to put my head down and work harder and harder.”

The CEO stepped in and said, “We have resources because we’ve been growing. If I would have known that, we could have provided help.”
The problem was actually solvable. Most problems are.

So much of the toxicity had drained out of the room by this point.

So my friend said, “Ok, now we need to come back here, pointing to, ‘Cindy, you’re a jerk.’” But before he could say anything, the guy who said it spoke up —
“I got this,” he said. “Cindy, I just want to say I’m so sorry I said that. What I wish I would have said was, ‘I’m so frustrated with you because when we come together, usually we’re all up to date, but you’re not.’” It’s interesting, sometimes the workplace does a better job of spiritual formation than the church does.

Maybe another way of saying that is God is at work to form character all the time everywhere — workplace, church, it doesn’t matter to him. We need to get really good at this — Rebuking your neighbor.
But we need to do this in love.

We need to ask God for skill and help and empathy and not a spirit of judgmentalism or contempt.

Rebuke your neighbor frankly

“I’d rather do it obliquely. I’d rather rebuke my neighbor obliquely. I’d rather do it indirectly. I’d rather do it subtly. I’d rather do it to a third party.
“I know what’s going to happen is when I start talking about a difficult, sensitive issue in this crucial moment when relationships rise or fall, when they’re life-or-death deals, it will be hard. I won’t be as articulate as I want to. If I’m angry, I might overstate stuff. If I’m feeling anxious, I might waffle about it.”

Here’s what’s interesting. Even with people who think they’re real bold, we have a real problem speaking truth in love.

How early in life do you think this starts?

We know that talking about difficult truths can be difficult for adults. How early do you think you learn to lie to other people to keep relationships smooth? This is so fascinating.

Joseph Grenny has a son, and he did a little experiment to find out how early in life kids learn somewhere how to lie to smooth over relationships.
This is so classic. I have to show it to you.

Video: Grenny’s son doing a brownie experiment

That’s great isn’t it? Here’s the thing. We’ve all been to that meeting. We’ve all been a part of that group. We’ve all been a member of that family. We’ve all been in that church.
Everyone knows the brownies stink except the brownie maker.
Everyone talks about it in the hallways. Everyone talks about it with each other. They just don’t rebuke the brownie maker frankly. They hate his brownies in their hearts.

Now, why do we do that? Why do we not speak the truth in love when the writers of Scripture are so clear about our calling to do that? Well, I think it’s because of a lie. I think there’s a lie that the Evil One gets human beings, you and me, to believe, and it’s this:

I must choose between telling the truth or keeping a friend.

* I think I have to smooth things.
* I have to hide.
* I have to spin.
* I have to avoid. This is so different than the wisdom of the writers of Scripture.
This was said thousands of years ago, and it remains so true. This is from the book of Proverbs.

The kisses of an enemy may be profuse,
[Someone who doesn’t really love me might flatter me. They might spin stuff. They might try to make me feel good.]
The kisses of an enemy may be profuse,
but faithful and true are the wounds of a friend.
Proverbs 27:6

It’s better to have a wound, painful truth from a friend that can lead me to the man God wants me to be… than flattering words that will make me feel better or avoid causing pain in the moment but make me a worse person.

The idea of having crucial conversations with people is so central to life, and as in every other area, the master of the crucial conversation is Jesus himself. Think about it. Over and over again, when he’s with people, he has really difficult conversations.

One time, a guy who is known as the rich, young ruler comes to Jesus, and he wants Jesus to affirm his spiritual life because he’s so righteous. “My brownies are so good,” but they’re not, so this is what the writer of Scripture says:

Jesus looked at him and loved him.
[He doesn’t say, “Yeah, you’re on the right track. I don’t want to hurt your feelings. Keep going. You’re going to set records.”]
Jesus looked at him and loved him. “One thing you lack,” he said. “Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”
Mark 10:21

That’s a crucial conversation. That’s going to change that guy’s life. Jesus didn’t have this conversation because he didn’t love the guy; he had it because he loved him. One time, there was a woman named Martha. Jesus is at her home, and her sister Mary is listening to Jesus, and Martha is in the kitchen making the brownies.
She’s mad at Mary, but she won’t go rebuke Mary frankly, so she goes to Jesus.

“Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!”
Luke 10:40

Jesus will not do that. It’s very interesting. John tells us about his relationship with Martha. He says Jesus loved Martha and her sister… and he rebukes her.

“Martha, Martha,” the Lord answered, “you are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed—or indeed only one. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.”
Luke 10:41-42

Can you imagine if Jesus didn’t have crucial conversations with his disciples, with the religious leaders, with everyone?
The New Testament wouldn’t exist. Here’s the deal. We see this so clearly in Jesus’ life…

We don’t have crucial conversations in spite of love; we have crucial conversations because of love.

So the question is who is it that God is calling you to have a crucial conversation with this week? I was thinking this about Jesus. I’ve never thought about this before.
Jesus’ life is a record of crucial conversations.
The very first conversation he had when he was 12 years old was a crucial conversation.
His mom and his dad find him in the temple. They’re upset because they couldn’t find him before. They say, “Why have you done this to us? Why are you treating us this way?”
He doesn’t say, “Oh, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be here.” He doesn’t get sarcastic with them.
He says, “Don’t you know I have to be about my Father’s business?” Then he goes home and is their son.

I had never thought about this before. This is amazing. The very last conversation Jesus has as he’s dying is a crucial conversation.

There’s a thief on his left and a thief on his right who are being crucified.
One thief says, “If you’re the Messiah, why don’t you save yourself?”
The other dying thief says, “No, you belong here, and I belong here, but not him, not Jesus. Jesus, would you remember me when you come into your kingdom?”
Jesus says, “You’re going to be with me today in Paradise.”
His last conversation is a crucial conversation.

So you need to remember you’re not going into these conversations alone. Jesus is with you and will help you. And remember, this is not Community 101. This is Advanced Community, but God is calling us all to do this with courage and love and trust and confidence in the midst of fear.

Who is God calling you to do this with? It might be a mom or a dad or a brother or a sister or a husband or a wife or a boyfriend or a girlfriend or a boss or a coworker, but there is someone.
Will you do it this week?

Will you say, “God, I’m going to ask for your help. I’m going to think about it. I’m going to get some people to pray for me, but I’m not going to back down. I’m not going to shrink away. I’m not going to carry hate in my heart. I’m going to have that crucial conversation. I will rebuke my neighbor frankly.” Will you do it this week? And remember, you’re not doing it by yourself. God will do it with you. Alright, let me pray for you and then Michaela and the team will lead us in a closing song.

Blue Oaks Church
Pleasanton, CA