I don’t know about you, but I think relationships are hard! Sometimes, you don’t know what to say, sometimes you say the wrong thing, sometimes it feels like you have to say something. What do we do? How do I relate to the people around me in a way that produces peace?
James 1:19–20 are words to live by. “Know this, my beloved brothers and sisters: let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger; for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God.”
How often have you gotten into issues in a relationship with someone because you do the opposite of what James says here? So often, we have difficulties in our relationships because we are slow to hear, quick to speak, or are quick to become angry.
Be quick to hear
Instead of having a mindset where we believe the most important thing in a conversation is to be heard, let’s switch our attitude to be one of listening. Think of the last time that you felt truly heard by someone. Besides the feeling of being heard, what else did you feel? Feeling loved is closely associated with feeling heard. When we take the time to listen to someone, it conveys love to them. Our former care pastor, Doug Whitlef, says this all the time, “What the world needs is a good listenin’ to.”
Slow to speak
When we’re slow to speak, it doesn’t mean that we don’t talk at all. It means, in our relationships with other humans, that we aren’t the first ones out of the gate to speak and make our opinion known. It can also mean that we utilize asking good questions and what many have called “active listening.” Active listening means that we do talk, but we’re reflecting back to our conversation partner what we are hearing from them. So, let’s say that the person we’re talking about is telling us about a stressful situation at work. We could practice active listening by saying things like, “That sounds really frustrating, I’m sorry you’re going through that.” Or, we could ask them, “How are you doing emotionally with all of this?” Being quick to hear and slow to speak has a goal of loving the person we’re talking to.
Slow to anger
I have found that I am an emotional person, maybe you know this about yourself too. So, I have had so many times in a conversation where I disagree with how someone is perceiving a situation, feeling about a situation, or what someone is saying about their situation. Sometimes, when they keep talking about their situation in the “wrong way” (or, at least what I consider to be the wrong way), I can get mad! I want to correct them. I want to be right. But the goal of the conversation isn’t to “be right” it’s to love them. Job says in Job 6:26, “Do you think that you can reprove words, when the speech of a despairing man is wind?” When someone is hurting, it does no good to reprove their words, to correct them, and to get angry about the way that they’re experiencing their situation. It’s our job to listen. You don’t have to agree with them, you just have to understand. You don’t need to entangle your emotions with theirs. They just need you to be quick to hear, slow to speak, and slow to anger.
Now, what’s crazy about these words from James is that, despite how helpful they are in interacting with people, I think that he’s telling us primarily how we should interact with God. If we look at the context of these verses, it seems to me to be clear. Look at verse 18, “Of [God’s] own will he brought us forth by the word of truth, that we should be a kind of firstfruits of his creatures” (emphasis mine). It’s this word that we need to be quick to listen to, and we should be slow to speak. What’s more, when our situations are not what we want them to be, we ought not to get angry with God, because as James says in verse 17, God is the source of every good and perfect gift. He is not unloving towards us— ever.
So, if we’re going through something we’d rather not go through, we ought to be quick to hear what God wants to teach us in and through it. We ought to be slow to speak. We ought to be slow to anger about our situations.
James may be drawing from the author of Ecclesiastes when he says,
“Guard your steps when you go to the house of God. To draw near to listen is better than to offer the sacrifice of fools, for they do not know that they are doing evil. Be not rash with your mouth, nor let your heart be hasty to utter a word before God, for God is in heaven and you are on earth. Therefore let your words be few. For a dream comes with much business, and a fool’s voice with many words” (Ecclesiastes 5:1–3).
Be quick to listen. Be slow to speak. Be slow to anger. It will help you relate to anyone you’re talking to.
