Can we talk?

When you think about our president, and the pundits on TV and radio, and the anchors on the evening newscast such as Brian Williams, it’s interesting to look at what the Bible says.

The word “conversation” in the King James Bible doesn’t mean just “talking.”

Jordan, in a study on I Timothy earlier this month, reasoned, “If you sit and chat with someone you say, ‘Well, we’re just having a conversation.’ But you know conversation even in that context is not just a chat. A conversation is when you sit and enter into a concourse and a communion between you and someone else.

“In the Bible, a conversation can be something that has no words involved in it at all. For example, I Peter 3: [1] Likewise, ye wives, be in subjection to your own husbands; that, if any obey not the word, they also may without the word be won by the conversation of the wives;
[2] While they behold your chaste conversation coupled with fear.

“How can you without the word, without speaking, have a conversation? See that? So conversation is something that is more than just speaking words.

“Now, what we would usually talk, in the simple way, we would say it probably would be lifestyle. Some people like the word ‘behavior.’ Lifestyle is probably better because your behavior would be erratic, but your lifestyle, you have concourse, you have a going back and forth with people in the way that you live.

“So when we’re talking about your manner of life, we’re talking about the whole of your life and we’re talking about the honesty and the integrity with which you conduct yourself. That’s why I Timothy 3 has all these qualifications that have to do primarily with how you relate to one another.

“I was discussing some things in I Timothy with some brothers just the other day, and I’m struck constantly, when we talk through it, I said this, ‘It’s interesting that Paul doesn’t give you a long list of doctrinal this, this and this.' They were expected to already KNOW about that.

“Nobody gets to be a bishop or a deacon who isn’t doctrinally sound to start with, but every person who’s doctrinally sound doesn’t have that live out in the quality of their life and their conversation, so you have a quality of life issue, a lifestyle, an integrity, an honesty, where you see it living in your life.”

(to be continued . . . )