Persuasion

It's last topic, I have to admit that the last topic doesn't completely fit in with everything I was talking about. But someone, I can't even remember who, that's a beauty of email. Everybody's voice sounds, everybody's voice sounds the same. When somebody phones you, you can remember who it was that told you something through email you can never remember who it was. It's contextless, but somebody came up with this idea that for you as communicators, evangelists, and particularly as preachers, it would be interesting to talk about the subject of persuasion. If for no other reason then it just doesn't, it just doesn't get covered at conferences like this. And yet it's a very important part of communication and I think it is. And in some ways, I noticed that Gordon Conwell, they have a, right, they have a doctorate ministry, they are called, Ministry in complex urban environments. Is that the name of it? Right? And it's absolutely right. I mean the big, to me, in some ways, one of the difference between an urban and suburban ministry is the complexity of it. And I think persuasion is more complex in urban settings. Now the very subject of persuasion makes people nervous, especially in more orthodox traditional circles. And one of the reasons is because when you talk about persuasion, you seem to be focusing on the listeners, the audience. You're trying to find out something about them to know what makes them tick, what their desires are, what their fears are, so that you can sell them something. And so the very notion of persuasion sounds like marketing or spin or salesmanship. And many people will quote, first Corinthians 2, in the very beginning where Paul speaks about how he preaches. And they will say, look, Paul doesn't do persuasion, he doesn't, he says he doesn't do it, he doesn't do marketing, he doesn't do audience analysis, he doesn't do cultural analysis, he just explains the text, he just preaches the word. So for example, let's read it. Case page 29. First Corinthians 2. When I came to you brothers, I did not come with eloquence or superior wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. I came to you in weakness and fear and with much trembling. My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words but with a demonstration of the spirit's power so that your faith might not rest on men's wisdom but on God's power. Now what does that look like? I mean, I understand why people say, well, what he's saying is, we don't use wise and persuasive words. That means we don't focus on needs. We don't analyze culture. We don't analyze the audience. We just speak the truth. We just preach the truth. I just tell people what's in the text. And that's what Paul's saying. That's all there is to it. He's not trying to persuade anybody. He's just proclaiming. He's not finding out rhetorical strategies or apologetic strategies. He's just proclaiming the word. That's what it looks like. Because it says we just proclaim Jesus Christ and him crucified and we don't use wise and persuasive words. The only problem with that theory is that in second Corinthians 5, verse 11, Paul using the very, very, very same Greek word, by the way, he just says the word persuasion. In second Corinthians 5, 11, he says since then we know what it is to fear the Lord. We persuade men. What is plain to God, I hope, is also plain to your conscience. And that's the same word, same Greek word. What he says in first Corinthians 2, he never does. He says in second Corinthians 5, he tries very hard to do. See, that's the problem with the Bible. Fill with contradictions. It's very clear a doctrine of inerrancy is a crock, right? Now just take that out of context, put on your blog. So is that what Mark was talking about? It's very clear that what Paul's talking about in first Corinthians 2 is a kind of persuasion. There's a kind of persuasion he's saying we shouldn't do. Not that we don't try to persuade. And persuasion is a word that means rhetorical strategies, apologetic strategies, crafting arguments that really hit a person where they are. So what is he talking about? Have you ever seen the most massive commentary I've ever written, I think, for the size of the book, is Anthony Thistilton's commentary in first Corinthians. And when you read what he says about first Corinthians 2, it is quite fascinating. There's been a great deal of scholarship done on first Corinthians 2. And actually, he does a marvelous job of distilling it together. And here's what he suggests. And I think he's right. He marshals the evidence. The word eloquence and the word superior wisdom have a couple of very interesting meanings. The one word eloquence refers largely to playing to the crowd, that is playing on a crowd or the audience's fears or playing to their prejudices. It means doing things that get applause. It means not challenging the people's prejudices, but actually manipulating them, playing on them, doing things that get applause so that you can get money and support and popularity. So in a certain sense, you're making the audience king. You're not challenging them at all. You're using their prejudices and they're using their fears against them. Saying things that you know is going to get them riled up. Saying things you know is going to get them angry. Saying things that you know is going to confirm they're in their prejudices or confirm them in their fears and get them behind you. That's actually what eloquence means. The second word superior wisdom means almost the opposite. Superior wisdom is the rhetorical strategy of overwhelming people with the force of your personality, with your disdain, with your cutting remarks, and in some cases with a kind of parent of arguments. Instead of trying to bring a person along and actually challenge them and persuade them, you are essentially brow beating them. And the way you get people on your side with superior wisdom is the rhetorical strategy of essentially saying you're an absolute fool and everybody in this room knows you're a fool if you don't believe what I'm saying. In this case, you might say the speaker is king. The speaker is making no effort to get into the shoes of the other person. Cutting remarks, distainful remarks, maybe very, very condescending remarks are in some cases essentially yelling and just coming after people and coming after them. Not saying why understand how you feel, oh no, nothing like that, but rather overwhelming them. In the one case, the audience is king, there's no challenging. In the other case, the speaker is king, there's really no adaptation, there's no coming into standing in their shoes. In both cases, you're actually manipulating them. You're either in the first case working directly on the emotions and trying to use their emotions to get them on your side. In the other case, you're working directly on their will. You're basically just trying to not convince them, frankly, you're just trying to bulldoze them. And in neither case, are you actually going to the heart through the mind. The doctor, Dr. Boy Jones has a sermon in the spiritual depression book, which was a series of sermons. He's got one on, I forget, one text in Romans that basically says, we obeyed from the heart, the form of teaching that was committed to us. I think the name of the sermon is mine, heart, will. What he talks about is, going directly to the emotions or going directly to the will is not right. You convince the mind in such a way that it touches the heart and that's what really changes people from the inside. Rather than brow beating them, pushing them, making them feel guilty and very, very bad, or like fools, or telling stories that kind of play on their emotions and get them emotionally moved. But in neither case, the doctor would call or would Jonathan Edwards, so you've actually changed the person's mind and their heart. Now, one of the things that's so interesting about this, the eloquence versus superior wisdom, the over adaptation you might say, or you're not challenging the people, and the under adaptation where you're basically just trying to bulldoze them. An awful lot of evangelical preaching, I'm afraid, at least resembles some of that. I would say that the people who are afraid of marketing, and who are afraid of spin, and who feel like it's extremely important we don't try to persuade people, but we just tell the truth. In many cases, those folks are a lot like what Paul, I think, is talking about here as superior wisdom. They are so incredibly earnest, they're so overwhelming with their force of personality, that people aren't really getting convinced, I don't think. You're either overwhelmed or else you never come back. On the other hand, there are plenty of people in the secret sensitive movement, I would say, or maybe it's unfair to call it that, because secret sensitive, that's good, I'm secret sensitive. Certainly, there's a lot of preachers that basically are playing down the negatives, playing down the more difficult parts of the scripture, telling lots and lots and lots of stories, trying to engage people, but not basically expounding the truth. So, here you have the eloquence, you might say, under-adapting to the audience, I mean, over-adapting to the audience, and here you have the superior wisdom in which you're just ranting at the audience, and Paul says, neither. And I would like to just lay out what I think would be a model of persuasion that is neither, but is actually trying to change the mind through the heart, and therefore does use arguments, and does use audience analysis, and does use cultural analysis, why? Because you're actually trying to understand people so that what you say to them actually will address their concerns and take away their objections to the best of your ability, so that those barriers are gone, and they can start to see the attractiveness. Of what the gospel is, that's what I call persuasion, and I think that's what Paul is talking about here. And he does persuade people, he says so, second Corinthians 5. Now, having said that, all of pages, I'm not going to do what I did before, all of pages basically 30 and 31 are trying to lay out, and I'm not going to talk about that, I'm going to go right to page 32, basically. All of this is trying to lay out an approach to persuasion that is message centered, but receptor oriented. And if that sounds a little strange, receptor oriented means simply, how do I put this? Well, I can show you here, take a look at the bottom page 29, where it says listeners, receptors, see this, under number two. A listener or a receiver, a receptor, automatically interprets communication from the perspective of his or her own context, so it's an extremely tiring and difficult process for a receptor to comprehend communication, which is not provided within his or her frame of reference. If you can imagine picking up a technical computer journal, what we have nowadays, by the way, is we have an enormous best selling line of books called X and X, this or that for dummies, right, or for idiots, right, idiots guide, dummies guide, for everything. You know what those books are all about? These are experts that come into our frame of reference. These are experts that come in and use language only, we can understand and very, very carefully come in, understand our ignorance, understand our problems, whereas in most cases, if you just pick up a book on post-structuralism, you would pick up a book on written by some software engineer. They are immediately saying, you come into our reference, they use all kinds of terms, you don't understand, and it's very, very difficult. What I put down here is, if you are a person reading a technical computer journal, and you have no background at all in the field, it's horribly tiring and difficult. It takes you forever to read it. The technical journal makes no effort to begin with a big interest frame of reference. Soon you, the receptor, tune out and become numb. By a frame of reference, I'm talking about your culture, beliefs, language, vocabulary, life situation, perceived needs and so on. Now, there are two basic approaches to communication, send or orient and receptor-oriented. When the communicator designates his frame of reference as the one in which communication takes place, the receptor must make most or all the adjustments. The receptor has to look up every question, has to ask people, what does that mean? You have to ask questions, listen, deal with many strange and uncomfortable concepts and so on. Whereas if the communicator comes into the receptor's framework, the communicator has to, is now the one you might say in the vulnerable position. The communicator has to ask a lot of questions. Did you understand that? Did you understand that? How does this work? It's far harder for a computer expert to write a book for dummies than it is for other computer experts. Far easier just to write. Everybody you're writing to knows the abbreviations, knows the shorthand, knows everything's going on. Now, from what I can tell looking at the Bible, God is a receptor-oriented communicator. You can start with the incarnation. He became one of us. The incarnation is deity for dummies. Ever thought about that? I want to know what holiness really looks like. I want to know what love really looks like. What is divine love? What is divine holiness? What is it? Well, there's all these abstract concepts. I'll come myself. On the other hand, Jesus Christ is God incarnate, but He was without sin. So there's no other way. He's not at all like us. In that sense, he didn't over-adapt to a city. He didn't become a sinful human being. He just became a human being. That's the sweet spot. The sweet spot is you don't adapt your communication, and yet you do not change or compromise the gospel. There it is. You say, well, how do you hit that? Well, when you hit that, you have a revival. Because when you over-adapt your communication to the audience, you might say to the listener, you actually don't change their lives, do you? Because you're not actually calling them to repentance. You know, they might like the sermon, but you're not really changing them. On the other hand, if you under-adapt, they don't get it. So if you under-adapt, they either, they don't come back, or they're either offended or they're confused. So what you're trying to do is be receptor-oriented and yet message-centered. That means to say, you're trying as much as you possibly can to get inside the believer's framework to get inside and yet challenge it. It's receptor-oriented, but message-centered. It challenges, it enters and yet challenges. If you just challenge and you don't enter, nobody's going to listen to you. If you only enter and don't challenge, nobody's going to be changed. Now, how do you do both? I don't know, but I got ten minutes left. So I'll tell you what, turn to page 32. You know, you're paying for this, right? I want my ten minutes where I thought you, okay, so we're good. I don't know what they charge you, actually, but you're paying it. Here's what I like you to think about. Honestly, one, two, three. Write this down. This is not what I'm about. The four things I'm about to tell you do not exactly fit the headings. However, reading what I gave you will flesh out what I'm saying to you in these ten minutes. There's four things you want to do. There's listening, entering the framework, challenging the framework, and completing the framework. Listening, entering the framework, challenging the framework, completing the framework. This is, by the way, not four points in a sermon. These aren't three stages you go through in a communication. This is just a basic underlying structure for how you communicate with people. First of all, listening. Now, this is something, you can find most of this at the top page 32, but let me just say this. You cannot be receptor-oriented as a preacher or as a communicator unless you've done an enormous amount of listening. That's my whole point was that if you are, you might say, if you're the kind of communicator that just simply doesn't make adaptations, you say things in ways that are very, very offensive, difficult, or confusing, unnecessarily offensive. Get to that in a minute. You say things unnecessarily offensive because you make no effort to understand the receptor and understand what the person believes and what they don't believe so that you can actually, you don't do unnecessary offense. You go after the things that are necessarily difficult, and you don't offend in places that are unnecessary. If you are receptor-oriented, you've got to do all kinds of listening. You have to get to know your people extremely well. I put down here at least four ways of listening. The one is, now here's for preachers. I don't think you're going to be very persuasive unless you recognize what I put down here, unless you process the small but significant amount of feedback the audience gives you while you're talking to them. You're crazy if you don't notice whether people are with you or not, whether they're getting bored, whether their eyes are glazing over or not, whether you've got them by the jugular or not, whether they're kind of, as Martin Luther would like to say, staring at you the way a cow stares at a new gate or not. Not only that, when I look out there and see people, I don't preach the same way when I see older heads versus younger heads. I adapt to some degree to the way people are dressed, the racial makeup. Why? Because I know something about it because anyway, so one is you have to process what you actually see. Secondly, beforehand you have to know your audience incredibly well, which means to say you have to live as much as you possibly can in the worlds of the people you're trying to communicate to. You have to listen to what they listen, you have to watch what they watch, you have to read what they're reading. You in some ways have to live where they're living, so you know the headaches they have and the fears that they have. I mean, that's incredibly important. I mean, you want to say goes without saying. Number three, you really do have to, and this gets harder as time goes on, if you are a communicator, especially as the church gets bigger, some of you have, are from bigger churches. The danger is you're not listening regularly to new people and non-Christians to find out how they're responding to the way in which you're preaching. Now, if you're doing personal evangelism, it's perfect because you know right away how they respond. But as a preacher, you've got to get that kind of response. I never forget to me one of the most important things that ever happened to me in my life and it was an accident. I didn't plan it. I wasn't wise on the planet. When I first got here and I began preaching, I had no staff. I had no budget. I was just getting my monthly check from Atlanta. I had no leaders practically. I mean, I was very, very loose. I really didn't have an office. It was heaven. And what it meant was, there was nothing to do, but with people after the services would say I want to talk to you, and I would talk to 25, 30, sometimes more people every week. You know, individual meeting him in diners and meeting him in restaurants. And I got an enormous amount of feedback. I was like bombarded with what I did right, what I did wrong, what confused people, what helped people. It was astounding. I'll never get that again. I don't have the time. I don't know if anybody's got the time, except for a brief period of time. But I was just bombarded with what illustrations worked, what themes worked. It was astounding. And when you're actually preaching, the other thing about this is very important is you have to be able to anticipate internal dialogues people are having. See, if you've listened to them in all these other ways, then as people, as you're speaking to people, you have to anticipate the kind of doubts, fears, questions they have. There's internal dialogues going on, and you just say, now I know some of you are thinking this. But when you say that, and anybody's out there is actually thinking that at the time, you've got the rest of that sermon, so make good use of it. Now, when I say, that's all preliminary. Listen, now, enter the framework, challenge the framework, complete the framework. What are we going to do by enter the framework? Two ways. Entering the framework means you've got to get inside people so that they feel like you understand them. You've got to get inside. How do you do that? Basically, two ways. Everybody has got a set of beliefs. Believe one, two, and three are beliefs people really, really believe strongly. Beliefs four, five, and six are beliefs that people kind of believe, but not real strongly. And believe seven, eight, nine are beliefs that people are totally against. From zero to ten, you've got some things that people really believe strongly, some people that they, some things that people believe, but not very strongly, and some things that they're against and they don't believe at all. You better know what those things are, because here's why. Go to those things that they believe very strongly. In some cases, things they believe somewhat, and find if there's any overlap between those things and what you know the Bible features. Find any overlap at all by the common grace of God. And as far as I can tell, you ought to expect that by God's common grace in every culture, in every group, there'll be some things that people would passionately believe about that Bible also confirms. Find out what those things are, and mention them, talk about them, lift them up, say so. And here's all the ways in which you can, so that's what you have to do. You have to say, well, some of you, for example, you're talking to kids, and one thing that kids think is awful about the church is the prudish view that the church has about sex. Well, just take them to song a Solomon, or some other places in the wisdom literature, and show that the Bible also does not have a prudish view of sex. See sex is a great gift of God. Well, what you're doing is you're coming alongside, you're entering your framework. Don't try that with Hindus or Muslims, because their whole problem is that Christians are just way too loose and permissive about that stuff. So don't go there with them. That's not one of their beliefs, one, two, and three. So you go there with the kids. And while you're affirming certain things they believe, make sure that you use emotion in a way that fits their context. Some people need an expression of emotion that's greater, and other contexts that's considered a rant, and other contexts that's considered just forceful preaching. You have to be careful the way which you use cultural references. You need to show, because you've listened to that, you've read that, you've watched that, that you know about that, you bring it to bear on what people just show that you, so you're entering the framework. Got it? Very, very important. And, actually, let me say that, no, I don't have to say more than that, because at times running out and you can ask me a question about it later if you want. But then at a certain point, you have to challenge the framework. Now, how do you challenge the framework? Here's my suggestion. Find things that they believe, four, five, and six. And show them what they believe is inconsistent with something else they believe strongly. So, for example, if you've been reading my book Reason For God, you kind of know about this. When I just went around and did a lot of ministry on college campuses, one of the things I discovered is, in some ways, there is, in some ways, secular students are not relativistic. It's the most moralistic generation I can remember since mine. It's a people who feel very strongly about injustice, and it's very wrong that we're letting these things happen in these parts of the world. It's very wrong that people start. And genocide is terrible, and slavery is awful, and oppression is terrible. However, they also believe, so that's their belief one, two, and three. They also believe that we're here by accident. There probably isn't any God, and we're all here by evolution. Well, if you start to say, well, if the strong eat the weak, and that's how you got here, then what's wrong with strong nation's eating weak nations? I mean, if it's okay for strong animals, that's how you got here, strong animals eat the weak. What's the problem? If you go after people and show that this belief here, which they don't believe quite as strongly, generally, is actually contradicts this belief down here. It's called presuppositional apologetics, by the way. But what you're actually doing is you take something that the Bible says that the challenges their framework. But you also show, look, the Bible says this is wrong, the cross proves that this is wrong, and it also doesn't fit in with something you believe. That's called presuppositional apologetics. Now what you're doing is you're saying, well, why don't you just tell people what the Bible says that the Bible says this and therefore they're wrong? Well, don't forget, by common grace, we found something that they also believe that happens to be also true in the Bible. Use that. Use something that they believed anyway before they even knew about what the Bible said. And then also show the biblical citation for the thing they believe, that double works it, and then go after them. Some of you may have heard the one of the things I used to say, for example, people say, I believe in a God, and I believe in a God of love, and I believe I'd love to have a personal relation with God. But I think this idea of an air in infallible Bible, moral absolutes, that's just awful. That's confining. So what do I do when I'm trying to convince people? I use the Stepford God thing. It's in the reason for God. I say, look, if you have a situation like in the Stepford wives, where a husband has sort of put a microchip in his wife's brain, so all she ever says is yes to, yes to, she can't contradict them. That's not a personal relationship. I said, that's a robotic relationship. It's exploitative. You don't have a personal relationship unless the person you're in a relationship with, it sometimes can contradict you. If you don't have an authoritative Bible, I say, how will your God contradict you? If you just pull out the things in the Bible that you don't like, so why can't believe in a God that says this or that? So I like these parts of the Bible, but I don't like this part of that. How will God ever say something to you you don't like? So I say, you know, you want a personal relationship with God, don't you? And the Bible says you should have a personal relationship with God, but unless you have an authoritative scripture, you couldn't have a personal relationship with God. If you just have a kind of cardboard cut out, one dimensional God of your own creation, what did I just do? I confronted with what the Bible said, but I also confronted them with something that they had already believed that the Bible said, which makes it harder for them to contradict. And they start to see, so what you have to do is you enter and you show them that you're with them, then you challenge, but finally you have to complete. And what I mean by complete, and I have to complete the talk here, I already alluded to this. When Paul said to the Greeks, you've made an idol out of wisdom and yet the cross is the ultimate wisdom. You've made an idol out of power, O Jews, but the cross is the ultimate power. You actually have to do that with everybody. And you enter the framework, you talk about, you talk to the more existentialist types about the importance of authenticity, you talk to the liberal types about the importance of justice, you talk to the guilty people about the importance of forgiveness and mercy. And you always say, look, you're trying to be a good person, you'll never be good, you're trying to be a free person, you'll never be free, you're trying to deal with something, you're trying to create justice in the world, you're never going to do that. On the basis of your own beliefs, but in Christ, there's the justice, in Christ, there's the freedom, in Christ, and you have to complete the framework. You honor the framework, challenge the framework, and complete it in Jesus, which means you've got to understand intercanonical themes. Because you know one of the themes that climaxes in Christ is the idea of the covenant God, whose blessings and curses are upon us, and because we've disobeyed somebody's got to take the curse. Or there's the theme of homecoming and exile that were cast out of Eden, and therefore we're kind of like living in an atmosphere that doesn't really fit us, that's what we're breaking down, then the Christ can bring us home. Or the kingdom kingdom theme that we are built to serve something, and as Bob Dylan says, we've got to serve somebody, and now we're serving idols, and only God can free us. They all find their, you know there's these themes throughout the scripture, and they all find their climax in Christ, and you have to especially with certain people go to texts that make their mouths water to wish Christianity was true. So they're not going to listen to you unless you think you can make them wish it was true. How do you make them wish it was true by entering the framework, then challenging the framework, and then completing the framework with Christ, which is exactly what I think Paul did with the Jews with the Greeks, and what I'm saying you should do too. So I'm sure that I have opened maybe a can of worms, and I didn't kill all the worms before they, you know I'm sure I didn't answer all your questions. So now I think let's see what what are we doing here.