 And today we're going to be talking about communication. In order to be an effective disciple maker, there are some key elements of communication that we have to understand. Now this doesn't mean that you have to be the most eloquent speaker or that you have to be ready to preach on Sunday, but it does mean that we are responsible to know some very simple but effective ways of communicating. Everyone once said that the downfall of communication is the illusion that it's actually happened. And in today's lesson, we're going to identify some tools and some traps to avoid in the areas of communication so that our communication skills can grow. Our key verse for today is Proverbs 18-21. It says this, Death and life are in the power of the tongue, and those who love it will eat of its fruit. So what is the importance of communication? Well simply put, communication is the reason why things succeed or they don't succeed. All we have to do is we have to take a look in Genesis 11-9. We see the story of the Tower of Babel. This is of a people in the people of Shinar. They tried to build this tower up to God out of their own pride, and together they build this mighty tower, and God sees it and he removes their pride by scattering their languages. Their languages are scattered and they no longer are able to communicate properly with each other. Therefore the tower never gets finished. While for many of us, our problem isn't a language barrier, but sometimes our communication feels like we're speaking different languages with someone, especially when we're trying to talk about something important, be it a friend or a parent, and especially a spouse that we're trying to communicate with. Lord help us all. Communication involves speaking, listening, and understanding. It's a dialogue, meaning that it goes two ways. And communication is active. In order to be effective in communication, we have to use active communication. Trying to casually talk the way that you do on a regular basis is not going to help when it comes to actually trying to be effective and create solutions and make things happen. We have to be active. So what does active communication look like? Well first, it looks like active speaking. What is active speaking? It's when you don't expect people to read your mind or emotions. You are the one that is responsible to let people know what's going on inside of you. Nobody understands you better than you, and nobody can tell it better than you. Now sometimes we feel like other people know us better, but in reality if we can learn how to grow in our emotional literacy, being able to describe what's going on inside of us and describe the things going around us, communication will dramatically increase. Another thing is active listening. This means paying attention. It's retaining the information that is being spoken to you. Now sometimes, and I know I'm guilty of this and I hate to admit it, but sometimes when we're talking with somebody, we can be looking dead center in the eye and yet we're thinking about something completely different. I know sometimes, and I know I'm not the only one guilty of it, we are at church, someone's talking to us and they're pouring their heart out to us and we're thinking about lunch and what we're going to do afterwards. This is not an example of active listening. In order to be an active listener, it means that you are present. Now I know many of us are busy and as you grow as a leader, you're going to become more and more busy, but I love what Pastor Vlad says. He began to do this and I love it. He says, when someone says, I know you're busy, he says, I'm not busy, I'm present. And that is how we need to be. We need to be present in all situations if we want to communicate effectively. Active communication also requires active understanding. Now you know how when you're talking to somebody, sometimes when you're especially having a really important conversation, you're not necessarily thinking about what they're saying or understanding what they're saying. You're really listening so that you can come up with a rebuttal to what they're saying. That's not an example of active understanding. Active understanding is seeking to identify not only what the person is saying, but what they're trying to express. Effective communication and in order to be an effective communicator, we have to get to the heart of the matter, meaning that we're not looking to see who's right or who's wrong. We're trying to figure out, okay, what is this person trying to portray to me? I know that they're saying one thing, but what's the deeper meaning behind it? If you can learn how to do that, you will become an amazing communicator. The importance of communication also is that it's an exchange of feelings and information. I emphasize the word and because sometimes we are communicators of only information. When we're only communicators of information, we're oftentimes seen as cold and harsh and that we don't really understand people. Then on the contrary, some of us are so emotion and feelings led that when we communicate, all we communicate is feelings and we leave out facts. Oftentimes people see us as invalid or not really someone that they can rely on or trust in communication. But it's important to understand that if we're going to be an effective communicator, that it deals with both, that we have to be able to be sensitive to feelings and understand that information needs to be getting across. So communication is an active thing, but sometimes in our active communication, we have bad habits and those bad habits can be the thing that kill communication. And right now we're going to identify a couple of communication killers. Now there's a ton of communication killers out there. I can't possibly describe all of them, but I'm going to describe just a couple of the ones that are the most devastating. And the first one I want to bring up is the fear of rejection. It often causes hostility in the communicator because they want to make sure that they hurt before they get hurt or the fear of rejection can do the exact opposite. It causes a person to avoid communication altogether and neither of those things is good. The result of rejection is that a communicator sees everything through the victim mentality. And if a person sees something through a victim mentality, it will be really hard for them to see the error of their own ways even when someone is saying something legitimate to them. And so we need to be making sure that when we are communicating that we have let go of the fear of rejection, we remove ourselves from that because we've been delivered from rejection and we need to not operate out of the flesh, but we need to operate out of the spirit. And that requires that we avoid this downfall altogether. Another communication killer is the lack of honesty. It causes misdirection and it just simply delays the inevitable. And the inevitable is that the truth will always be exposed. The Bible says that an offended brother is harder to win than conquering a city. And this is why the lack of honesty can be honestly one of the most damaging because instantly trust is broken. And when trust is broken, it's so hard to regain it with people. And people might not want to listen or communicate with you or continue communicating with you if they began to recognize, hey, this person's not always honest in the things that they say. They might, if they're a leader, they might just find someone else who they know will communicate honestly. Or if they're a subordinate or someone that you're leading, they might actually try to find someone else because they don't feel safe with you. So if we, even the widest of lies, the smallest of lies, those things can be detrimental to real, effective communication. Another communication killer is explosive response. This instantly puts the receiver of our message in defense mode. And if you're in defense mode, there's a pretty good chance that someone is not going to be able to hear what you're saying. If you're coming at them like 100 miles an hour ready to bite their face off, there's a good chance they're not focusing on, let me see what they're saying. They're thinking, okay, that's right. I'm going to pull out my guns too because I got them. And then now it's no longer communication. It's just a quarrel. The last one is tears and silence. Tears, sometimes what they do is they make the person who you're communicating with feel bad because you're crying. And if they feel bad because you're crying, they often feel like, well, maybe my thing doesn't mean anything, even if what they're saying to you is true. And so to be an effective communicator, we have to be sure. Now, not all situations are we going to be able to avoid tears. But if your go-to method is tears, that is not something that will help you. In fact, it's damaging you more and more. Silence is also not a good help. Silence oftentimes feels like one of the most biggest forms of manipulation and some people use it as manipulation. And as long as you're silent, real issues, big issues can't be dealt with because big issues and real issues have to be spoken through. They have to be worked through. They have to be, they have to have a dialogue where someone says this is what's going on and another person being able to express that they understand. But if that's not happening, if there's just the wall, the cold shoulder, then oftentimes this kind of communication leads to, I would say probably one of the most destructive ways that relationship falls apart. Here are some phrases to avoid when communicating and hopefully they're obvious when I say them. Avoid saying, when I was your age, I used to and yada, yada, yada. Starting with that phrase oftentimes causes the younger person to help, here he goes again. When he was a teenager, he used to walk seven miles just to get to school. And oftentimes that is a cliche that causes people to check out. Another thing that we wanna avoid saying is you just don't understand. If someone truly doesn't understand, then help them to understand. You are responsible for effective communication, for effective understanding. You hold the keys for someone to know what you're thinking. And then another phrase to avoid is, why can't you be more like and it was God's will? Obviously when we say why can't you be more like, the moment you start comparing, immediately feelings of hurt happen in the other individual. And then at that point, there's no way to really move on beyond that point. And communication has to be tried at a later time. Sometimes what happens when we're dealing with really tough situations such as the case of a death or other accidents, we might say something like, well, it was God's will. And I would like to encourage you to be very careful when you say that. One of the things that we talked about when it comes to communication is more than just having information, it's an exchange of feelings. If we're gonna be an effective communicator, we have to be able to recognize that and not become so harsh and deal with people gently. There are levels of communication. That most basic level we can consider and we can call it hallway communication. This is the kind of thing that if you're walking in the lobby at church that's like, hey, how are you doing? You know, when you say how are you doing, you don't actually mean how are you doing. You're just saying it as a pleasantry. I know the first time that I came to hungry Jen and I said, how are you doing? And somebody said to me, do you actually care? And I was like, oh, geez, okay. This was back when, I know for a lot of Russian cultures, they don't understand how Americans say how are you doing if they don't actually mean it. But this is the most basic form. And then we have reporter communication. Reporter communication is being able to report facts about another. This is the kind of thing where you've been able to talk with somebody, you know facts about them, but you don't actually know somebody. The next level is the intellectual communication. That's, do you know what I think? When you can say to someone that you know someone well enough that you probably know what they're thinking, not in a prideful way, but you know them well enough to be able to say, I know that in this situation, so and so I would do this. Then this shows a certain level of deep communication that you have. Meaning that you have been able to connect deep enough that you can help even make decisions because you know, hey, I know that this person would actually appreciate it if you did that. It shows a level of closeness. The next level, which is the fourth level, is emotional communication. This is, let me tell you how I feel. This is when you are close enough friends to where a person feels comfortable enough to really let you know how they feel. This is where real bonds, real friendships are made. This is where we're able to actually start making some real strides in communication. And then there's the fifth level, and this is genuine communication. It's a composition of all the other ones I just mentioned, plus it involves these few things. It involves understanding, not determining who's right. So when you're communicating with someone and a genuine communicator is not looking for who's right and who's wrong, it's a person who's looking for understanding. Someone who's able to be in a conversation or be in an important topic or issue and be able to search for the deeper meaning. That's true communication. It also seeks first to understand and then be understood, meaning that it is listening twice as much as it is speaking. God gave us two ears and only one mouth for a purpose. It's important that we learn how to listen well. It's important that if we wanna have genuine communication that we are taking the time to listen and understand people. That will help you to become an effective leader. It'll help people to understand you better and it'll help you be able to reach more people for Christ. Lastly, some tips on building good communication. First and foremost, you need to be clear and understandable. There is something to be said about someone who is able to just share how they feel straightforward. It makes life so much easier. Second point is to be short and to the point. When we put all of our thoughts, and sometimes I know a lot of us, including myself, I like to put a lot of words to what I say and that can sometimes be my downfall because when we put a lot of words, when we put a thousand words to what could be conveyed in two, it's like a needle in a haystack and it's almost impossible to find the point. Be specific. I like this saying it says over communicate and under assume. Oftentimes, this is the biggest issue that happens in communication is people just not being specific enough. People not laying out exactly what is need to be done and if we are able to be as specific as possible, we can avoid mistakes over communicate under assume. Fourthly, be anointed. Now, there is something to be said about someone who is very smooth with their words, who can talk their way out of any situation, but even those people who are able to do that, if they're not anointed in what they say, they can say everything right, do everything right and yet hurt people because they're not walking in anointing and you may not be someone who feels like that. If you allow the Lord to use you in communication, if you ask Him to use you in communication, He will anoint you to communicate effectively. Fifth, speak and don't yell. Yelling, like we said about the emotional and explosive response, it's a surefire way to make sure people don't hear you. Speak at the right time. There's a time in season for everything and sometimes we come with these really, really great ideas to our pastors or to our boss or to our family members and we really wanna just communicate something, but we speak it out of season. And when we speak it out of season, we don't speak it at the right time. When we don't speak it simply and now without getting all spiritual, simply put, if someone's busy, that's not the right time. If you have something that's really important to get across, try to find a time when this person is not like leaving, you know. I have a lot of students in the internship program that literally as I'm walking out the door, like, oh, hey, wait, wait, wait, wait. And it's like, ugh. While I stop and I listen, oftentimes there was definitely a better time for them to be able to communicate. And so we need to look for the right time to speak. The other thing is that we need to think before speaking. I mean, I think this goes without even having to explain, but oftentimes when we just let our mouth run, things come out of our mouth that we wish we never had said is the biggest reason for regret is thinking without speaking. Another point is to unleash life through our words. It's so easy. Anybody can say something negative. The Bible talks about speaking life into the dry bones. That's exactly what we need to do as well. When we're communicating with people, especially no matter how tense the subject is, look for the opportunity to speak life into that situation. Use eye contact during communication. I mean, when we're communicating with people and we're looking off in the distance, it just shows to the other person that we don't really care. I think it was said that 90% of communication is body language. And so if on a very basic level you can't even look at the person when you're talking, it shows that you're uninterested. It shows that you really don't care what's happening between the two of you in that moment. So make sure you use eye contact. And do not interrupt the person when they speak. It's so hard to be able to communicate effectively, especially when we're talking about active communication. It's so hard to be able to do so when someone's constantly speaking over you. You almost can't even get a point across. It's hard to talk to people who won't let you get a word in edgewise. Don't be that person. And then don't waste people's time when you're communicating. If, and especially when it comes to when you're talking about business stuff, take the time, make sure you know what you wanna communicate about. Make sure you know what you wanna talk about. Read the moment. If the moment's not a time for relaxing and you guys are hanging out at the house or whatever, but if you're in a more formal environment, make sure you know what you wanna say when you communicate. It will help you to be more effective. And lastly, talk about the interest of the other person, not your own. People like to talk about themselves. And the more you can get someone to talk about themselves, the better it will be. In fact, it will help you to do the exact thing of what active communication requires. That means active listening and active understanding. The more you can get a person to talk about themselves, the more you'll be able to not only retain the information, but understand where they're coming from. And if you can understand where you're coming from, you'll be able to help someone who may be coming for the first time in church just because you took the time to talk to them and be there and to be an ear for them, you know, to be a shoulder for them to cry on, listening to what they had to say rather than something that you felt so important to say. People don't necessarily wanna know what you know, they just wanna know that you're there. They wanna know that you're with them. They wanna know that you're real. And so I wanna encourage all of us as we are growing as leaders to take communication seriously. Now, we don't have to be the most perfect speaker. We don't have to be the person who has all the right words to say, but I guarantee you as you learn to actively speak, actively listen, and actively understand, God will use you in extraordinary ways.