It IS plain talk...

     Someone close to me is unfortunately going through an incredibly difficult time in their marriage, one which may end in divorce.  As is the all-too-familiar pattern, both are professing believers, but one has decided that when it comes to happiness, the authority of Scripture is to take a back seat.  As my friend has tried to speak in love to his wife, whose infidelity is ongoing, and has tried to remind her both of his love for her and what the Bible says with regards to marriage and sin, her reaction is one that (while not surprising) is thought provoking to me.  In prefacing a conversation she was about to have with him, she told him she did not want to hear any religious speech from him, but wanted just "plain talk".
     That phrase/idea struck me for a number of reasons.  It implies there is a dichotomy in the life of the believer, that there is a special vocabulary and set of principles for faith, and another altogether for matters of "real" life.  While coming from someone who has chosen to live their life deliberately that way such a statement is probably more revelatory than anything else, I find in it a challenge also.  For the believer our "religious speech" should be our "plain talk".  


1 Peter 4:11 - "If anyone speaks, let him speak as the oracles of God..."


     There ought to be in the life of the redeemed no difference in our speech from one day to the next, no contradiction in our lifestyle.  We ought not have a vocabulary we reserve for the occasion of theological debates that is not common to the conversations of our lives.  To somehow separate the two, to foster the mentality that the Bible is well and good for reading and reflecting on, but needs to be set aside in favor of common sense when real troubles arise is not faith unto salvation, it is evidence of a mind blinded by the god of this age. 
     For the believer, the language of our faith is the language of our life.  I am not advocating be uncommunicative with a lost world, or living in such a way as to be deliberately judgmental of others.  I am saying that if Christ truly is transforming us by the renewing of our minds, let this manifest itself in the way we talk, the way we live.  Let faithfulness be fruit of the Spirit in our lives by which we are marked out as believers.  May it be that people know better than to ask us to set aside the truth of the Gospel in having a conversation about the stuff of life.  We cannot (and should not) set aside that on which we stake the hope of our eternal souls.