WES HUMBLE

Getting To Know You! Have you ever been in one of those conversations where you just weren’t connecting? You’re doing everything you can to make sense and no matter how hard you try, you’re just not getting through to that person. You may be talking to a teenager and they think you’re from another planet. You may be talking to your husband or wife or an employee, but for one reason or another it just isn’t connecting.

One of the deepest needs you have in life is the need to be understood. We all desperately need to feel that somebody understands us, that somebody can feel what we’re feeling, think what they’re thinking. We all need people who connect with us. If you don’t ever have anybody in your life that you feel connected to, it has all kinds of negative effects.

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago the California Department of Health Mental Study. It’s so profound I want to mention it again. They discovered that if you’re disconnected to other people, there’s no one in your life that you really feel understands you, you are two to three times more likely to die an early death, you are four times more likely to suffer from emotional burnout, you are five times more likely to suffer clinical depression and you are ten times more likely to be hospitalized for an emotional or mental disorder. Human connections are good medicine. We need them. They’re not just something that are nice to have in your life. You need them – physically, emotionally, spiritually. You need people who understand you, who relate to you and who can connect to you.

Two weeks ago we talked in this series about the importance of being spiritually connected to a church family. I was pleased that about 100 of you expressed an interest in being a part of a small group. It’s going to be a great thing. But even if you are connected to a church family, if you don’t know how to connect to people one on one, you can still feel detached, disconnected.

Today, I want to talk with you about how to really connect with another person. How to connect with them on the deepest level. This is one of life’s most important skills. Learning how to really connect with people on a heart to heart, soul to soul, fellowship level.

Unfortunately nobody ever teaches us how to do this. It certainly isn’t taught in school how to relate interpersonally. You learn science and geography, history and math and a language in school. But nobody teaches you how to connect with people. If you don’t know how to connect with people, you’re not going very far in life. You may be brilliant in some subject but if you don’t know how to connect with people, you’re just not going to go very far in life. It is the most basic skill you need, how to deal with and how to relate with other people.

These six principles that we’re going to share today, I'm very excited about. Every one of you in this room needs this material. It doesn’t matter what age or stage of life you are in. If you are a parent and you want to know how to better connect with your children, you can use these principles. If you are engaged or married and you want to know how to better relate to that other person, you can use these principles. If you are a teacher or an employer or employee, no matter who you are, if you need to get close to anybody in life, you need these principles. In fact, these would be good rules for a small group.

To get the most out of today’s message, at the start I want you to think of somebody that you would like to be closer to. Think of somebody you would really like to connect on a deeper level with than you’re connecting with them right now. In order to make this specific, write down their initials somewhere. If you can’t think of somebody, you really need this message! Who would you like to get closer to? Who would you like to have a deeper connection with? For some of you it needs to be somebody you need to reconnect with. A child, a parent, a former friend. It’s possible to get disconnected once you have been connected. Marriages do this. Most marriages start off close and connected but somehow over time they just get disconnected. A lot of marriages start off as an ideal, quickly move to an ordeal, and eventually become no deal!

It’s very easy to get disconnected and it’s hard to get reconnected. What do you do? The first key to connecting is this:

1. BE COURAGEOUS AND TAKE THE INITIATIVE.

You’ve got to be willing to take the first step. You don’t wait on somebody else to connect with you. You must take the initiative to connect with them. This often takes courage. Why? Because it’s fear that disconnects human beings. When we’re full of fear and anxiety we don’t get close to each other. In fact, we back off from each other. We’re afraid of being rejected, manipulated, vulnerable, hurt, used. All of these fears cause us to be disconnected in life.

This fear is as old as mankind. When Adam and Eve sinned and God came looking for Adam, Adam said, “I was afraid and I hid.” People have been doing that ever since. We’re afraid so we hide. We hide our true selves. We don’t let people know what we’re really like. We don’t let them see the inside of us. Why? Because if we let people know what we’re really like and they don’t like it, we’re up a creek without a paddle. Tough luck. Why am I afraid to tell you who I am? Because if I tell you who I am and you don’t like me, I'm in for it. I have no alternative. So we wear masks and we pretend.

Fear does three terrible things to relationships.

1. It makes us defensive. We’re afraid to reveal ourselves. We defend ourselves. When people point out weaknesses we retaliate and defend ourselves.

2. Our fears keep us distant. We don’t let people get close to us. We want to withdraw, pull back. We want to hide our emotions. We don’t want to be open and honest. We become defensive and distant.

3. Our fears make us demanding. Whenever we’re insecure, the more insecure we are the more we try to control things. So we try to have the last word in a relationship. We try to dominate, control. It’s always a symptom of fear and insecurity.

Where do you get the confidence, the courage, of taking the first step in connecting with someone, to go into a deeper level of intimacy? Where do you get that kind of courage?

You get it from God’s Spirit in your life. 2 Timothy 1:7 “For the Holy Spirit, God’s gift, does not want you to be afraid of people but to be wise and strong [courageous] and to love them and enjoy being with them.” How do you know when you’re filled with God’s Spirit? You’re more courageous in your relationships. You love people. You enjoy being with them. You’re not afraid of them because God’s Spirit is in your life. The Bible says “God is love,” and “Love casts out all fear.” The more of God you have in your life the less of fear you’re going to have in your life. God is love and love casts out fear.

So the starting point in connecting with anybody is to pause and pray and say, “God, give me the courage to take the first step.” Some of you need to do that this week with a person you need to connect to. “Give me the courage to take the first step.”

2. BE CONSIDERATE OF THEIR NEEDS.

In other words, if you want to connect with people, you’ve got to start with their needs not your own. Start with their hurts not your own. Start with what they want not what you want. There’s an old Chinese Proverb that says “Seek to understand before seeking to be understood.” The Bible talks about this in the same way. You need to first be thoughtful of others and don’t worry about people understanding you. You try to understand them. That’s how you make that initial connection.

The Bible says in Philippians 2:4 “Look out for one another’s interests not just your own.” That is such a counter-culture verse. Everything in our culture from the moment you are born, you’re conditioned to think first of yourself. You don’t think about other people naturally. That’s something you have to learn to do. You naturally think about your needs, your desires, your goals, your ambitions, what you want in life. I’ve got to do what’s best for me. I’ve got to think of me first. As a result we have many, many millions of people disconnected because everybody’s thinking of themselves and not being considerate of each other’s needs.

Let’s think about two very basic truths about life.

First, the world does not revolve around you or me. I know that’s shocking, but the world does not revolve around you.

You’re very special in God’s eyes.

You were created for a purpose… but the world does not revolve around you.

If you want to know how much you’d be missed stick your hand in a bucket of water and pull it out and see what kind of hole you’d leave. It fills up pretty quick. Don’t be expecting the whole world to come saying, “How can we meet your needs?”

The second basic truth of life is God has promised that when you focus on meeting the needs of other people, He guarantees He will meet yours. If you want your needs to be met, start focusing on meeting the needs of other people. God says it over and over in the Bible that if I focus on meeting the needs of other people, God assumes responsibility to meet all of my needs. Why? Because He wants me to learn to be unselfish. He wants me to learn to be loving, to be generous like Him.

Colossians 3:13 says this, “You must make allowances for each other’s faults and forgive the person who offends you. Remember God forgave you so you must forgive others.” Part of being considerate of other people’s needs is making allowances for their faults. Part of being considerate of other people’s needs is not expecting them to be perfect. You’re not perfect. You can never attain perfection so why would you demand it of anybody else. Nobody is perfect.

A couple of years ago, a woman wrote to Dear Abby, “I'm 44 years old. I’d like to find a man my age with no bad habits.” Abby wrote back, “So would I.” There are no people with no bad habits, no faults. We have to make allowance for each other’s faults.

Proverbs 17:9 says, “Love forgets mistakes.” When you are trying to make a connection with a person, you’re trying to be considerate of their needs, it’s not that you are blind to their faults. You choose to overlook them. Great friends have good forgetters. They forget the bad stuff intentionally. They don’t rub it in, they rub it out. They have good forgetters. Love forgets mistakes. A friend never says, “I told you so… How could you be that stupid?” Instead, a good friend is considerate of the other person’s needs.

3. BE CONSTRUCTIVE WITH YOUR WORDS.

Use your words to build people up. Ephesians 4:29 “Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen.” Circle “building others up”. God wants us to take these words and use them to build people.

I read this week about a couple whose home was flooded. They had groups of people come in and help us rebuild that home which was a wonderful thing. Something funny happened with the first groups that came in. Before they could build the walls back up, they had to tear the sheeting off the walls. The first people that came in, were given sledgehammers and sent into a room where they had to knock down the walls. He says, “We started hearing this laughter in the room while they were knocking the walls down because if you’ve got a sledgehammer and swing it and knock something down it’s sort of fun! My wife and I would walk back in and they would get all sad again because it’s our house, after all! We walk back out and they start swinging away again! It’s fun to tear things down.

Sometimes with our words it’s like a sledgehammer, no planning, no thinking. We swing away and all of a sudden we look around and all we’ve got is a pile of rubble, relational rubble. When you just swing away with your words and tear people down inevitably your relationships are going to suffer. Words are the single most important tool given to man by God. Without a doubt!

In the book of Genesis, there was a place called Babel where they were trying to build a tower to reach as high as heaven. They were getting pretty prideful about it so God wanted to stop the project. To stop the project, He didn’t take away their hammers or their saws. He took away their words, their ability to communicate because words are such an incredibly important tool that God’s given us.

One of the reasons we’re not constructive with our words is we don’t realize how powerful this tool is, our mouth, the words that God has given to us. We say things without thinking. People remember them. The things people have said to you in a thoughtless way it may have been as far back as grade school or college or when you first started working. You still remember some of those things. That’s how powerful words are. So when it comes to your mouth, think of it as a power tool and be very careful with it.

Have you ever read the manual for a power saw? I know most of us guys wouldn’t read the manual unless it just wouldn’t work and only would we read it after hours of our own attempts to make it work. Let me read you the simple rules from the manual.

1. Know your power tool. 2. Keep guards in place. 3. Be careful around children. 4. Store idle tools when not in use. 5. Don’t over reach 6. Never use in an explosive atmosphere.

It fits how we are to use this mouth which is an incredible tool to build people up.

How can I start using it more carefully? If I’ve got a power tool, how can I use it more carefully so instead of destroying with it, I’m building and constructing relationships with it?

1. Stop excusing. Stop saying, “I didn’t really man to say that.” or “It’s just that blood sugar dip before lunch. That’s all it was.” Stop excusing and realize that what you say is impacting everybody around you.

2. Talk less. If it’s a power tool – you don’t have to use it as much. Talk less. One of the reasons we get in trouble is we just talk too much sometimes. We talk before we think. We need to talk less and…

3. Listen more. If I listen more I can understand people’s needs.

4. Start building. Think first of all, what do they need. How can I use a word of encouragement to build them up? How can I use a word of challenge to make a difference in their life? How can I use my words to build the people that I love the most?

4. BE CANDID ABOUT THE PROBLEMS IN THE RELATIONSHIP.

You have to be open, honest, frank. Proverbs 24:26 “An honest answer is the sign of a true friendship.” Notice that being candid and being connected go together. You don’t have one without the other. Genuine, healthy, deep, meaningful relationships are built on honesty not on flattery. If you’ve got somebody always telling you what you want to hear, they don’t really love you. They’re using you. Flattery is a sign of a manipulator, not a sign of somebody who’s genuinely your friend. An elderly man lay in a hospital with his wife of 55 years sitting at his bedside. "Is that you, Ethel, at my side again?" he whispered."Yes, dear," she answered.

He softly said to her, "Remember years ago when I was in the Veteran's Hospital? You were with me then. You were with me when we lost everything in a fire. And Ethel, when we were poor—you stuck with me then too."The man sighed and said, "I tell you, Ethel, you are bad luck." Our Daily Bread (January 18, 2000)Genuine friendships, genuine relationships are candid. They’ll tell you when you’ve got spinach in your teeth. They’ll tell you when you’re blowing it. They’ll tell you when you’re wasting your life, making a dumb, bad decision. Healthy relationships are built on honesty. All of us have blind spots (some of us have bald spots, too.) The question that really matters is, do you have anybody in your life that loves you enough to point them out? Who cares enough to say, “You need to work on this.” Do you have anybody in your life who loves you enough to hold you accountable and makes you grow. If you don’t, I pity you. You cannot grow unless somebody points out the things that you can’t see in your life that need changing. Honest, loving, candidness is what all of us need to grow. You can’t grow without it. Let me give you three rules for being candid in relationships:

      1. Compliment in public, correct in private. If you’re doing this with your children compliment in public, correct in private. If you’re doing this with a husband or wife, compliment in public, correct in private. If you’re doing this with an employee, a student, a friend compliment in public, correct in private.

      2. Correct when they’re up and not down. Nobody can handle correction when they’re tired, fatigued, depressed, out of energy. Rick Warren says, “My wife has had to listen to my preaching for over 25 years. I depend on Kay to give me good feedback. She has been a great blessing in my life but the thing that I love the most about Kay’s correction or feedback is that she never, ever, tells me something that needs to change immediately after a service. After five services you’re lower than a skunk! Out of energy, your adrenaline is depleted, your blood sugar is low. Really after five services all you want to do is go home, get under the covers and go to sleep for nine or ten hours. So she always waits until I’ve had a little bit of rest, a little delay, my stomach’s full of food, sometimes she’ll wait a full 24-hours and then she’ll give me helpful corrections on improving the skills I'm trying to improve. When I'm feeling good I can handle almost any correction. When I'm feeling tired I can’t handle anything.”

Is that true with you? When you’re tired, fatigued, the slightest word of correction is like a big mountain, overwhelming. Timing is everything in candidness.

      3. Never offer correction until you’ve proven that you’re open to it. You should never correct anybody else until first you’ve proven that you’re open to receiving it from them. Again – you seek to understand before seeking to be understood. You open up your life before you expect them to open up their lives.

All healthy relationships need and allow the opportunity for the expression of frustration and anger. Anger is a good thing in a relationship sometimes. Out of control anger is bad but anger is sometimes the only legitimate response in a relationship where there is love. If there are some things you don’t get angry over it just means one thing – you don’t care, you don’t love. Sometimes anger is the response of love.

The problem is today, many couples are scared to death of anger. They run from it. And as a result they’re always pushing the issues aside. They’re always sweeping them under the carpet. They’re afraid of anger so they just push it aside. They won’t deal with it. You spend all your life going round and round, skirting the issue. And you make little sarcastic remarks about it and hints and little jokes and wise cracks. But you never really candidly deal with the issues. Some of you have been married 10, 15, 20 or more years and you are still dealing with issues today that should have been resolved in the first five years of your marriage. But you’re still dealing with them today because you have refused to be candid. You just skirt the issues and you won’t face the music and deal with it.

I don’t know how to say it any clearer than this: There is no genuine intimacy without going through the tunnel of conflict. I am not kidding. I have probably counseled more people than you’ve talked within your life and I have come to the conclusion that there is no genuine intimacy without going through conflict because it is in conflict that the relationship is spelled out, defined and built. You have to do it.

On one side you have superficial intimacy. You may like a person. You may be acquainted with them. You may be in love, you may be married to a person and still never get beyond superficial intimacy. You won’t ever really deal with the gut issues of the relationship that need to be dealt with – your faults and that person’s faults. You keep it at the superficial intimacy level. You can have ten kids and still just have superficial intimacy.

On the other hand is genuine, deep intimacy. Soul satisfying relationship, heart to heart, being fully understood by another person in a way that you never thought possible on this planet. Being so connected with another person that there is a deep, deep satisfying communion between the two of you.

How do you get from superficial intimacy to genuine, soul satisfying intimacy with another human being? There’s no straight line across. You have to go through the tunnel of conflict. It is the only way.

In the tunnel of conflict, it’s kind of like childbirth. Sometimes the pain may seem unbearable but if you’ll stick with it, you will have a new birth of a new relationship at a level you didn’t even know was possible up to that point. But it takes being candid.

If you really care about the relationship, sometimes there is only one alternative – confront, force the issue. Force the argument. Sometimes that’s the only alternative in a relationship that’s going south. You have to force the issue and you have to confront in love and be willing to put up with the pain.

So let’s get real personal. Some of you are scared to death of what I'm going to say! Who do you need to get honest with? What problem in your relationship are you pretending isn’t a problem? You keep skirting around the issue and not dealing with it and living in pseudo-intimacy. Which of those issues do you need to be candid about? There’s another word for “keeping the peace”. It’s called “co-dependency”. And that is not a good thing. That is not what God created you for. Sometimes you must care enough to confront.

Let me just give you one word of balance. Don’t run around thinking you can just share yourself with everyone you come in contact with without building a relationship.

If relationships are going to work we have to be...

5. CONFIDENTIAL WITH INFORMATION.

Why? Proverbs 11:13 reminds us that “A gossip betrays a confidence but a trustworthy man [or woman] keeps a secret.”

Are you the kind of person that can keep people’s confidences so that they can trust you? We tend to think of gossip as one of those little sins, a misdemeanor sin. But when God talks about gossip, He puts it on the list with things like sexual immorality and murder? Why? Because it is so destructive to relationships. Gossip can tear a friendship apart, a family apart, a church family apart. More churches have been destroyed by gossip than persecution. More friendships have been destroyed by gossip than any other kind of disloyalty. It’s incredibly destructive to relationships when you trust someone and then find out you couldn’t trust them. What’s so destructive about it?

My favorite story about gossip has always been about the man who went to the rabbi and confessed the sin of gossip and asked him, “What penance can I do for this sin?” The rabbi said, “Here’s what you do. You take a feather pillow and walk up on this mountain, rip it open and let the feathers fly everywhere.” The man did that and came back and said, “Is that it?” “No,” said the rabbi, “Now I want you to go pick up every feather.”

That’s what gossip does. It just goes everywhere. You don’t know the impact that it’s having but it’s tearing relationships apart. It’s tearing you apart in ways that you don’t realize.

What is gossip? Definition: Gossip is talking about a situation with somebody who is neither a part of the solution or a part of the problem. If they’re not a part of the problem or the solution and you’re talking with them about it, that is gossip. And if we’re honest with ourselves, what we’re doing is making ourselves feel a little more important at somebody else’s expense.

We’re talking about their hurts and their problems to make us feel like we’re a little bit morally superior to them. That’s the danger and the hurt of gossip. Gossip is such a dangerous thing that one of the values that we have in all our small groups is to keep confidences. Regardless of the nature of the group, it’s a place where we can come and talk about what you’re facing in your life and that stays within the group because it’s such an important part of relationships.

There’s a story in the Old Testament about a family that struggled with gossip. Remember Moses in the Old Testament. He had a sister name Miriam who one day got caught up in gossiping about Moses amidst the rest of the people. God called them in as a family – Moses and Miriam – and stood them in front of Him and had a little talk. He spoke with Miriam and told her what she’d done wrong and immediately on the spot He gave her leprosy. Some of you are thinking, “That sounds terrible but I’d like that to happen to the person who gossiped against me. Maybe not leprosy but a really bad stomach flu, something where they really knew how much this hurt.” God next invited Moses to pray for Miriam’s healing, the one who gossiped against him.

Some of you have been deeply hurt by gossip, things that have been said around the office, or things that have been said in the breaking of a confidence of a Christian friend or family. What God would say is “Pray for that person’s healing that gossiped against you, that you can be released from the hurt that’s come into your life.”

Others of you, you’ve been the one gossiping. You’ve been the one that has been sharing things about other people. This story is in the Old Testament to remind us how serious it is, how hurtful it can be to people whatever side of this you’re on. The truth is, when you keep confidences it makes relationships much more healthy. It enables us to keep connecting to one another in healthy and genuine ways.

The final key to connecting is…

6. BE COMMITTED TO THE RELATIONSHIP.

Good relationships take time. They don’t happen by accident. They take cultivation, work, a lot of time to build a deep connection with somebody. That requires commitment. The difference between a lot of people who get divorced and those who stay married is commitment. I tell people who I counsel before marrying them. This is a commitment and a vow that you have made before God. Either you take it serious or you don’t. Don’t even make the D – word become part of your vocabulary.

When you get married you take a vow that says, “Till death do us part.” I made that vow not just to my wife but I made that vow to God. That doesn’t mean that marriage is always this wonderful happy feeling. Let’s be honest, there are times in marriage that the only thing that keeps people together is that commitment. It isn’t love, it isn’t interest. It is simply a commitment we had made to God. I am so glad that a lot of people don’t give up. My wife is my best friend. I’d much rather spend time with her than any of you. I would be lying if I tried to paint a picture that suggested that I have felt that way every moment of our marriage. Regardless of how you or I may feel at the moment we have to be committed to the relationships we are in.

Some of you, your relationship right now is hanging on by less than a thread. Some of you are already in the physical separation stage. Do not give up. We have a miracle working God. The same God that raises the dead can raise a dead relationship if you’re willing to be changed.

But it takes a commitment. The Bible says this in Proverbs 17:17 “A friend loves at all times.” Circle “all”. That means even when it’s inconvenient, when you don’t feel like it, even when they don’t deserve it, even at personal cost. That’s what real friendship is all about. When you’re blowing it and you’re making a mistake, friends are in your corner when you’re cornered. And they see you through when everybody else thinks you’re through. They walk in when everybody else walks out. They are there with you even when you don’t deserve it.

And, by the way, genuine friends take sides. If you ever get in an argument with somebody and you’ve got a friend who says, “I'm going to stay neutral in this. I'm not going to take sides.” They’re no friend. Friends take sides. Friends are in your corner when you’re cornered. They don’t say, “I'm just going to stay neutral in this.” That’s not much of a friend.

The Bible says in Proverbs 18:24 “A man of many companions may come to ruin, but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother.” It’s talking about commitment. What does this mean, “A man of many companions may come to ruin”? Your socializing can keep you from having deep relationships. You can be so busy networking, so busy contacting, so busy socializing, so busy making acquaintances that you never spend the time and the energy and the effort it takes to cultivate the deep, satisfying intimacy of a good friend … or a good wife or a good husband. It comes from taking the time to do it.

It’s not wrong to have a lot of acquaintances but they can keep you so busy you don’t develop any vital close relationships. You don’t need a lot of friends to make it in this world but you do need a few good ones. Focus on quality not quantity. You can have lots of acquaintances but that means nothing. Take it from somebody who knows. I know thousands if not tens of thousands of people. One good friendship is better than ten thousand acquaintances. Any day of the week! The acquaintances aren’t going to be there in the crisis. They’re not going to be there when you need them. Friends will. And every important close connection begins with a commitment.

The late Wilt Chamberlain had great numbers as an NBA star, but the number he will probably be remembered for most is 20,000. That is how many women the never-married Chamberlain claimed in his autobiography to have slept with.What few may remember though, says columnist Clarence Page, is Chamberlain "went on to write that he would have traded all 20,000 for the one woman he wanted to stay with for keeps." Citation: Clarence Page, "Remembering the Big Dipper's other statistics," Chicago Tribune (October 17, 1999)

Who are you committed to? And who knows it? Have you ever gone to any single individual besides your spouse and said, “I just want you to know that I will always be there for you.” Have you ever said that to anybody? Have you ever established that kind of intentional commitment and say, “I want to grow close to you as a fri

2004/02/01

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