“Let Your Yes Be Yes” (3 of 3)

In Leadership and Church Life

The church that has learned to communicate strategically rather than plainly has imported a corporate management culture into the body of Christ. The pastoral letter that takes three pages to not quite say what needs to be said, the elders’ meeting that reaches a conclusion everyone understands but no one states plainly, the church member who tells everyone except the person who needs to hear it — these are all forms of the oath-making system Jesus condemned. The language is elaborate. The plain truth is absent.

The elder who can say to the pastor: “You preached something today that was not right and here is why” — plainly, respectfully, without the seventeen-paragraph diplomatic preamble — is the elder who is making Matthew 5:37 real in his church. The church member who can go to his brother and say “I saw something that concerned me and I want to tell you directly” is practicing the same teaching in the same spirit. Plain speech in the church is not rudeness. It is the love that treats people as capable of receiving the truth.

In Cultural Engagement

The disciple who is engaging the cultural battles described in Volume I Part Eight will face constant pressure to soften, qualify, and reframe what he actually believes. The pressure is not primarily violent. It is social. The consequence of plain speech in the public square is not usually arrest or physical harm. It is the label. The loss of approval. The exclusion from certain conversations.

Matthew 5:37 is the instruction that applies here. Not rudeness, not aggression, not the performance of bluntness as a personality style. But the plain speech of a person who says what is true because the Father is his primary audience and the Father already knows what he thinks. The disciple who says “I believe what Jesus said about marriage” plainly, without hedging it into cultural acceptability, has let his Yes be Yes. The disciple who frames it as “I personally hold a more traditional view while deeply respecting those who see it differently” has produced a sentence that conveys almost no information while protecting his social standing. That is the oath system. Jesus said it comes from the evil one.

In Prayer

The most neglected application of Matthew 5:37 is the application to the disciple’s prayer life. The God who knows the interior perfectly is the One to whom plain speech is most obviously appropriate. And yet the disciple’s prayer life is often the most managed performance in his entire Christian existence.

The prayer that describes the disciple’s situation in the most favorable possible light, that approaches God with carefully structured petitions rather than with the raw honesty of the actual interior, that uses religious vocabulary to present a version of the self that is more spiritually composed than the actual self — this prayer is the oath system operating in the one context where it is most absurd. You are managing the impression of the One who already knows everything about you.

The Psalms are the antidote. David said to God exactly what he was experiencing, exactly what he feared, exactly what he desired, exactly what he had done, exactly how angry he was, exactly how desperate he was. No managed impression. No theological framing of the raw material before presenting it to the Father. The raw material itself, offered plainly to the One who could handle it. That is Matthew 5:37 in prayer.

Psalm 13:1: “How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever?” That is a Yes. That is plain speech to God. It is also the prayer that ends in verse 6: “I will sing the Lord’s praise, for he has been good to me.” The plain speech did not drive David from God. It drove him through to the other side of the darkness faster than any carefully managed religious presentation would have.