Why We Speak

Picture a thirty-year-old who still gets blown around by every voice in the room. Flatter him, and he's all in. Criticize him, and he's wrecked for a week. A confident new idea shows up on Monday, and he rebuilds his whole life around it — then a different voice shows up on Friday, and he rebuilds it back. Whoever talked to him last is the one he believes.

If that were a four-year-old, we'd smile. That's just what it is to be little. At thirty, something's wrong. Something that was supposed to happen didn't.

This Sunday, we’ll focus on how the apostle Paul says the same thing can be true of a whole church. Turn to Ephesians 4, and the first picture he paints is a small boat with no anchor and no rudder, out on open water: "tossed by the waves and blown around by every wind of teaching" (Ephesians 4:14). Notice what he says the danger is. It isn't first the obvious temptations out in the world — it's teaching. Confident voices. Clever pitches. And we happen to live in the windiest moment in human history for exactly this, every one of us carrying a device in our pocket that pipes those voices straight to our hand all day long. So, Paul's question is challenging: are we the boat that gets blown around by all of it — or have we grown up into something the wind can't move?