Are Political Conversations Pointless?

Maybe. Or maybe we have the wrong expectations of them.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

In this last uh I'd say decade, decade and a half, there's been some very, very, very toxic disagreements on matters of politics, policy, personality, all the rest of it. And I see a lot of online discourse that actually I don't think is helping too much. The memes and the long Facebook essays and all the rest of those. I'd like to posit that maybe we just have wrong expectations for it. And here's what I mean. I'm a man who tries to read my Bible regular, and among all the other things it teaches, it certainly shows that people change. They often don't change very quick, although sometimes it does happen. The word of God reaches right in, smack changes a person, and suddenly they go from one way of life to another way of life. But most of the time change comes slow. It comes through a lot of long conversations. It comes through, I did not actually convince him of anything today, but hopefully I planted a seed of thought. Hopefully I can come back and talk to him the next day. A lot of conversion for the Christian is long-term conversations. And I hate to say, but sometimes it doesn't work. Think about uh what was his name? John the Baptist and Herod the oh Herod Antipas, I think it was. And Herod went to talk to John because John was very intriguing to him. Talked with him even after he arrested him, put him in jail. But all the talking didn't ever seem to change Herod's mind. And Herod was just as bad as he was when he started out. And he got so bad that eventually God struck him down for his arrogance and hubris. It's not like John wasn't talking to him, not like he wasn't talking to John. But he just refused to change. There were inklings that change could happen, but he refused it. And then conversely, we go back to the Old Testament, and I do love these stories. Of Nebuchadnezzar from the book of Daniel. How many different miracles did he have to behold before he fully changed his mind about God? Well, first there is the small miracle of the Jewish students' diet. They were not given fine great fruits. They in fact asked to be fed the most basic of things, and yet they were the most hail and hardy. When he made that golden statue of himself and said, all must bow down to it, well, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego did not, and he saw them come out of the fiery furnace, and yet he did not change. He was also there for Daniel in the lion's den. Lord God has shut the mouths of these lions, he said, and still that did not convince them, until finally we get near the middle of the book of Daniel's histories. Nebuchadnezzar writes a letter to say, God finally struck me down with madness that lasted for years until I raised my head and declared there is no other God but God alone. Some of these things might just be a long, long time, but I've learned this much. Cannot convince somebody to change their political mind in a day. Memes don't work in a day, the arguments don't work in a day. So yeah. Maybe there's something out there that can convince somebody on the right or the left to switch sides. Maybe there is a magic key or maybe, just maybe, we're trying to go about this all the long and long way. And you just gotta extend your viewpoint out a little bit farther. I know that's hard because we have midterms every two years and we have elections every four years, and it feels like there's not a lot of time to change somebody's mind. But the more realistic your time frame, the more realistic your expectations, and the more patients you can be. Cheers.