QUIET/INHIBITED OR OUTGOING/RESPONSIVE
Christ in You
Dr. George O. Wood
We’re looking at patterning after the healthy Christ, becoming like Him in our emotions and
temperament. We’re taking the first four Sunday nights of this series, two traits an evening. We
looked last week at Anxiety verses being Composed and Depressed versus being Light hearted.
Tonight we look at two other contrasting qualities whether we are Active and Social or Quiet and
whether we are Expressive and Responsive or Inhibited. Perhaps it would be worthwhile to take
just a moment to define those terms.
Active would describe the person who is physically active.
Social would describe a person who is outgoing.
Quiet would describe a person who is pretty much to themselves.
Expressive describes an individual who really is able to articulate in words or in emotions
what is happening inside of them.
Responsive would suggest that they’re able also to give back in words and body language
and affirmation and response.
Inhibited would describe a person who is again somewhat unable to express what they’re
really feeling or thinking or how they’re responding.
Really the whole matter of being active social and expressive responsive are part of the
necessary ingredients for the missionary task of the church. Therefore in a sense there is a
missionary theme even that under girds this. It was to those kinds of persons that the Spirit came
– the 120 – who were somewhat many of them by nature I think quiet and perhaps not so
expressive responsive in the beginning of following Jesus. But the first thing he did for them
when the twelve began to follow him was he took them to a wedding. He began getting them in
a group. Began bringing them out of their aloneness, out of themselves and ultimately left them
with a challenge to be outgoing and communicating and to take the gospel to the whole world.
The Christian life simply means letting Jesus live in us. Nietze (who coined the phrase God is
dead) said “If Christians wish us to believe in their redeemer why don’t they look a little bit more
redeemed.”
What we’re looking at in being expressive and responsive and outgoing and communicating is to
look at two realms of association – the broader circle of people in our life. How we’re
communicating with that broader circle of people on terms of friendliness, expressiveness,
responsiveness. And also we’re communicating with people at the inner circle of our life in
terms of affection, tenderness, empathy and warmth.
Some questions to help us sort of measure our pulse. As you’re growing and maturing spiritually
you’ll answer these questions differently. Some questions about the trait of being outgoing and
communication – the word “communicating”, its root is “common”. To share something in
common. What’s in you becomes something shared with the other person so it becomes
common to the two of you.
Here are some questions that will measure how active and social you are verses how quiet you
might be:
Would you rather stay at home and read or watch television than to go out with friends?
QUIET/INHIBITED OR OUTGOING/RESPONSIVE
Christ in You
When things are going on around you do you usually take part? Are you an observer or a
participant?
Do you have only one or two friends you like to be with? If you don’t broaden your circle
beyond that that suggests somewhat a quiet person.
Do you prefer to live a quiet life without getting involved with people outside your immediate
family and friends?
Do you wait for someone to tell you what to do instead of getting things started yourself? You
need to be prompted a lot? You don’t go out looking for things to do but if somebody says go do
it then you do it.
Do you shrink from approaching people you do not know and introducing yourself?
How did you do? Did you say yes to all of those? If you said yes to all of those it would suggest
you are a very quiet person who prefers being a lot by yourself. Or maybe you don’t prefer
being by yourself but in actual fact you are by yourself a lot or with a very, very small enclosed
group.
If you have a church that is full of people who say yes to all six questions you’re going to get a
church with a lot of people who give to visitors the impression of being a cold church. Not
because the people are cold. The people may not be cold at all. It’s just that everybody’s shy.
If you answered No to all of those questions it would suggest that you are a person who finds it
rather easy to be active, social, outgoing, communicating.
Outgoing is important for the three basic Greek words of the New Testament community.
Proclamation, fellowship, service. All will need to be done by people who begin to be coming
out of their shyness. And begin finding ways to expand that. Not that they’re going to become
somebody who’s an absolute extrovert and be different than themselves. But begin making
progress within their own life. When we talk about becoming like Christ we’re not talking about
becoming like somebody else. We are saying that the more we become like Jesus Christ the
more truly we will become ourselves. Therefore we don’t need to measure ourselves against
somebody else’s extroversion or whatever.
The expensive responsive scale, another set of questions, that determines how we are doing in
terms of verbally and non verbally communicating what’s happening in us to others as well as
when somebody shares something with us how are we responding to them.
1. Do I seldom show love and affection to members of my own family? If we don’t do it within
family we’re going to have a tough time doing it to other people.
2. Do I find it hard to put into words how much I really care for someone? Luke 15:20, the
father of the prodigal, while the young man was still a long way off his father saw him and was
filled with compassion for him. He ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him.
He showed he cared.
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Christ in You
3. Do I find it hard to give compliments or say nice things to members of my family? Maybe
the reverse is true. Find it easy to spot when they haven’t done something right. But find it hard
to find good things, nice things, positive things.
4. Do I often keep my feelings bottled up inside myself? Whether those feelings are love or rage
or anger or whatever they are. We know that feelings do not work well for us when we keep
them bottled up. When we keep them stored. Feelings are to be used and used in the right kind
of way. Jesus did this, “Having loved his own who were in the world he showed them the full
extent of his love.” He was able to express what was happening in him.
5. Is it hard for me to express sympathy for someone who is very sad? Jesus wept.
6. Am I quiet and reserved in manner? We know that the Lord although he spent great amounts
of time alone was also the friend of sinners.
7. Do I rarely express gentleness and tenderness with children? As a single adult Jesus gathered
children in his arms, put his hands upon them and blessed them.
8. Is it hard for me to talk about personal problems as well as happy things with close friends?
Obviously the Lord was able to do this with his own many times disclosing things about himself
and situations he was facing.
If you answered no to all of these 8 questions it would suggest that you are somewhat a
spontaneous, affectionate and demonstrative person. At least you see yourself in those terms.
All Yes answers would suggest a good deal of inhibition. You have an inability to express
tender feelings. You’re reserved, restrained, maybe repressed and excessively self-conscious.
Midways? Half-half? A lot of us probably do half-half on those. That suggests that maybe in
our lives we can begin to extend the borders of our communication and become more as the
spirit equips us outside of ourselves into the world of others.
We might as what the barriers are to our becoming more outgoing and communicating in our
life.
John Powell has said, “The beginning of life is as a bud of a flower. It is closed. Only when the
bud of the flower receives much warmth from the sun and nourishment from the mothering soil
will it open and expose all the beauty that is latent within it. When a bud is injured by hostile
forms like an unseasoned frost it will not open.” He goes on to say that’s the way it is many
times in our life. We were a bud when we were born but sometimes things happen to us that
keep us from opening up in our personality to the degree that the Lord wants us to open.
What are some of these things?
The first one obviously is family background. Being an unwanted child, a less favored child, a
battered child, unwholesome parental relationship that might involve desertion, incest,
homosexuality. A driven child, a child that had to match a scale of performance. Maybe a
family background where there was not a great deal of affection or feeling communicated to the
children that they were loved. All of this has impact. Can we grow out of that? Can we change?
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Christ in You
We can. The gospel gives us the power to change. Many times that kind of conditioning early in
our background has made us somewhat quiet and distrustful of people because early on in our
years we began to be suspicious of opening ourselves. We didn’t have good models to go by.
A second thing that could inhibit us from being an outgoing and communicating person is a very
poor self-concept. A lack of self-esteem and worth to God and to ourselves. Sometimes persons
who suffer from inferiority complexes are mistaken for being smug or superior. But those can
hurt us and keep us from developing. 2 Timothy tells us that God has not given us a spirit of
timidity but of power and love and self-control. It’s sad when we adopt the view of life that we
have nothing to offer. But with the Lord’s help we can have something to offer. We desperately
need to see our life mirrored through the acclaim, the positive encouragement of others.
The third reason why we might not be outgoing and communicating is an unwillingness to be
vulnerable. Maybe we have really been hurt by somebody and we are reluctant to open up again
and trust and be outgoing. A psychiatrist was once asked, “How do you teach people to love?”
he said, “Have you ever had a toothache? If you did what were you thinking about when you
had the toothache? Somebody else’s needs or your own? Of course you were thinking about
your own.” It doesn’t do anyone any good to lay a guilt trip on you that you weren’t thinking
about somebody else’s needs when you had a toothache. That toothache was great concern to
you. That’s the case many times when we have difficulty coming out of ourselves. A divorce, a
broken relationship, a strong rebuff in our life and we’re unwilling to risk and be vulnerable
again.
We might be a victim of pressure and stress. We’re under so much things that are baring down
on us in the financial real and the emotional realm and a sense of feeling incompetent for a task
that we may draw within ourselves.
Then finally a thing that might keep us from being outgoing and expressive in our life is we are
simply a creature of habit. That’s the way we are and we’re not going to change. We’ve decided
that’s the way we’re going to be.
I’m convinced, for example, that some people have consciously made the decision to be selfish.
It’s not something they gradually fell into. It’s just that over a period of years they’ve decided
it’s me first and that’s the way it’s going to be. Conscious choice of habit. How hard it is to
break habits. But they can be broken.
How can I become an outgoing and communicating person? How can we deal in our life. How
does the Lord give us a pattern for becoming more expressive and more responsible in our lives?
I think the first thing is to settle in our own hearts our worth to the Lord. If we do not feel
worthy we can’t give love. Sometimes we have the “I am a worm” concept. We have to realize
that although the word “worm” is used in the scripture it is not used for us as believers. The
Lord did not die for worms. He died for people whom he dearly loved and whose image of him
was sadly broken by sin and the fall. But we are of infinite value to him.
We receive our worth only by becoming a child of God. Through the new birth which the Lord
brings to us where we are immediately given a sense of our infinite value to him.
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Christ in You
I think a second thing we can do in becoming more outgoing and communicating is to deepen the
level of our verbal communication. John Powell Why Am O Afraid to Tell You Who I Am
gives us the classic five levels of communication that we have with one another. If we are
staying on two of these levels – 5 and 4 – the chances of our ever coming outside ourselves and
becoming significantly present to someone else is very small.
Cliché. “Hi! How are you? Fine thank you.” Actually something else very traumatic may be
happening in your life. That’s basically the kind of level we’ve been doing on Sundays when we
greet one another.
You never know who you’ll meet. Reporting the facts about others. We begin to share some
data about ourselves. “What did you do today? How did everything go at school today?”
My ideas and judgments. “I did not agree with the lecture I got in history today… I did not agree
with the information passed on to us politically… I like what the pastor said in his message
today.” What I’m thinking about things. We may share that. In most communication that’s
about as far as we get. If we only get to this level we have surface relationships.
My emotions. What am I anxious about? What am I worried about? What is bothering me in
my life? May I tell you about that? Do I have freedom to tell you without your being
judgmental? If I tell you what is happening and the kind of pressures I’m facing, will you
instantly judge me or will you first listen with an open ear? If I tell you the struggles I’m going
through and the anxieties I’m feeling right now are you going to give me a lecture and
immediately start throwing scripture at me? Scripture can be used like bricks. We mean to help
people with it but sometimes we can hit them with it too. Can I listen nonjudgmentally? And
begin to hear so I can give another person freedom to begin opening up. Or is my response so
predictable that I close the lines of communication and I can’t communicate in that particular
area of my life because I know it will be met with this response immediately. So therefore I
either dam it up in my life and don’t express it or I wander around and find somebody else who
will listen. Can I feel free with the significant other people in my life to say what’s going on
inside me and really reveal me? Can I be free to do that with the Lord? Or is it also a matter a
communicating with the Lord that a great deal of our praying is cliché oriented, factually
oriented. Maybe prayer at times needs to be “Lord, you know how deeply I’m going through
this? You know what I feel.” Can I spend significant moments relating to the Lord and telling
him how I feel.
The final level of communication which John Powell suggests is peak communication which is
open and total sharing with all defenses down. A great model for peak communication is John 4.
See how Jesus leads the woman at the well of Samaria from cliché oriented conversation – level
5 – all the way down to peak communication. Heart to heart talking.
The importance of peak communication is that we have that opportunity to get past the defenses
of normal communication and really reach in and let the inner warmth that God has put in us
reach out to others.
Lord, not only help me to verbally begin to share what is going on in me. If I’m at level 5 or
level 4 help me to get to level 3. Help me take a step at a time. Not only verbally but through
my actions how can I communicate. Can I show your warmth through my actions. Who is
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Christ in You
attempting to touch me? Remember the woman in Luke 7 who was pouring oil on Jesus’ feet?
If that had been me I’d said get that stick, smelly stuff off me. You’re embarrassing me! How
neat it is to see Jesus that in order not to embarrass somebody else let himself be embarrassed.
He received twice gifts that women brought him that were anointing him with oil. Somebody
that comes up and dumps oil on your head or feel, even in biblical culture that was not the thing
to do. In fact there were people who sat there and criticized Jesus for what he was allowing. But
he was sensitive to know when a person was expressing something so valuable that expression
should be treasured. Not put down or put off or delayed to some more convenient time.
Not only who is trying to touch me but who am I to touch? Come to church looking for people
you can touch in significant ways. Family we can touch in significant ways.
Take one step at a time and don’t stop. Growth is a process. Christian growth is a process.
There’s a tremendous degree of difference in the outgoingness of the disciple between Mark 6
and Acts 1. In Mar 6 Jesus tell them in their first witnessing mission they are not to go outside
Galilee. They’re not to talk to gentiles. Why? Because they didn’t know enough to argue with
anybody. Because they were culturally limited. Because they were racially prejudiced. So don’t
go talking to anybody that isn’t of your kind. Take one step at a time. Talk to the people you
know. There will come a day you can tell the whole world. Take a step at a time.
Maybe for you beginning to be more outgoing involves introducing yourself, extending a
handshake, offering to pray with somebody, becoming hospitable, sitting specific goals of
exercising or practicing hospitality towards others. Then maybe if you are good at hospitality
going beyond that to radical hospitality which is inviting people into your life and home that
can’t invite you back. Radical hospitality.
And rely upon the power of the Holy Spirit. He brings power into personal relationships. It is
the Lord who says of the Spirit that he will give you power to be a witness. That is to come``
outside of yourself to others with the good news of the gospel of Christ. If we can do that in
`reference to the gospel we can do it in all other areas cross the board in our life. Importance of
prayer. Importance of earnestly seeking the Lord. If we want significant changes to take place
in our life we must do more than want them to take place. We must be willing to do more than
attend classes where we are given helpful hints to allow them to take place. We must also
become open to being men and women and young people of prayer. That God will do for us
what only the Holy Spirit can do for us. Transform our lives and make us different.
I’m going to ask Florence and David to come and share in our panel tonight.
Florence: There are extroverts and introverts. The problem I had with that is that the only way to
be a Christian was to be outgoing. All of us know some good, quiet, reserved saints I’m
sure. I read a survey that said 75% of the population are extroverts. 25% introverts. We
that are extroverts are always telling you introverts there’s something wrong with you. But
there really isn’t. God can use quiet people just as much as he can use loud mouths. It isn’t
whether we’re introverts or extroverts. But that we don’t use introverts as an excuse not to
be involved in the gospel and working with other people.
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Christ in You
David: As far as reaction for me it’s on a personal nature whenever I’m ministered to in this
church. I always feel God’s presence in speaking to me. Some of my thoughts as Pastor
Wood was speaking and trying to be sensitive to the Lord speaking to me in certain ways I
always think of the church at times like this and how we are to minister to each other and the
healing process. I experience that so much every time I come here. I feel like that’s what
the Lord is wanting for this body.
David: There’s a point when labels are helpful and a point they’re not. Sometimes I experience
myself as an introvert yet I find myself doing extroverted things. I’m not sure what to call
myself except David. In a sense I think that’s where our relationship to God comes in.
Sometimes labels are helpful and sometimes they’re not.
Part of why these different categories are on a continuum is to show especially if you’re
locked into one style, that may not be the most helpful thing. For me too I think it might be
helpful to take a sociological perspective. I think in some ways the world or America is
giving us a different message of what health is. Particularly in American society or culture
there’s a different standard than I think is put forth in the scriptures. It seems like America’s
real into being big and expansive and Look at me. Sometimes that doesn’t quite jive with
what I see in the scriptures.
Florence: I think there’s a balance that we need to work on. We need to take care of ourselves.
Jesus said, thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all of thy heart and thy neighbor as
thyself.” Not instead of thy self but as thyself. So I think there’s a balance there. When you
see someone that’s totally wrapped up in other people and has no sense of self they’re in
trouble. There needs to be a balance there. It’s not carnal to take care of yourself. There is
to be a balance in our lives as Christians. We are to love others but we are to love ourselves
well.
George Wood:
As pastor of the church my desire is to see a church brought into existence that is a relationship
body of Christ. It’s so easy in southern California culture where nothing really sticks – kind of
stucco culture – for us to have as many stuccoed relationships as there are stucco homes and
plastic relationships as there are plastic appliances. It would grieve me to think that over a
period of time New Port Mesa Christian Center would be church where people simply slide in
and out of with no significant relationship with one another in the Lord. So that we have a Hi,
Goodbye kind of mentality. One of the reasons why in our church body we’re placing the kind
of emphasis we are upon adult Sunday school times, upon fellowship times, upon occasions that
find the church coming together in whole or in part outside the Sunday worship context, is that
we really have a desire to do the one-anothering that the scripture talks about.
This is part of our growth – being in worship together. But a great part of our growth as well
comes as we really pray for one another and care for one another and support one another and get
beyond those relationships simply surface ties. It’s hard to be at peak communication with every
person in the congregation. I want to know the name of every person in everyone’s family,
what’s going on in their life, want to feel like you know what’s going on in my life. It’s
immensely frustrating to me to find myself many times at level 5 conversations and level 4
because of the fact of as many people who are here this evening it would be impossible for one
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Christ in You
person to have a significant relationship on a level 1 potential with every single person in this
room. I think we need to back off and realistically say Who is the Lord putting in my life? The
first people we ought to look for are obviously the people that are blood family. That’s where it
starts – in the family. Then we need to go beyond that to see who the Lord is calling by our side
who is near to us in terms of what he is doing. Then work beyond that to not become a closed
group where we say I finally am comfortable in this church. I finally find people that minister to
me that care for me, that support me. If we can reach one step beyond that and find persons who
are not easily include-able to us. Maybe they are outside, maybe they’re alone or maybe just
strangers. The scriptures talks a great deal about hospitality. Hospitality is the opposite of
xenophobia. Xenophobia is fear of strangers. But the believer is called upon to be a friend of
the stranger.
I encourage you to that. That’s what the Lord would want to develop in us as a whole church
body.
As we call upon the Holy Spirit through prayer I want you to focus in on one person in your
life who you would like to move one level deeper than you are right now in your
communication. I’m not talking about romance. I’m talking about people in our family,
people who are near to us, maybe even persons that we’ve really had odds with. The Spirit
is calling us to go one step deeper. Lord, reveal that person to us as we pray. Show us the
practical steps this week on a day by day basis to lead us so that we can fully express you to
a degree we’ve never been able to before in that relationship. Help us to be able to take our
heart and share our heart. To be willing to risk, to be vulnerable. Then, Lord, help us to go
one step further and isolate that one person who does not know you, who we work with or
live with or go to school with or are friends with. Help us to be filled with the Spirit to carry
that level of communication one step further and see you become present as the outgoing
Lord to them. And come in their life through our witness especially this is difficult if we’re
quiet and reserved. Help us to find the power of the Holy Spirit enabling us to go one step
further. Help us to take one more step. We ask this in your name. Amen.
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