Touré Roberts - People Skills

I want you to look at John chapter 13 really quickly with me. I think this is such a critical and important word. I’m not going to be preaching today; instead, I will be teaching. I just want to teach a little bit and empower us with a life skill that I believe might quite frankly be the most important life skill that any of us can ever have. Jesus is speaking to His disciples and says, «A new commandment I give to you: that you love one another as I have loved you; that you also love one another.» Then in verse 35, it says, «By this, all will know that you are My disciples if you have love for one another.» The word «have» can be better translated as «hold,» so it better reads, «By this culture of love that you demonstrate—this love culture—by this, people will know that you are My disciples if you hold, hallelujah, if you hold love for one another.» In other words, love is something you’ve got to hold on to because it can be easy to fumble love. Yes, you get hit hard enough—pun intended on Super Bowl Sunday—it can be hard to hold on to love. As long as you’ve got the rock, you can score. Did you catch the analogy? A little corny, but that’s okay. By this, all will know that you are My disciples if you have love for one another. Today, I want to talk about people skills. People skills. You may be seated. People skills. When you think about the workplace, you think about any sort of business, any school—anything, in fact. If we narrow it down to the workplace, one of the things that any employer wants to know is whether or not you have people skills. It’s kind of funny how we treat people skills like this added bonus benefit skill, as if most people don’t have it, but if you do, you’re special. The reality is, unless we are living alone on an island, we are going to have to interact with people. So, you would think that having people skills, pursuing people skills, and developing them should actually be the norm. It’s almost like it should be taught in school. We are all people, and we must interact with others, so this shouldn’t be seen as some sort of bonus or elective; it should be mandatory. In the text, Jesus is basically saying that His idea for reaching people—one of His prime strategies for reaching people—is that they will ultimately see our people skills. They will recognize this culture of love and this culture of interaction with one another, and the demonstration of that will be so attractive to society and culture that they will want to meet our teacher. It says, «By this, they will know you are My disciples.» «My disciples» means «My pupils,» implying that they will be attracted to the teacher. So, in other words, one of the most strategic evangelistic outreach strategies is not you handing out a tract; it’s not you knocking on a door, hoping to tell someone about Jesus. Although that’s wonderful, you’ve got to do what you can. Jesus is saying, «Let me tell you how, for sure, you will attract people to Me—it’s the culture in which you live; it’s your people skills; it is how you love; it is how you interact with one another.» Right now, the world is greatly deprived of people skills, and many factors can be responsible for this: social media. I love social media—I use it and have a significant following. Social media is wonderful, but one thing that the culture and era of social media have done is rob us a little of our people skills. We have reduced people down to avatars or photos. That’s why, on social media, people can be so nasty. You would never see people in the grocery store saying the things they say to one another on social media. Something has happened to us: now we are not all rude; you all are saved, wonderful, and beautiful and full of love. But some people can be so nasty—they can talk about you like you are an absolute worthless piece of nothing and just sin and move on with their lives. There is this deficit, which means that there is an opportunity for the church to model in society and culture what godly humanity looks like. There’s an opportunity! Are you tracking with me? It’s almost like Jesus knew that the world would ultimately be polarized. He said this is going to be one of the ways that you know. One of the ways you’ll know that I am in this thing is how you love people—how you treat people. And you know what’s interesting is that a lot of times we can misread that verse and think that Jesus is saying that people are going to know or recognize that you are a child of God or one of Jesus’s disciples by how you treat one another, and we often think He’s only referring to how church people treat church people. And sometimes that…