Quick to Listen, Slow to Speak

Do you listen to your spouse?

My dear brothers and sisters, take note of this: Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry, because human anger does not produce the righteousness that God desires.
{James 1:19-20 NIV}

This has to be one of our favorite scriptures pertaining to effective, healthy communication in marriage (or any other relationship). This scripture contains essential keys that give us the ability to first, hear from God, and secondly, communicate effectively with our spouse and everyone else we come into contact with.

We have come up with three important points from James 1:19-20, that if applied can produce amazing fruit in your marriage.

Quick to Listen

Let your spouse know you value what they have to say by training yourself not to talk over them. It shows great honor to your spouse when you allow them to express their own thoughts without being interrupted even when you know where they are going with their thought process. Can you remember a time when you were trying to express something that was valuable to you and the person supposed to be listening to you ignored you? Or interrupted you? Doesn’t feel too nice, does it? Keep this in mind the next time you are tempted to interrupt or ignore your spouse and it will change your perspective on the situation.

You can train yourself to make listening a priority in your life. We know from experience that it can be done – we have had major victory early on in our marriage because we were both committed to respecting one another simply because we love one another and are trying our best to model our marriage based upon God’s word.

One way we have achieved this and continue to work through it are by realizing the benefits of being an active listener.

The benefits of being an active listener are:

• to obtain information
• to understand
• for enjoyment
• to learn

Make it a priority to think about the importance of listening to, valuing and honoring your spouse, practicing it often, so that when the heat of the battle comes – you are battle ready to do what’s right. You will be pleasantly surprised at how quickly your communication efforts will transform your marriage.

Slow to Speak

This is not always easy. As a matter of fact, it can be quite challenging at times to hold your speech when you have a strong feeling or point you’d like to make in the midst of a heated or emotional discussion. However, it can be done.

The bottom line: You have to make the decision that you love your spouse more than talking. As silly as this sounds, it is true. We have had plenty of times in our nearly 16 years of marriage that we both had to make this hard choice, specifically when going through rough patches in our marriage.

We have found that one really effective way to help curb our emotions wanting to come out of our mouths is to practice being silent when we are emotional (to include excitement, sadness, anger, etc). What do we mean?

We mean to train your mind to speak the Word of life over your emotion rather than speaking what the emotion from the current circumstance is bringing. A great way we have been able to fine tune this area of our lives is to ask this simple question of our words: Do our words line up with Philippians 4:8?

Even better, do our thoughts line up with Philippians 4:8?

Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.
Philippians 4:8 (NIV)

By using this as the measuring stick, we are able to train ourselves over time (be patient and realistic about this) to no longer speak what we are feeling all the time. It is of great benefit to only speak words of truth, nobility, rightness, pureness, loveliness, things admirable, and praiseworthy things. This causes us to be carefully to only speak LIFE over our situations and not the enemies lies (deception based on emotion and circumstances) that lead to death in both physical and spiritual form.

Slow to Become Angry

Is this something that is difficult for you? Perhaps it is something difficult for your spouse? If you are putting the above two steps into practice, this will certainly become less of an issue for you. It is also very important to keep in mind that walking in love is a daily choice, not an instant deliverance.

The best way to combat being angry and acting out of anger are the foundational acts of: reading your Bible daily, praying daily (alone and in fellowship with our spouse and other believers), and to have corporate worship and accountability through a church body or home-group.

However, there are definitely times when an individual has been hurt so badly they will need pastoral counseling or any other type of Christian counseling available to be able to sort out and confront the past to be able to be present in the here and now as well as the future.

Be patient with your spouse and yourself as you make the journey to lasting, biblical communication in your marriage. You will find it is an uphill battle, however the benefits far outweigh the costs. And the beautiful thing is, this wonderful communication breakthrough will not only benefit your marriage, but more importantly, your relationship with Jesus!

Of course it will also trickle down into every other relationship you have from children to in-laws (yes people, this is possible…haha). We are praying for each and every one of you that you will continually strive (it is a life-long commitment) to be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry. Here’s to better marriages through godly communication!