The other day, I was talking with a friend, who is in the middle of one of the most demanding of all challenges: Raising a middle schooler. In this particular instance, my friend was trying to help his son learn how to “read the room”. Ahh, the plight of nearly every middle school boy. Understand, males struggle with this more than females. Females are typically better at picking up nuance, especially when it comes to emotions. Males, who tend to be more direct, listen expecting direct. According to Emerson Eggerichs in his Love and Respect curriculum, men speak and listen “blue” while women naturally communicate “pink”. Thus, “pink” is a foreign language for most men. A foreign language that can be learned.
Not so with Jesus. Jesus, the Son of Man, God Incarnate, perfectly understands His audience in every situation. That’s part of what is so interesting in John 3 as Jesus speaks with Nicodemus. In many of Jesus’s conversations and confrontations with the religious higher-ups of the day, Jesus gives stern teachings and, if not angry, frustrated rebuttals calling them out as a brood of vipers or white-washed tombs. But not here. Here, Jesus just cuts straight to the point.
“Unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.”
John 3:3 (ESV)
Jesus teaches Nicodemus. He recognizes something in Nicodemus that warrants a direct lesson. Jesus, who warns us not to cast our pearls before swine, takes the time to actually teach Nicodemus truth because He recognizes in Nicodemus a teachable spirit. Nicodemus is giving evidence of being a man after the godly wisdom Jesus’s half-brother James describes at the end of James 3. Nicodemus is peaceable, open to reason, and sincere. He is seeking truth. Jesus responds by giving truth to Him, and doing so in a way that communicates the fullness of the gospel to all of us.
There is always value in being able to read the room. Sometimes the opportunity to meet someone where they are comes when you are tired and frustrated. Sometimes it comes from a person who is a regular source of frustration. In every case, if we stop and consider what God might be doing in each circumstance, we can be used by Him to make an eternal difference in someone’s life, and it starts with this particular ingredient of emotional intelligence – being able to read the room.
This raises two application based questions.
- Like Jesus, how good are you at reading the room? To what extent do you gage your audience well? Whether it’s the large scale message on a Sunday morning or the individual conversations that fill your week, how well do you recognize the needs and spiritual location of your audience?
- Like Nicodemus, does Jesus find you functioning from a heart of open-minded, peaceable, godly wisdom? There are far too many militant, soldiers for Jesus out there who do not recognize when they have stepped beyond the bounds of Christ-centered living.