verb
persuade (someone) to do something by sustained coaxing or flattery
After reading 1984 and the preface to Mere Christianity recently, I have gained a new found zeal for the recovery of words. We could all stand to be a bit dictionarier. After talking to Paige about it, I'm even more committed to the preservation of vocabulary. Words matter and when you know two words for the same thing, pick the more unusual one if only to keep it in circulation. Paige suggested this, so when I came across "cajole" this morning (8/17/20) in Oswald Chambers' My Utmost for His Highest, I decided to put it to use.
Jesus never cajoled. He did not flatter. He did not say things nicer than they were true in order to produce behavior better than it would have been. That end does not justify those means.
Matthew 15:12
Then the disciples came and said to him, “Do you know that the Pharisees were offended when they heard this saying?”
Like Christ, we should not cajole. Flattery is not a permissible Christian tactic. We must trust the truth to persuade or not persuade at all. If a man is not won over by the truth, you cannot lie him over to a better appreciation of it. You cannot spark an affection for truth with the matches of lies. You cannot encourage purity through provocation. A Christian girl in the backseat with a boy is not in a better position to teach him purity than a pastor in the pulpit merely because she has a more captive audience.
God has called us to proclaim a particular message and His promise is that those He has elected will believe it. When we muck up the message with flattery and half-truths for the sake of being more persuasive than God's Good News, we do not tell sinners about a true assurance of the Kingdom, but a false assurance for living outside of it. So, in one fell swoop, flattery provides a false sense of security and makes the real one even harder to access.
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