Simple Is Not Shallow

Sandrine knows exactly which room she learned it in, and she was twenty-three.

It was a seminar. She had said something in plain language, correctly, and a man about fifteen years older had responded, not unkindly, with a sentence that began well, more precisely, and then restated her point using four technical terms.

He was not wrong. What he said was a more precise version.

But something happened in that room in the following four seconds. The temperature shifted very slightly toward him. And Sandrine, who was twenty-three and paying attention to everything, learned a thing that afternoon that she has never unlearned.

Plain sounds like not knowing.

She is fifty-one now. She teaches very well and people ask for her, and she has a habit she has never mentioned to anybody: when she is being listened to closely by somebody whose opinion she respects, her language goes up about two registers.

Not to confuse anybody. Never that. She would be appalled at the suggestion and it would be unfair.

It goes up because down feels dangerous.

She noticed properly last spring, teaching a room that happened to contain two people she found slightly intimidating, and hearing herself take a plain thing she says every week and dress it. The room got about eighty per cent of what it usually gets. The two intimidating people, she suspects, got nothing much either.

You have your own version. There was a room, probably when you were young, and you learned something in four seconds that you have obeyed for thirty years.

Nobody here is going to tell you that precision does not matter. The man in the seminar was right and his sentence was better.

But there is a verse where Paul uses simplicity as the name for the thing he is afraid of losing, and it is worth having.

He calls it simplicity and he is guarding it

There is a sentence in 2 Corinthians where Paul names what he is worried might be stolen from a church, and the word he chooses is startling.

But I fear, lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtilty, so your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ.2 Corinthians 11:3

The simplicity that is in Christ.

That is the thing at risk. Not their depth, not their doctrine in the abstract, not their sophistication. Simplicity, named as a possession worth guarding, in a sentence where the threat is described as subtilty.

Subtlety is the danger in that verse. Simplicity is the treasure.

And notice who is writing it. This is not somebody incapable of complexity. Romans exists. Paul can do subtlety at a level that has kept scholars occupied for two thousand years, and he uses that capacity to warn a church against losing something plain.

And plainness is a possession rather than a lack. That is not my reversal: the written word calls it the simplicity that is in Christ and names it as the thing worth protecting, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land in a woman who has been going up two registers since she was twenty-three.

And nothing here devalues what you know. The word has this written by the man who wrote Romans, and the Spirit is the one who lets a person hold real depth and plain speech in the same hand rather than trading one for the other.

What the two registers cost the room

Here is the practical part, and it is the reason this is worth an evening.

When Sandrine goes up, she is not teaching the room. She is answering the seminar.

That man is not there. He is fifteen years older than her and she has not seen him since, and there is a decent chance he has no memory of the exchange at all. But he is in the room every time somebody she respects is listening closely, and the material gets addressed to him.

Which means the eleven people who came to learn something get eighty per cent, because twenty per cent of the session is a reply to a sentence spoken in 1998.

That is not vanity. She is not showing off; she is defending herself against a room that no longer exists.

And you have nothing to prove in that room or any other. The word says it is a very small thing that I should be judged of you, or of man's judgment, and Paul says it about a church that was assessing him, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit about what you are.

And your standing does not rest on how you sound. The word says by grace are ye saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a floor under a woman who has been maintaining a register for twenty-eight years.

Nobody is telling you to be simplistic

I want that very plain, because this is the exact place where a message like this gets misread and somebody starts dumbing down.

Simple and simplistic are not the same word and the difference is everything.

Simplistic leaves things out that change the answer. Simple leaves in everything that changes the answer and takes out everything that does not, and that is considerably harder than complexity and takes considerably longer to prepare.

The two registers Sandrine goes up into are not more accurate. They are the same content in armor.

And the correction here is direction, not dilution. Nobody is asking you to know less, and if this article makes you a shallower teacher it has failed and you should ignore it.

And you are able to be plain without being thin. The word makes simplicity a thing in Christ rather than a reduction of Him, and the Spirit is the one who supplies the difference, which no amount of preparation can manufacture on its own.