Closed-mindedness. Is it a bad thing? Is it a good thing? As one t-shirt said, "If I kept an open mind, everything would fall out." Joking aside, there are people who just seem to legitimately not want to even consider another person's point of view. Maybe at a future time we'll talk about how to deal with the claim of closed-minded being applied to you. There are some helpful ways to deal with.

Today I want to address how we should think about talking with people who seem very, very closed. The first thing I want to point out is that pretty much everyone is closed. Pretty much everyone has a narrow view. That's the nature of truth. It is narrow. It is exclusive, and it does contradict other things. I think that should give us a little bit of patience with people.

By default, I don't walk out of my house each day thinking, "Well I hope someone will convince me of something new today." That doesn't mean I'm closed to learning new things or closed to surveying evidence. I'm not, but it does mean that we all are pretty much comfortable where we are, and so is any person we're going to talk to. From a spiritual perspective, certainly, people are not going to accept the truth of the Gospel without the work of the spirit.

Why are we tackling this question today? Over the last week I had 2 people each ask me, "What should I do with people who seem very closed-minded?" These people aren't timid people. One's in the military. Another is an outgoing individual, and they're both wondering, "Is it even worth it? Could it be fruitful to talk with someone who just seems very closed to anything about Christianity."

I gave this some thought, and here's what I want to say. I think when we approach the issue this way, understandably, what often happens, is that we diminish our trust in the sovereignty of God. That sounds really spiritual and you might be thinking, "Why do you say that? Why do you think that?" Here's the thing. We often think in terms of what we can do, right? If the floor needs to get cleaned in my house and I don't clean it and I say, "I'm waiting on the sovereignty of God," you're going to laugh at me. If anything gets done in a physical sense, for the most part, it's we that have to do it, but in a spiritual sense, and when we're talking about spiritual matters, we're not the only players in the game. As Greg Koukl has said in his book, "Tactics," man is 100 percent responsible for his part, and God is also 100 percent responsible for his part, and we need to trust that when we are faithful with the opportunities we have, that God will be faithful to accomplish his purposes, which he always does.

There are actually several potential avenues of fruitfulness in this conversation in conversations with people who seem closed.

The first is in a real sense that most conversations occur around other people, so the person you're talking with may very well come away not having their mind opened at all, not having even listened or countenanced anything you've said, but what about the people around you? There are 2 ways that you can affect them positively. One is obviously with the things you say. They're listening to this conversation. They're not in the conversation, so they're not guarding turf. They're not having to defend their point of view. They're just able to sit back and listen to the exchange and hopefully you have a well-reasoned point of view that will be persuasive to this person who is perhaps more open than the direct person you're talking with.

The second way you can hopefully have an influence on those observers to the conversation - Maybe it's the break room, maybe it's family dinner - is in your character and how you comport yourself. In these…