“For we are not writing any other things to you than what you read or understand.” (II Corinthians 1:13)
Jessie was a matron in one of my early pastorates. As generous a soul as ever lived, she once made two bookcases for my office and assured me, “These are for you, so take them when you leave.” That was over 40 years ago, and today, those bookcases are in our bedroom, one on each side.
But Jessie had a little quirk that drove me up the wall. She would sometimes drop by the office and say,”Joe, what did you mean in that remark you made last week when we were standing in front of the church?” “What did you mean by what you told me yesterday?”
I learned to answer, “Jessie, whatever it was, I meant what I said and nothing else. There were no hidden meanings to the words.”
Jessie’s habit, no doubt picked up over a lifetime of conditioning, was in over-analyzing matters. She would walk away from a conversation and relive every word spoken, searching for hidden meanings and implied messages. Poor thing. That is not a happy way to exist, I’ll tell you.
The Apostle Paul was being harassed by some in the Corinthian church who accused him of saying one thing and doing another, insisting that his messages did not always convey the full story. In II Corinthians 1:13, he tells them to stop that, to take his words at face value. On this verse, John MacArthur says, “(Paul’s) continuing flow of information to the Corinthians was always clear, straightforward and understandable, consistent and genuine. Paul wanted them to know he was not holding anything back, nor did he have any secret agenda (10:11). He simply wanted them to understand all that he had written and spoken to them.”
The president in my lifetime who was gifted (afflicted?) with the plainspeaking gene was Harry Truman. Merle Miller wrote a book about Truman by that title, “Plain-Speaking,” in which he interviewed people who had known HST all his life. Almost to a person, they said the same thing about Truman, that he said what he meant and meant what he said.