Let Your Yes Be Yes

Can I be honest about something?

I don’t usually have a hard time speaking my mind. Ask anyone who knows me. But there is one specific situation that still makes me go quiet, and I didn’t fully understand it until I started paying attention.

When I am not confident about a topic. When I feel out of my depth. When vulnerability feels like too high a price.

That is when my yes stops being fully yes. And my silence stops being wisdom.

It becomes something else. A way of staying safe. A way of staying in the room without really being in it.

And I carried that pattern for years without naming it.

The Loophole We Don’t Talk About
When Jesus is teaching in Matthew 5, He is speaking to people who had built an entire system around managed truth. You could swear by heaven, or by earth, or by Jerusalem, each oath carrying a different level of weight, a different level of accountability.

It sounded serious. But underneath, it was a way of sounding truthful without fully being accountable.

Jesus doesn’t adjust that system. He dismantles it.

Heaven is not a workaround. It is God’s throne. Earth is not neutral ground. It is His footstool. There is no category of speech where God is not already present.

Which means the loopholes were never protecting anything. They just gave the illusion of control.

And then He says something that feels almost too simple. Let your yes be yes and your no be no.

No reinforcement. No verbal padding. No escape hatch.

Because the goal was never to find better words.

The goal is to become the kind of person who doesn’t need them.

My Quieter Kind of Loophole
I never built elaborate verbal escape hatches. Mine was simpler.

Silence.

For several years at Black Hills Cowboy Church, I would sit with thoughts about what I was learning, reactions to sermons, questions that wouldn’t leave me alone, and I kept most of it to myself.

Not because I was dishonest. But because putting my real thoughts out there felt vulnerable in a way I wasn’t ready for.

What if I was wrong?
What if I didn’t know enough?
What if speaking up cost me something?

So I showed up. I served. I did the job I was assigned.

And I kept the most honest part of myself tucked away where it couldn’t be challenged or changed.

James 5 puts it plainly. Above all, let your yes be yes and your no be no.

Don’t reach for stronger language. Don’t soften what needs to be said. Just stay steady.
But I was doing a version of the opposite.

I wasn’t overstating. I was understating. Withholding.

And the gap between what I was actually thinking and what I was willing to say was quietly costing me, and maybe the people around me too.

The Tap on the Shoulder
About a year ago, I was in a conversation encouraging someone else to step into what they were called to do.

And right in the middle of that conversation, I felt the Holy Spirit ask me the same question.

"What are you waiting for?"

It wasn’t loud. It wasn’t dramatic. But it was clear.

And I knew exactly what it meant.

So I started writing. Just putting my honest thoughts into words, out loud, where people could read them and respond.

It felt exposed. I wasn’t entirely comfortable with it.

But I did it anyway.

And something shifted.

Pastor Isaac started engaging with what I was writing, encouraging it, challenging it, pushing back on it. Our church community started responding.

What began as a quiet act of obedience has become one of the most significant things in my growth.

Not because I became an expert.

But because I stopped hedging and just said the true thing.

My yes finally became yes.

The Gap Words Can’t Close
Here is what I have learned about the moments when we reach for stronger language or retreat into silence.

Both usually point to the same thing, a gap.

A gap between what we say and what we do.

Between who we want to be and who we have proven ourselves to be.

Between the thought we are having and the words we are willing to speak.

And we try to manage that gap. With intensity. With hedging. With silence. With whatever keeps us feeling in control.

But words were never meant to carry that weight.

Silence was never meant to be a hiding place.

God is not just interested in cleaning up our language. He is forming something deeper, a kind of wholeness where our inner life and our outer words actually match.

Where we are not divided. Not hedging. Not hiding.

Where we stop needing loopholes because we are no longer trying to live in two directions at once.

The Christian tradition has a word for this. Sanctification.

It is the slow, grace-driven work of God forming us from the inside out. Not just changing what we do, but reshaping who we are. Unifying our heart.

Wesley called it moving toward perfect love, not moral flawlessness, but an undivided heart fully oriented toward God, where the gap between our inner life and our outer words gradually closes.

Not through willpower. Not through better communication.

Through surrender, over time, to the God who is already present in every word we speak.
That is not a communication technique.

That is what it looks like to be made new.

What It Looks Like Now
I still feel the pull toward silence. When vulnerability feels expensive, staying quiet still feels safer.

I don’t think that instinct ever fully disappears.

But this kind of formation does not happen in private.

It happens in relationship.

It happens when we submit our honest thoughts to community, when we let people see what we actually think, push back on it, challenge it, and help refine it.

That is what writing this blog has been for me.

Not just a personal discipline, but a communal one.

Pastor Isaac’s challenges have shaped my thinking. Your responses have deepened my faith.

The willingness to say the true thing out loud, in community, is one of the ways God does His forming work in us.

John Wesley understood this. He didn’t just preach transformation. He built communities around it.

Because an undivided heart is not formed in isolation. It is formed in the company of people who will tell us the truth and stay with us while we grow into it.

That is what your yes being yes looks like in community.

Not just honest words, but an honest life, lived openly, accountably, with people who know you well enough to notice the gap.

So maybe the question is worth sitting with.

Where is your yes not fully yes?

Where is your silence not wisdom, but self-protection?

What would it look like to just say the true thing, not perfectly, not confidently, but honestly, and let your community help you grow into it?

Because integrity is not built in the moment we speak. It is built in the life we live afterward.

And it starts with telling the truth.

A Question to Sit With
Is there a true thing you have been withholding, from a person, from your community, from God, because vulnerability felt too expensive?

What would it cost you to say it?

And what might it cost you, and the people around you, to keep staying quiet?

A Prayer
Lord, I confess that I am better at managing my words than surrendering them. I have used silence as a hiding place and careful language as a way of staying in control.

Forgive me for the gap between what I truly think and what I am willing to say.

Form in me the kind of wholeness where my inner life and my outer words match, where I am not divided, not hedging, not hiding.

Give me the courage to let my yes be yes and my no be no.

Surround me with people who will tell me the truth and stay with me while I grow into it.

And where vulnerability feels too expensive, remind me that You already know the truth, and You are not afraid of it.

Amen.