Watch Those Words!

Neal Pollard

It has been said, “Remember to taste your words before you spit them out!”  Too many times in my life, I have regretted my failure to heed that wisdom.  Our words have meaning and we too often minimize the impact our speech and rhetoric has on our hearers.  As a preacher, I must face that fact every time I preach or teach.  But, it is an ironclad truth for us all.  What we say really matters!

Adolf Hitler was quoted in the October 6, 1930, edition of time as saying, “All epoch-making revolutionary events have been produced not by the written but by the spoken word.”  That is frightening, given what evil Hitler perpetrated through his words.  He is a prime example of the power of our words.  Solomon informs us that “death and life are in the power of the tongue” (Prov. 18:21).  Jesus ties our tongue to our eternal destiny, saying, “Every careless word that people speak, they shall give an accounting for it in the day of judgment.  For by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned” (Matt. 12:36-37).

Think about how widely that impacts our lives and their influence.  What about when we engage in gossip, idle speculation, surmising, and innuendo with our words?  What about conniving and manipulating words?  What about those words we speak that give false comfort to those engaged in sin and immorality?  What about dogmatic words we speak, equating our preferences, proclivities, and personal judgments with Bible truth and passing them off to others as divine law?  What about those angry words, spit out without filter or forethought?  What about vindictive, bitter, or arrogant speech?

It is sobering to think about how often our tongues can trip up our travels down the road of life!  Proverbs 4:24 says to put away a deceitful mouth and devious speech.  Paul says to put aside “anger, wrath, malice, slander, and abusive speech from your mouth” (Col. 3:8).  What are these and so many other passages admonishing us to do?  In essence, we are urged to bite our tongues when they are prone to produce their poisons.  How we all need to measure our words before they take shape and fly away!  There is an African proverb that apparently goes, “Quarrels end, but words once spoken never die.”  The Russians say, “A spoken word is not a sparrow. Once it flies out, you can’t catch it.”  Oh, that all of us will say, “Set a guard, O Lord, over my mouth; keep watch over the door of my lips” (Ps. 141:3).