FreeTruth

Whereas I know that what comes out of my mouth reflects what is in my heart (Mark 9:22, 23; Matthew 12:33-35);

Whereas I will give an account for, and will either be rewarded for every good word or will suffer loss for every idle word (Matthew 12:36, 37);

Whereas I am aware of an emphatic biblical concern about the tongue;

[and] Whereas I am very aware (frankly with profound grief) that what I have long called “the dirtying of the Christian mouth” is a significant moral sin in our day–I have compiled (over the years) a series of personal resolutions for my tongue. I share them with you now for my own personal renewal and (if God is so pleased) for your personal reflection.

1. Resolved: To speak, sing, and proclaim the excellencies of the Triune God everyday. I do not want a single day to pass during which I have not–in word and/or song–spoken to God and others of the surpassing worth of my God, and of His transcendant beauty.

2. Resolved: To proclaim Jesus to the lost in personal witness as a matter of normal, at-least-once-a-week practice and privilege. Since “witness” is a defining term for a NT Christian, I will strive to find at least one lost sinner every week and use my tongue to testify of the grace and gospel of Christ for the salvation of that soul.

3. Resolved: To speak grace, gratitude, and commendation to others, and for and about others, as frequently and faithfully as each conversation will allow. As it is my calling to “outdo others in showing honor” (Romans 12:10), and as there is always at least one thing in every human to honor (if nothing else that he or she is made in the image of God), I will look for the good to honor and will endeavor to put that honor into words.

4. Resolved: Never to speak negatively about other human beings except wherein it is necessary to minister truth and grace either to them or to others. As God forbids any word on my tongue except what “is good for building up” (Ephesians 4:29), I dare not indulge any negative word about anyone. And if I should sin in this way I must confess it to God and others with all haste.

5. Resolved: Never to further any unsubstantiated and/or unnecessary account of any sin or ill or sorrow or weakness of any other human being. As it is manifest that all tale-bearing is sin (whether derived from my neighbor or the news channel), I must guard against spreading any rumor about either friend or foe unless I know with absolute certainty that it is true, and if true, necessary to be shared.

More to come.

To wrap up my posts on the tongue let me give you one final step toward cleaning up our mouths.

Step Five: Gratitude and Wonder

In Ephesians 5:3, 4 Paul tells us not to be crude and vulgar, profaning the sacred gift of sexuality. But that’s not all he says; he also says that we should speak and think of these things with “thanksgiving”. Over in 1 Timothy 4:1-5 he says something similar: we sanctify God’s gifts of sex and food by thanking Him for them.

Here’s how to keep your heart from profaning things holy and beautiful: be actively, consciously, insistently, reverently thankful for them. Think of them and then treat them as holy and precious gifts from God. This putting on of thankfulness will help you to put off profanity.

It’s hard to treat with dishonor something that you are consciously thankful for as a gift from God. So spend time thanking God His name, for His church, for His Law, for His gift of sex, for all things holy and good and beautiful. Use your tongue to praise the holy and good, and you’ll find your tongue reticent to speak flippantly about the same.

Nothing so mortifies sins of the tongue like the right use of the tongue. Nothing so lifts us up from the gutter of the profane like a love and celebration of the sacred.

God help us to tame our tongues by turning them loose with praise.

Step Four: Trust God

I have found that the single greatest help in the restraining of my angry tongue from sinful outbursts has been a strong, sustained, conscious trust in the sovereignty of God.

Think about it: normally why do people curse? It’s because we get angry. Why do we get angry? Because either people or circumstances do not treat us the way we want.

But who controls and governs the people in our lives or the circumstances that fill them? God. That means that when we curse in anger it is because in that moment we are not trusting or resting in the sovereign purposes of God for us in that moment. We’re mad at what God has ordained. Cursing is anger expressed which is really unbelief at work.

A few years back I made a picnic table. It took hours of planning and labor and (as you would expect with me) sweat. Within a week or two of when I finished it–and I think even before we had a chance to use it more than once or twice, a storm hit. Heavy winds blew, knocking down a tree. Guess where it landed? Right on my table.

How do you think I responded? Believe it or not, I laughed. It was a good hearty, cheerful, full-bodied laugh of faith. For somehow in that moment, I was conscious of the fact that God rules over wind and trees and where trees trees land–and God must have had a reason for landing one on my handiwork.

Faith in a sovereign God made me laugh at that moment when at other times, when I have not been God-aware, I have not. Trust in a soveriegn God made me laugh at calamity; it never even crossed my mind to curse or even come close.

I wish it was always easy to keep from the angry outburst. What I have found is that the more I live in the shadow of God’s throne, conscious that He reigns over every detail of life, including smashed tables, hammer-smashed thumbs, dents to the car, and the flat out crises of life, the less I get angry or succumb to anger’s outbursts against God or others or things. The more I trust sovereignty, the less i even think about cursing the problems or people in my life.

Step Three: Hope

Some of us may hear our speech patterns and despair that we can ever clean them up. Don’t.

Just because we may be far removed from where God wants us to be does not mean that we cannot get there from here; it only means that we have a long way to go.

In all my years I’ve never figured out a way to get from anywhere to any other where except to take a first step. The fact that there is a long way to go need not deter us from going. Let’s move!

Start today: pray that God gives you awareness of when you’re about to sin with your mouth or just have. Ask Him for grace to have a vigilant mind. This will help you to have one victory here; another there. One good word choice to restrain or change the tongue will lead to another. And while you may never get to perfection, you’ll sure make progress.

If you curse or use profanity one less time than you did yesterday, that’s one less sin. And be sure of this: that’s growth; growth that will lead to more.

Have hope in the power of grace!

In the battle to clean up our words we come to another key element.

Step Two: Embrace Grace

When Isaiah came to grips with his dirty mouth he right away found grace to have it forgiven (Isiah 6:5-7). God forgives dirty mouths like he forgives everything else we’ve ever done wrong.

As you confess your sins, realize that God is faithful and just to forgive it (1 John 1:9). Two things to keep in mind: Jesus died for your dirty mouth, and Jesus didn’t have one. Because He had a clean mouth, His cleanness is counted as yours. Your record before God–based on the imputed clean mouth of Christ–is that you have never cursed, never been profane, never been potty-mouthed at all. Infact you’ve always said the perfect, right, clean and pure thing!

Praise God in Christ for a blood-bought forgiveness and a perfect righteousness in which before God we stand. To be sure don’t let your forgveness in Christ become a license to sin, but also don’t let your battles with profanity become a battle with condemnation.

Live in the power and freedom of a clean record before God. Then go out and seek to sin no more.

Before I go any further I want to clarify something I wrote yesterday by emphasizing it. In my first couple of paragraphs I was not endorsing the use of the s- or f- words as if they really, in today’s culture and use, are valid. I tried to qualify that at the end of those comments but at least one has thought that maybe I was not strong enough in what I said.

Folks, when a word has an overwhelmingly vulgar and base sense connected to it in a given time and place–even if there is a strict literal meaning of that word that is not vulgar, it is the height of foolishness (at best) to use that word. More likely the choice to use that word even in a strict literal way would evidence a carnal desire to sound edgy, and/or a callous disregard for others and for the name and testimony of Christ. Avoid these words because even if you think you are using a valid word in a valid way, you’ll be about the only one who thinks so. In such a case you may not be guilty of vulgarity, but you will be guilty of something worse: a lack of love and concern for others.

Now that said, I want to be sure to include in these posts a few helps as to how to move toward the cleaning up or sanctifying of our words. Over the next few days I’ll suggest five steps toward a cleaner mouth. I hope they provoke growth and holiness in us all.

Step One: Integrity

I think the first step toward cleaning up our mouths is being honest that they are dirty. If the holy, godly, mighty prophet Isaiah admitted a dirty mouth (Isaiah 6:5), we can be pretty sure that we need to admit it too.

Let’s be honest: all of us are at least tempted to curse and be profane. I’m not talking necessarily about certain four-letter words. Your curses may be words that others consider innocent. You can be cursing by saying “Phooey!!” if the word is coming out in anger; or by saying “Idiot” if your heart is defiling and denegrating another human being made in the image of God.

People often say that because words are used so frequently and mindlessly they lose their meaning so that when people use them they may not really be cursing in ther hearts at all. I suppose that it’s possible, in a given moment, to use a word mindlessly, but I’m not sure that that means cursing has not happened. I still would maintain that these words are chosen at some level precisely because they carry a certain sound and cultural meaning that satisfy the flesh at that moment.

Why don’t more people say “Phooey!” instead of “D**n”? I think it’s because the latter feels better to an angry heart than the former does. Why do so many exclaim the “s” word instead of some other word for excrement? Folks, the words we use, we use because they sound/feel sufficiently nasty to express our anger, naughty to satisfy our flesh, edgy to sound cool, or titillating to get attention. We need the integrity to confess that we use them for these reasons, and ask God to forgive the sinful heart that produced them.

It does us no good to make believe there’s no profanity or cursing in our hearts. Integrity admits it, and integrity gets us moving in a new direction. Why not start here and go to God with an honest heart?

S**t and f**k are not, in themselves, bad words. In their original meanings and still in some places they are simply synonyms for excrement and copulation respectively. Profanity is not made up of words with four letters. Profanity is a state of the heart. What makes a person profane is not the collection of letters and words he uses, but the angry or dirty or naughty or titillating intent of the heart when he uses them.

It is possible theoretically to use the “s” or “f” word without being profane at all, if one uses them as simple straight-forward terms for waste or copulation. I would not recommend doing this, since in fact cultural use has so influenced our perception of these terms that they are equated with profanity even if no profanity is intended. If at all possible, unless we have a really good reason for it, we need not risk confusing people by using words that they think are dirty just because we know a strict literal meaning that allows their use. Why bother when there are plenty of other more reputable words to use?

Apparently though, there are times when really strong words are justified. Paul seems to use a strong, even socially edgy term for excrement in Philippians 3:8. The Greek word that the ESV translates “rubbish” should more accurately be rendered dung or manure or excrement. Some argue that the term he chooses (skubalah) goes beyond a mere reference to waste; that it is a colloquial term meant to communicate the repulsiveness and filthiness of waste. They argue that it might even be equivalent to a bold, disgusted use of the word “s**t” (see Mark Driscoll/Doug Wilson, Chapter Two of Driscoll’s Religion Saves). At least Mr. Driscoll, whose ministry I highly respect in many ways, seems to find in this some justification for the use of edgy, even crude terms in ministry and life.

Having read their sources and the Theological Dictionary of New Testament Words’ entry on skubalah, I am not convinced that their conclusion is at all necessary or accurate. The term Paul uses clearly does speak of the righteousness produced by our good works as no better than waste. And Paul is clearly trying to communicate that we should think of our self-made righteousnes in the most vile and repulsive of categories.

But this is not to say that Paul is coming anywhere near to cursing or being profane, or justifying the use of profanity. He’s simply using a strong term of revulsion in its literal sense to describe what is truly revolting in the sight of God: the dung of self-made righteousness. Friends: any attempts at creating a righteousness of our own before a holy God are as revolting and disgusting in God’s sight as a pile of filthy fresh stinking dung is in ours.

Granted, there is shock in Paul’s words, but there is no profanity. He is not using words about waste because he regularly thinks about waste or lingers at the bathroom level in his mind. He simply tries to find the strongest word he can think of to describe the filth of human righteousness. Paul is not speaking of the vile for profane reasons; nor is he using words that refer to holy and sacred matters irreverently. He’s simply calling self-made righteousness what it is.

To conclude from this that we can freely use words about filth or sex or hell or damnation without careful regard for their vile or holy or fearsome significance is to go beyond what is allowed. In my opinion, it is to be profane.

Am I making any sense?