Weigh Your Words

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically from the audio and may contain small errors.

As the story goes, there was a woman in a village who maliciously gossiped about another lady and her family. Everything bad that she heard, everything bad that was even insinuated about this other woman, this woman would repeat to everybody that she possibly could. One day, she found out she was wrong and she had a change of heart. She had this woman all wrong. She doesn't know what to do, so she goes to the village elder and she asks the elder, how do I take back all the wrong that I've done? So the elder very wisely says, well go home and kill your chickens. Pluck their feathers, put them into a bag, and then come back here. But on the way back to me, I want you to take all those feathers that you've plucked, I want you to scatter them along the way. Just scatter them as you go. Don't even look at where you put them, just throw them out there. So the woman did that. She went home, she killed her chickens, she plucked their feathers,

she put them in a bag and on her way back to the elder, she just threw them out. And when she returned, the elder said to her, again very wisely, good, I'm glad that you've done that now, go back and pick up all the feathers that you've scattered. And the woman, astonished, said, well, by now, the wind has carried these feathers all around the village and beyond. And the elder said, well so it is with your malicious words. Not a whole lot of cure for that. Not a whole lot you can do to rectify that. In the book of Proverbs, time and time and time again it points to our words. Points to the things that we say. And we might say, it might be common to say that sticks and stones may break our bones, but words may never hurt us. That's really not true. Proverbs actually says that words are extremely powerful. They are potent things. Proverbs 25, 15 says, with patience a ruler may be persuaded and a soft tongue will break a bone.

1821, Proverbs 1821, death and life are in the power of the tongue and those who love it will eat its fruits. You see this also in the New Testament in James chapter 3 when it talks about the tongue and it likens our tongue to a rudder on a ship. I don't know if you have anything about ships, but they're really big and the rudder that steers them is very small. And it says your tongue is like that. That your tongue, even though the ship is large, it's guided by strong winds, there's a small rudder that steers everything. From what scripture tells us, our mouths are like loaded guns. Our words are like bullets. They're going to come out. They will come out, but how they come out determines the course of our lives.

And when we consider this, when we feel the weight of all of that, we should understand that we need wisdom. All the more need for wisdom, particularly with our words. And this is where we've been. This is last week and this week. And for the next two, we're going to be talking about wisdom. And this is our focus to kind of begin 2024. We started last week. I want to give you a very quick, like less than a minute recap. You can tell me if you want to. Okay, you should have sufficient time to tell me. Here we go. A minute recap. Wisdom is about God's perspective. It's about guidance and it's about meditation. Proverbs gives us God's perspective, which is wisdom. Wisdom is the accurate assessment of how God created life to work. Wisdom is also, it provides guidance, not formulas. So this is how life usually works, not how life always works. And lastly, it is intended for meditation. Proverbs, as you read them over time, should wash over you

so that we speak of in our sermon series here, The Tides of Wisdom. And as a church, we are reading a chapter of Proverbs a day. Today is January 7th, so you should be on Proverbs chapter 7 today. If you're not, you're like me. You're on Proverbs chapter 5. And that's okay. We need to read 2 today to catch up, okay? That's where we're at. We're doing that as a family. And if you want to follow along with that, if you're a technology person, then you can get on the Bible app. Excuse me. You can get on our church center app. There's Bible reading on that, but you can also get on UVersion. And UVersion is an app on your phone. It's a Bible app on your phone. And you can find the, you can find our church there, South Birla San Baptist Church. What we're doing this time round is we're doing 4 Proverbs for 2024. Last week, we talked about learning to fear God, right?

That was our, kind of our proverb for last week. This week, today, our proverb is, Weigh Your Words. Weigh Your Words. We're going to find that Jesus actually, more than just weigh our words, we're going to find that Jesus wants to redeem our words, since they are so powerful. And He actually wants to redeem them in order for us to change the future of those around us. So Jesus wants to redeem our words, and He wants those to redeem those in order to change the future of those around us. But first, we kind of need to get God's perspective on words. So let's do that. We're going to turn to Proverbs chapter 10. Proverbs chapter 10 verses 19 and 20. It says, talking about words, When words are many, transgression is not lacking. This is my new life verse, by the way, just saying. When words are many, transgression is not lacking, but whoever restrains his lips is prudent.

The tongue of the righteous is choice silver. The heart of the wicked is of little worth. Let's let this sink in just a little bit. Words are a heavy burden. If you're ever in a situation where you don't know what to say, what you're feeling is the heavy burden of words, because you know that what you say will be important. And you know that what you say will affect that person one way or the other. I'm just rolling with it. Okay, things fall all the time. Words are a heavy burden, and what these verses are telling us, 19 is telling us, keep your word count low. You don't need to fill the silence with words. Recognize their value. James 1, 19-20 says, every person needs to be quick to hear, slow to speak, and slow to anger. The anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God. And so remember that Proverbs is shaping our perspective. This burden or this weight of words, the heavy burden that we have, it should sober us.

Verse 20 is talking about how the tongue of the righteous is like choice silver. It means it's very valuable, it's very expensive, very heavy. It should not just be thrown around. And again, this is why Jesus wants to redeem these things. Their weight can accomplish much good. They can do a lot of bad, but they can do a lot of good too. And when they're handled correctly, they can truly change people's future. And I want to show you how. I'm going to show you, I'm going to look at Proverbs 10 again, and we'll look at the next verse. And we're going to talk about how Jesus really wants to redeem these words in us. Proverbs 10, 21 says, the lips of the righteous feed many, but fools die for lack of sense. Okay, just think about this question. If your words were someone's diet, how would they look? How would their soul look? If your words, what you spoke to somebody, if that was all they had, how would their soul look?

Would it look well nourished? Would it look a little, you know, are you too quick to criticize? If your words were somebody's diet. Proverbs 12, 25 says, anxiety in a man's heart weighs him down, but a good word makes him glad. I want you to consider people who spend their days hearing complaints. Okay, think about like a customer service representative. Okay, and if you ever worked a customer service rep job, I have. It was really horrible. Yes, I see that hand. It's hard, man, it's hard. Listen to people just whine all day long. And that's what you're supposed to do. I mean, it's kind of your job. You're to solve their problem. But I want you to think about that or think about somebody who listens to other people tear them down all day. Think about kids with parents who use condescending words. Okay, they don't get to pick what parents they have. That's the parents they got, but they got to they got to receive those words.

It's hard. Think about people with bosses who speak harshly with them just to kind of keep everybody on their toes. They're, you know, their bosses are like really mean and hard to please and all these things. Kind of keeps everybody on their toes. Proverbs what Proverbs trying to tell us is it displays the long term consequences of doing that. The long term consequences of using words that way and it invites us into wisdom. And so as wisdom is washing over us, it becomes clearer and clearer that the weight of our words is really too much. It's really a burden that we cannot bear on our own. If you think that you're somehow the master of words, okay, and you never mess up with your words. Really, we have to talk. I need to know all your secrets because it is it is so difficult. If you if you talk too much like me, I'm guilty of that. I know that's a shock.

But if I if you talk too much, you're going to say the wrong thing. If you don't talk enough, you're going to not speak when you should. And maintaining that maintaining a perfect record on that is hard. Winston Churchill says we are we are masters of the unsaid words, but slaves of those we let slip out. All of us say things that get us into trouble. We say things that hurt even unintentionally. We hurt people with our words. We say things that really we say things that can ruin other people's lives. People have said things that have ruined other people's lives. May not be your track record. Hopefully it's never your track record, but it is possible. Words are that powerful. You can do that. And this is why following Jesus means that we hand our words over to him. Okay. Jesus wants to use our words to nourish people. Jesus wants to use our words to nourish people in his hands.

We can help people grow. We can actually kind of water other people's souls and help them flourish and grow into something good. Here's two practical ways. I want to help you do it. Trying to stay practical as possible because we're in Proverbs. How can we not be practical? Okay. In the spirit, we can be quick to listen. In other words, we can say less and we can ask more. Say less, ask more. If your conversation skills consist of talking and waiting to talk, then talking again and waiting to talk, and there's never any listening in there. If you're not really interacting with the information that people are giving you, then you need to change your perspective on conversation. When you ask questions with an attentive heart, it really can change the dynamic of a conversation. This is what it means to be quick to listen and so to speak. It means to ask questions.

It doesn't mean to sit there in silence and wait for somebody to think of something fun to say. It means that you're probing, that you're asking, that you're showing interest, that you're really trying to listen. When the proverb talks about restraining your lips in prudence, it means asking questions. It means you don't assume that you know what they're going to say next. It means you wait and you ask questions. Jesus wants to nourish people through your conversations. He wants to feed them. He wants to water their souls. He wants to enrich them, to help them grow. The way that's going to happen is you asking questions and allowing that kind of room to happen in your actual conversations. So, first practical way, be quick to listen. Say less, ask more. Second, in the spirit, you can feed people good words. Now, I want to be careful here because sometimes whenever people say something like,

you need to feed people good words. Sometimes that means you need to be nice all the time and never say anything that's going to upset anybody and always be sweet. That's not what I mean. I don't mean we become pushovers. I don't mean we become welcome mats. I mean that we feed people good words. Words of truth, words of grace, words of kindness. I love this. I'm not always the kindest driver. It's a weak point for me. The Lord's working on it. This path lives like two days ago. There was this person that was going, I mean, they might have been going like 30 in a 60. That makes me nuts. I'm sorry. It does. It's really hard for me to just, I'm like, why are you going so slow? Okay, so, it's fine. We don't need to reenact the whole thing. But I definitely went around them quickly. Not dangerously. Don't tell my wife. I went around them quickly, and as I did, I honked my horn, because I'm that guy.

I am. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I don't know. It's the disappointed user pastor that I am that guy. I honked at them. And they very sweetly just waved at me. They were like, it was so disarming that it made me bust out laughing. As I was driving, I was so mad. And I'm honking, just waving at me. Kindness. That lady fed me kindness. She looked like a college student, just fed me kindness. Okay. And that was, it was great. It was a good illustration, because I was not trying to nourish that person with my communication to her. But, you know, she had whatever she had going on, and she was very sweet, and it really just did, it just disarmed me. Look, man, we, by using our words well, by feeding people, by waving when they honk, by doing that, we can actually change people's lives. And I don't mean this like the power comes from us, but I mean that it really does change them kind of one day at a time.

And I want you to think about it. I want you to think, how does the Bible describe Jesus? Right? John 1, Jesus is the Word of God. He's the Word of God. We kind of see this in creation whenever God was creating the world, He spoke it into existence. He's using words to do that. And whenever Jesus came, He's ushering in this kingdom of light and life, and how is He doing that? He's doing that by proclaiming the truth. He's speaking truth. Jesus can change people's lives around us as we nourish them with our words. I'm sure that you have had these experiences, I've had these experiences, where somebody comes up to you, well, I guess we've had positive and negative, I'm just meaning the positive. You had times where people came up to you, and they will say, you know, look, that thing that you said to me, that note that you wrote me, that little thing that you did, it meant the world to me, man.

I mean, it really helped me out in a really dark time. And sometimes you don't hear about it, sometimes you don't hear about it ever. But, man, using your words to feed people, to nourish people, understanding that your words can do that is really half the battle. Because if I'm thinking, like, how am I going to nourish the people around me, it's definitely going to make me, you know, I got a good friend who has a rule when he's talking too much, that he says, I'm going to say every third thing, okay? I'm going to say every third thing, okay? That's a great rule for me, because there's definitely like, I mean, at least more than half of what I say, I don't need to say. So, that's a good rule. And if that works for you, then do that. Then you don't always need to say what you're thinking, and you don't always need, even if you're right, even if you're accurate, sometimes you don't need to say it.

Sometimes you just need to ask a question, not a leading one, but an action one. You know, you ask a question, you ask how they're doing, you ask kind of what's going on. It's incredibly disarming. Jesus can change people's lives through your words as you nourish them. Okay. Well, look at two more things that Jesus can do. He can nourish. What can he do? Let's look at Proverbs 16, Proverbs 16 and 21 and 23. It says, the wise of heart is called discerning, and sweetness of speech increases persuasiveness. 23. The heart of the wise makes his speech judicious and adds persuasiveness to his lips. I want you to notice the combination here in 21 of discernment and persuasion. Look in verse 23, the combination of judgment and persuasion. And you see the inverse in Proverbs 10, 11. So I want to look at that. It says, the mouth of the righteous is a fountain of life, but the mouth of the wicked conceals violence.

It's very interesting, this whole combination, because it's talking about using your heart using your words to persuade the right people to do the right thing. So you're persuading toward justice. You're persuading toward discernment. You are persuading toward these things. And you're not concealing violence. You're doing the opposite. You're naming it. You're pointing it out. You're saying, hey, this is wrong. Okay. So this is using our words. Proverbs often points out that leaders need to make things right, to call out oppression, to correct those that are seeking to scam other people. Many times in the Proverbs it says that the Lord hates an unjust weight. What that means is in the market, so you say, I want to buy like, I don't know, a pound of oranges or something, they say, okay, well, they have a scale. And on one side of the scale, they have a weight that should be a pound.

Okay. So they put the weight on that side, and then they put oranges on the other, and as soon as those things balance out, then you have a pound of oranges. Right? Well, then what people would do to cheat other people is they would make that pound heavier or lighter, however it worked out for them. And then they would, so people would pay for a pound, but only get .8 pounds. I don't know. Right? They'd get less. So that people were making more money by being dishonest. This is what God's talking about in Proverbs when he's saying, look, there's, in the marketplace, there's bad things going on. There's scamming. And many times in Proverbs it's saying that leaders need to call that stuff out, need to see it, name it, and say it's not good. There is a corollary today. His name is Mark Rober. I don't know if you've ever seen Mark Rober, but he is a shining example

of seeking justice. And he uses technology and engineering to catch ports pirates and phone scammers and car thieves. And I want to show you a video of what he did here. Can we roll that beautiful bean footage? It's almost there. I feel it. And we cannot hear it. That's really sad. Hmm. It's no secret. Texting while driving. Hello, San Jose Sharks fans. I want to remind you to please be safe on your drive home tonight. It's no secret. Texting while driving or just distraction driving in general is super dangerous. After all, you don't want to look like this guy. Public shaming. Public shaming. So if you didn't catch it, people texting and driving, pointing them out in the crowd at the San Jose Sharks game. Okay. Right? Public shaming. And let me just say, like there's a certain amount of like deliciousness when you watch that. You're like, yes. Catching people doing the wrong thing.

So good. Right? Like, yes. We love that on some level. We hate it when it's us, but we love it when it's other people. But all Mark Rober can do is point out flaws. All he can do is shame people. That's really the most he can do. I'm not even blaming him for it. But if he wants to stop people texting and driving, his pretty much his only option is shaming people. Right? In hopes of stopping them. In hopes of making the roads safer. But Jesus does something better. Jesus can actually use our words to establish justice. Not just catch people. Not just shame people. Not just guilt people into changing behavior. But actually establish justice. How does he do this? Two practical ways. Two practical ways Jesus uses your words. The first, by the spirit, we can speak justly. Okay? That's kind of a, it's in the book of Micah. Speaking justly. Or acting justly. By the spirit, we can speak justly.

What does that mean? How can we establish justice this way? We can resist gossip. When somebody is, when somebody is gossiping toward us, we can pull back and go, no, I'm not really interested in that. We can resist core suggesting. Okay? We can resist those things. And it's not to shame people, but it is to verbally put a stop to it by not engaging. We can put a stop to other speech. We can put a stop to divisive speech. We can put a stop to gossip. We can use our words to warn our church family against sin. Okay? And look, please don't use this and go like, okay, now I have the God-given responsibility to tell everybody what they're doing wrong. No, it's not exactly how that should work. But what I'm saying is when you are convicted to warn somebody of something, you can use those words to actually establish justice. You can use your words when you have wronged somebody.

You can use your words to repent fully. And by doing all of those things, you are establishing justice in a circle that's about five people big. But the more you do that, the more the Lord can establish justice as it goes. You don't have to be a politician to change people's behavior. You don't have to be some social media influence to do that. You can use your own words. Jesus can use your words to establish justice in the small circles that you travel in. Think about what your work would look like if you began to change conversation and not look, not weird, but just that you began conversation about different things than just what the Rangers did. Now, I love the Rangers. I'm excited for them. I mean, they won the World Series. It's great. I'm not a fan, but I love it for the actual fans. Okay, great. It's good. There's something better to talk about than the Rangers win.

There really is. I know it's great, but there's something better to talk about than the NFL playoffs. There's something better to talk about than those things. Yeah, you might need a lead in there. That's great. I'm not saying never talk about sports, but I am saying, how are you using your conversation to establish good patterns in the lives of the people that are around you, at least when they're around you? There's a way that you can do that. There's a way that you can take responsibility for that, and Jesus wants to do that. That's actually what he wants to do to change people's lives. The second thing that we can do to establish justice is that we can pray toward justice. We can pray for God's kingdom to come for his will be done, just like Jesus taught us. We can pray God's kingdom comes, will be done. We can pray against evil schemes. We can pray if we perceive that somebody is being lied to or led astray or just in a web of sin

and they need to get untangled in front of them. We can pray for them. There is a popular sentiment when a natural disaster happens in Haiti. When that happens, I don't mean to be flipping, I'm just picking one. It was terrible, but when it happens, a lot of times when people do say, hey, sending prayers to Haiti. The popular response to that online is, hey, we don't need your prayers. We need you to come build a house. I understand this. I get it. You want people not just to just flippantly do something online. You want them to actually do something physical to help people. I understand that. But the truth is that there are some things you and I simply can't do. We can't do it. We can't stop a hurricane from going to Haiti. We can rebuild a house. That's cool. But we can't stop that hurricane. When you're talking about dealing with violence and you're praying against violence,

what do you think is going to stop violence? Education? Has it? Has education stopped violence? Not even close. Education is great. My mom was an educator for years, decades. Education is great. It doesn't stop violence. Shame does not change behavior in the long run. It might stop somebody from doing something immediately, but it doesn't change behavior in the long run. All these things don't change it because they don't change the heart. They don't change the heart. When you don't change the heart, if you have a husband who is a total crank and just grights at everybody and is so mean to his whole family and all this thing, well, you can maybe financially incentivize him to stop doing those things. Fine, I guess. But he's still a crank. He's still going to find ways to disparage people, to be mean to his family. He's still going to do all those things. No matter what you do,

if you're not changing his heart, then you're not changing that behavior. You're just changing the outlet. Prayer can change the heart. Prayer can change the heart. When we're praying toward justice, when we're praying toward change, we can do something about it. Our prayers can actually help establish justice. It's not always that we can just use words to stop what's going on, but you can pray for God to establish justice, to change hearts. So Jesus can change lives by using our words to nourish people. He can change lives by changing hearts, so using our words to establish justice. Here's the last thing. Proverbs 16, 24, and Proverbs 12, 18, I'm going to read them together. Gracious words are like a honeycomb, sweetness to the soul and health to the body. 18, there is one whose rash words are like sword thrusts, but the tongue of the wise brings healing.

Jesus can actually heal with your words, and it doesn't mean this. I don't mean this in a strictly metaphoric sense. I mean this in actuality. I mean physical healing. If you would consider the Journal of Orthopedic and Sports Physical Therapy, it's an actual journal, they came out with an article called The Impact of Language on Musculoskeletal Rehabilitation. I think the only one following now is Drew Ivey, and that's okay. Rehab, right? When you go to rehab, the words you use when you are helping somebody rehab. That's what that article is saying. And what that article finds, it says, we have found that the words we use, as people who help other people rehab, the words that we use have significant outcomes, on the clinical outcome, significant impact, excuse me, on the clinical outcomes of these patients. So when you have somebody rehabbing, what you say to them actually determines,

helps determine the course of their outcomes. They can heal faster if you use different words. That's insane, but that's real. That's real. Even those who are only interested in musculoskeletal rehabilitation can see that it's real. Anecdotally, we've experienced this, right? Words can lower stress. Words can change heart rates. Words can ease tension. Physical things that are going on in your body can be affected by words alone. Proverbs 17, 22 says, a joyful heart is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones. You tell me the difference. Tell me the difference. When you yell at somebody and they yell back, okay, versus when you yell at somebody and they speak calmly to you, it's the world. It's the world of difference. That's a totally different conversation. One might end in 911, okay, and the other is completely diffused, completely calm. And it's just word choice. It's just tone.

It's the only difference between those two things. Words are extremely powerful. And by the way, when you're yelling and they're speaking very softly to you, I promise, no matter how mad you are, it will get increasingly difficult to yell. You can be mad, but if they're not getting mad with you, you get calmer, whether you like it or not. I've experienced that. There are many ways that Jesus does this, that Jesus heals people through our words. I'm going to point to one specifically. And then I'm going to call the band back up here. In the Spirit, you and I can share the gospel with people. We can use our words to share the gospel. We can share the gospel with people in a way that's clear, concise, beneficial. I just want to give you two scenarios. Maybe you've told a few coworkers about how you came to faith. You've talked, you know, just kind of repeatedly, just drip, drip, drip day after day, right?

You're talking about what Jesus has done in your life. And it's not always miracles and rainbows sometimes. You're walking through some hard stuff. I mean, it's the good, the bad, and the ugly of what's happened in your life. But you've been faithful to kind of tell your coworkers about it. And you have one person, one coworker in particular, who's interested in those details. What you share with them can be life-changing for them, can bring spiritual healing to them. And it doesn't just, it's not just metaphoric. I mean, it changes their lives. It can restore their relationships. It can change the trajectory of not just their lives, but their kids' lives and their grandkids' lives. And lives of the people that are around them. Maybe, another scenario, maybe you have a student or a child or someone in your care, and they are listening to you, they are watching you, they have you, you know, just,

they are making sure, they're checking breathing patterns. I mean, they are watching you, okay? They are studying your movements here. And they are listening to you share about God's love. And they are listening to you share how Jesus has changed you. And they know you're not perfect. They're checking breathing patterns. They know your flaws. But they know that something has changed in you. They know that you're different somehow. Your verbal testimony, what you actually tell them happened, is extremely important. It is the difference between life and death, literally, and it's your words. And this is what we pray for. This is what we pray for. When somebody believes, truly when somebody believes that Jesus is the Son of God, it brings deep salvation and change to them. It changes their lives forever. And the difference between that happening and not happening a lot of times is just you speaking up.

It's you starting a conversation. It's you being faithful to just talk about what happened. Maybe it's you responding to a question graciously instead of in a condescending tone. The difference is maybe that you kept praying for them. All those things can make a huge difference. And Jesus, then, is using your words to heal them. I want to call the band back up. Maybe today it's not you that is not the Son of God. Maybe you're speaking the words of healing. Maybe you need that healing right now. Maybe that's something that you're kind of going through. You need somebody to speak over you. You need somebody to speak words of encouragement and life to you. You need somebody to help you remember the gospel that you aren't under guilt or shame. You need somebody to help you remember that you are not just sitting there waiting for God to smite you when you do the next wrong thing but that God has a plan for you,

a wonderful plan for your life. And He wants you to do amazing things. He wants you to help impact people with your words. But if you're in a bad space, you're never going to get there. You need help. I'm going to be back here. And I've been praying all week that the Lord would give me a word. So whenever you go back there and we start talking, my hope is that the Lord is going to use my words to be a blessing to you. My prayer is that our whole church would be praying that way, right? That we'd all be hoping that our words could be a blessing, that our words can feed, our words can heal, our words can call out things that are wrong in a way that's honoring to Jesus.

Lord, we love you. We know that you are in control. We know that you spoke the world into existence with a word and that you want to use our words for your glory. Help us to do that.