Sermon Tone Analysis

May the Words of My Mouth

 

*October 7, 2007*

*Ephesians 4:29-30*

* *

A Pastor relates this story from his childhood: I remember one time as a child that my mother actually washed my mouth out with soap.

She took me to the bathroom sink, rubbed the bar of soap around in my mouth, and then rinsed it out and made me go to my room.

Do you know what I had said?

I think I had said, "Shut up!" to my sister.

Now why should my mother wash my mouth out with soap for saying, "Shut up!" to my sister?

She did it because she believed Jesus when he said, "It is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a man, but what comes out of the mouth, this defiles a man" (Matthew 15:11).

I had made myself dirty by saying, "Shut up," to my sister, and my mother had a white-hot zeal for my purity.

So she used an unforgettable object lesson.

I think she did right and I have risen up to call her blessed even this past week on her birthday.

"But really!" someone will say, "What's the big deal with saying, 'Shut up,' to your sister?

It's not swearing.

It's not taking the name of the Lord in vain.

It's not a dirty word.

Why get so worked up?

What's really so bad about it?"

The answer is that when I said, "Shut up!" to my sister, it was mean.

There was no affection and no good will and no kindness in it.

It was ugly.

There was no moral beauty, no holiness, no love.

To use Paul's phrase in Ephesians 4:29, it was a "rotten word."

It came from a garbage pile of pride and one-upmanship and anger and resentment—all very normal between siblings, and all very sinful.

Beware lest you grow accustomed to sin because it is so normal!

But what I thank God for more than that my mother was intensely moral is that she was intensely Christian.

She knew that soap in the mouth couldn't touch the dirt in my heart.

If she had thought it could, she wouldn't have cried.

So she taught me the truth of Ephesians 4:22–24: "You must put off your old self-assertive, mean, uncaring self, son, because it is corrupt with deceitful desires.

And put on the new meek and kind self created by God in his own likeness in righteousness and holiness.

In other words, son, you need to be deeply renewed in the spirit of your mind."

In the end the battle for purity in the mouth is fought in the heart, because, as Matthew 12:34 says,  "out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks."

If you don't like what comes out of your mouth, listen carefully this morning, because the apostle Paul is at pains in this text to clean up your mouth from the inside out.

Our text for today is Ephesians 4:29-30.

Please turn there in your Bible and follow along as I read: /“You must let no unwholesome word come out of your mouth, but only what is beneficial for the building up of the one in need, that it may give grace to those who hear.

\\ And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption.”

/

 

Let's look at verse 29.

I said a moment ago that Paul used the phrase "rotten word."

The Revised Standard Version translates it, "Let no evil talk come out of your mouths."

The New International Version and New American Standard Bible use the word "unwholesome."

And the King James Version says, "Let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth."

What is this idea behind the words, "evil," "unwholesome," and "corrupt"?

The Greek word (/sapros/) is used in only one other context in the New Testament, namely, the places in Matthew and Luke where Jesus says, "It is not the good tree that bears bad fruit "(Luke 6:43; Matthew 7:17f.;

Matthew 12:33).

The term for "bad" fruit here is the same word for evil or unwholesome or corrupt in Ephesians 4:29—"Let no evil talk come out of your mouth!"

The image in Paul's mind is probably one of rottenness and decay, something that is spoiled.

This kind of rotten language must be taken off like the old garment.

It is part of the old self of verse 22 that needs to be stripped away when a person becomes a Christian.

The garment of a rotten mouth must be taken off and thrown into the fire, just like the Ephesians had burned their old books on magic in Acts 19:19.

Now what sort of talk does Paul have in mind when he says, "Let no rotten talk come out of your mouth"?

Let me suggest at least four kinds of language that I think Paul would include as "rotten" or "decayed" or "spoiled."

First would be language that takes the name of the Lord in vain.

It is a great contradiction of who we are as Christians if we say, "God!" or "My God!" or "God Almighty!" or "Christ!" or "Jesus!" just because we are mad or surprised or amazed.

No one with a good marriage would stomp on his wedding ring to express anger.

It stands for something precious and pure.

And so does the name of God and Jesus Christ.

The second kind of language that Paul would call rotten would be language that trivializes terrible realities—like hell and damnation and holiness.

What's wrong with saying, "What the hell!" or "Hell, no!" or "Go to hell!" or "Damn it!"

or "Damn right!" or "Holy cow!" or "Holy mackerel!"?

Among other things these expressions trivialize things of terrible seriousness.

It's simply a contradiction to believe in the horrible reality of hell and use the word like a punctuation mark for emphasis when talking about sports or politics.

The same is true of damnation.

And if the divine command, "Be holy as I am holy," carries for you the same weight it carried for Moses and Jesus and the apostles, you will simply find that "Holy cow" or holy anything will stick in your throat because it treats something infinitely precious as a trifle.

The third kind of language I think Paul would include in his command not to let any rotten talk come out of your mouth is vulgar references to sex and the human body.

With this kind of language people take good things that God has made, and use them like mud to smear on whatever they get upset about.

The whole assumption behind the use of vulgar four-letter words is that they communicate scorn or disdain or hate.

How does this happen?

How, for example, does the act of sexual relations, created by God as good to be fulfilled in marriage—how does it get translated into a four letter word and carry the meaning of hate and scorn?

The answer is easy: first you get God out of your mind.

That's fundamental to all vulgarity.

Then you get the sanctity of his creation out of your mind.

And then, in your mind, you replace the tenderness of married love with the force of rape, and you've got yourself a four letter word which does verbally the same thing that rape does physically: it expresses selfish, uncaring abusiveness.

(Which, incidentally, is why I would say to Christian women, don't spend two minutes with a man who uses this kind of language: rape and rotten language come from exactly the same root.)

The final kind of language I think Paul would call rotten is mean-spirited language—like, "Shut up!"

The words themselves are untarnished.

But the usage is vicious and loveless.

Marcy and I had a wonderful sheepdog, named Toby, for many years.

He was a great pal except when you penned him in the back yard, then he barked continually.

It was tempting at two in the morning to poke your head out the window and yell “Shut up!”

But we soon discovered that calling out, “Shush Toby” achieved the results we wanted.

And I’m sure even our neighbors appreciated the less derogatory way of hushing our dog.

Those are the four kinds of language I think Paul would include in "rotten talk."

Now let's step back and ask what Paul might mean by calling language evil or corrupt or unwholesome or rotten.

If we think of spoiled or rotten fruit, like Jesus did, four implications come to mind.

First, rotten fruit does not nourish.

Neither does rotten language.

It does not strengthen or improve or help.

It is not useful for food.

It is good for nothing but to be thrown out and trampled under foot by men.

Second, rotten fruit will probably make you sick if you do try to eat it.

And rotten language can make people sick, too.

In other words, it not only fails to give positive nourishment; it can cause harm.

Words can wound a person very deeply.

Words can be like the virus that transmits the disease of meanness or vulgarity from parent to child or roommate to roommate or colleague to colleague.

Rotten language makes people sick if they are forced to eat it.

Third, rotten fruit smells bad and makes the atmosphere unpleasant.

I heard about a couple of men in graduate school in Germany who seemed to carry the aroma of vulgarity about them.

All they ever to laughed at was sexual innuendo.

The pitiful thing about it was that the nearer they got to the gutter, the more they laughed.

With their mouths they created an atmosphere like a stinking locker room.