Read & be blessed good people of God
Text: Ephesians 4:29-32
They called him “Daddy King.”
When Martin Luther King Sr. died in 1984, one black leader said, “If we started our own country, he would be our George Washington.” In his eighty-four years he endured more than his share of suffering and hatred. During his childhood in Georgia, he witnessed lynchings. When he tried to register to vote in Atlanta, he discovered that the registrar’s office was on the second floor of city hall—but the elevator was marked Whites Only, the stairwell was closed, and the elevator for blacks was out of order.
He is mostly remembered for the accomplishments of his son, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.—leader of the nonviolent civil rights movement, cut down by an assassin’s bullet in 1968. But that was not the end of his pain. During a church service in 1974, as his wife played “The Lord’s Prayer,” a young man rose in the congregation and began shooting. Mrs. King collapsed in a hail of gunfire while Daddy King watched in horror from the pulpit.
Near the end of his life, he spoke about the policy of nonviolence he had come to embrace. “There are two men I am supposed to hate. One is a white man, the other is black, and both are serving time for having committed murder. I don’t hate either one. There is no time for that, and no reason either. Nothing that a man does takes him lower than when he allows himself to fall so low as to hate anyone.”
But how can a man not hate when his wife and oldest son have been murdered? It seems natural and even proper to hate killers, doesn’t it? The answer comes back, “There is no time for that.”
To hate is to live in the past, to dwell on deeds already done. Hatred is the most damaging emotion, for it gives the person you hate a double victory—once in the past, once in the present. No time to hate? Not if you have learned how to forgive. Forgiving does not mean whitewashing the past, but it does mean refusing to live there. Forgiveness breaks the chain of bitterness and the insidious desire for revenge. As costly as it is to forgive, unforgiveness costs far more.
The Command
You can Forgive: God’s Answer to Resentment. Let’s begin with these words from the Apostle Paul:
Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen (Ephesians. 4:29).
What the NIV translates as “unwholesome talk,” the King James translates as “corrupt communication.” The underlying Greek word means “rotten.” It was used for decaying flesh or rotten fish. The meaning is, “Don’t let any putrid words come out of your mouth.” We might say in street lingo, “No trash talk!”
What qualifies as rotten speech? Here are a few examples:
Vulgarity, obscenity, indecent language.
Racial or ethnic insults.
Abrasive humor.
Harsh words.
Mean-spirited comments.
Gossip, rumors, false accusations.
Public criticism of your spouse or children.
Yelling and screaming.
Exaggerating the faults of others.
Excusing unkind words by saying, “I was only joking.”
Why is this so important? Proverbs 18:21 says, “The tongue has the power of life and death.” Every time you open your mouth, either life or death comes out. The Bible speaks of the throat as an “open grave” (Romans 3:13). When there is death on the inside, it will eventually show up in your words.
Ephesians 4:29 offers a Christian alternative: First, we are to speak good words that build up instead of tearing down. Second, we are to speak words that minister grace to those who hear them. Here is the teaching of this verse put very simply:
Every word . . . all good . . . all grace . . . all the time.
Sometimes we need a friend to remind us to watch what we say. Gordon MacDonald tells the story of a trip to Japan he took as a young man. One day, while walking the streets of Yokohama with an older pastor, he made a sarcastic comment about a mutual friend. The older pastor stopped, looked him in the face, and
said, “A man who truly loves God would not talk about a friend like that.” Gordon MacDonald said it was as if a knife had been plunged between his ribs. The pain was so great he didn’t know how to respond. Reflecting on that experience twenty years later, he remarked that the memory of those searing words had helped him ten thousand times when he was tempted to make a critical comment about a family member, a friend, a colleague, or someone he knew casually.
We all have our excuses for what we say, don’t we? We’re tired or we’re provoked or we weren’t thinking or we didn’t mean it or it’s true so we said it. On and on we go, justifying our verbal diarrhea. But our excuses don’t excuse us at all.
What is God saying to us? No more stinking speech!
The Consequence
Paul mentions the sad consequence of our unkind words in Ephesians 4:30:
Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with whom you were sealed for the day of redemption.
Did you know you can grieve the Holy Spirit who lives within you? You can only grieve a close friend or a loved one. You can’t grieve a stranger you meet on the street. You can irritate a stranger and you can offend a casual acquaintance, but you can only grieve someone close to you. Paul’s advice is both practical and profound. We tend to talk a lot about interpersonal problems, as if the greatest issue in life is how we relate to other people. But verse 30 reminds us that our primary relationship is always with God. You can make the Spirit weep because of your thoughtless words.
Here’s the reason: The Holy Spirit not only lives in you. He also lives in the Christian brother or sister you just slandered. Evil speech destroys Christian unity. D. L. Moody said he had never known God to bless a church where the Lord’s people were divided. This is a word we need to hear today. We tolerate and sometimes even encourage thoughtless attitudes in the way we speak to each other.
This does not mean we will never say anything hard or difficult for others to hear. Proverbs 27:6 reminds us, “Faithful are the wounds of a friend” (KJV). Sometimes friends “wound” each other to bring healing. Just as a doctor must sometimes cut us surgically to remove what is killing us, friends sometimes say things that aren’t easy to hear. But in those cases, friends first remove the telephone pole from their own eye before they remove the speck of sawdust from someone else’s eye.
The Cause
We grieve the Spirit first by rotten speech (Ephesians 4:29) and second by evil attitudes (v. 31). But these two things are not separate. Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks. Whatever is in the heart must eventually come out in the words we say. “Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice” (v. 31 NASB). These wrong attitudes corrode the soul from the inside out. The corrosion starts with bitterness, a word meaning “pointed” or “sharp,” referring to the pain we feel when someone mistreats us. It speaks to a deep emotional reaction that keeps us from thinking clearly. If we dwell in bitterness long enough, it produces a wounded spirit.
Bitterness leads to wrath, a word that originally meant “to snort.” It has the idea of the nostrils being flared in anger. We use the same image when we speak of someone being all steamed up, with smoke coming out of their ears.
Anger, the third word, speaks of a settled condition of the heart. Some people get up angry, shower angry, eat breakfast angry, go to work angry, come home angry, watch TV angry, and go to bed angry. Nothing pleases a person like that. Anger leads to jealousy, harsh words, and it can even lead to murder. Angry people usually express themselves in clamor, the fourth word, which means raising your voice and shouting.
CONTINUE IN PART TWO!