Your Words
Your words.
Your words have the power to destroy or the power to encourage.
To build up or to tear down.
Your words can ease someone’s pain or viciously magnify their regret.
Your words can plant a magnificent garden ready to blossom and spring forth in a glorious array … or your words can stir up weeds and discord in an otherwise beautiful life.
Your words.
Your words can stick the knife in and then twist it while gouging out someone’s very heart … or your words can be a healing oil and a soothing ointment.
Your words can lovingly speak of truth with a kind tone, gentle verbiage and heartfelt compassion … or you can go ripping into someone’s already raw emotions and cause traumatic and undeserved damage.
Your words.
In the center of your face, located halfway between your mind and your heart, is an opening called your “mouth”. Inside that mouth is a muscle that weighs about 1 pound. This muscle is known as your “tongue”.
Do you see where I am going with this?
Your tongue is located between your mind and your heart for a reason. Your mind and your heart have the massive power to control every word that this 1-pound tongue of muscle creates.
Your tongue may be the most powerful and influential muscle in your entire body … but it is controlled by your thought life … and by your emotional preferences.
Scarey, huh?
Maybe you don’t fight the same battles that I have fought over the years with this 1-pound piece of overgrown, opinionated arrogance, but I have had to give myself some very strict guidelines concerning my tongue.
My tongue has placed me into more trouble than I dare relate … it has shamed me and caused pain in the lives of the people who I know the best and love the most.
My tongue has not been pretty. My tongue often stinks. Bad breath of the very worst kind.
Halitosis of the heart.
My tongue has reared its ugly head in selfish, explosive language and I have wished too many times to count that I was able to push the re-wind button and erase something that I have spoken in emotion and in unbridled reaction.
Is anybody with me, here?! Or is your speaking record immaculately clean?!
“Guard your heart above all else for from it flow the issues of life.” – Proverbs 4:23
My heart has been infected and reveals its dread disease through the words that I choose to speak.
My heart doesn’t want to be guarded … it wants to vomit its ugly self all over the people in my world.
Verbal vomit. Not a pretty picture, indeed.
The Bible doesn’t say to express your heart … it says to guard your heart. Control your heart. Give your heart some healthy boundaries.
And then … if my heart weren’t enough to deal with … there is my mind. That over-thinking, analytical, anxious piece of human software.
My mind. My brain. My thought life. My. My. My.
After all … if I think it … then I have the right to say it, right?!! WRONG!!!
“For as a man thinks within himself so is he.” – Proverbs 23:7
I don’t know how this is possible but it is … if I think it … then I become it.
If I think angry, critical thoughts … then I will become an angry, critical person.
If I think fearful, negative thoughts … then I will become a fearful, negative person.
If I think … then I will become.
I must not say everything that I think, feel and believe. I must not. I must discipline my tongue not to get its soundtrack from my heart or from my mind … but from my spirit.
“Examine me, O Lord, and try me; test my mind and my heart.” – Psalm 26:2
I must ask God to clean out my heart and my mind. I must lay down my will on the examining table of the Great Physician and allow Him to do open heart surgery and a craniotomy on me.
You see … my tongue is not my problem. My problem is the infection that lurks in my heart and the germs that have attached themselves to my mind.
Only the Great Physician is able to heal the disease that I have allowed to fester in the deepest parts of me.
And, as I am healed, I become more like Him. As I am healed, I begin to think like He thinks … I begin to feel what He feels … I begin to speak words that His tongue would speak.
You see when the Great Physician is invited to treat my mental and emotional plague, He not only takes out the infection … He makes me like Him.
What joy there is on the operating table of His presence and His power!
Your words.
Your words have the power to bring life and purpose back to a discouraged husband’s beat-up heart.
Your words bring hope to your mother in her golden years.
Your words help your children dream big dreams and to slay huge giants.
Your words set the atmosphere for your home in a dynamic display of joy and peace.
Your words give loving direction to a friend who is floundering with self-esteem.
The words that you speak today are the seeds that will be harvested in your life tomorrow.
If you give loving words … you will receive a bountiful harvest of love.
If you speak hopeful words … you will be the beneficiary of the hope that is an anchor in the storms of life.
If you utter words of encouragement … the encouragement you give to others will boomerang straight back into your heart.
If you declare words of faith and healing … yours will be the mind and the heart that is miraculously healed.
Your words.
“Death and life are in the power of the tongue and those who love it will eat its fruit.” – Proverbs 18:21
The words that you speak today determine the banquet from which you will eat tomorrow.
Your words cook up a recipe for your life that will be enjoyed for years to come.
Your words.
Speak well.
