“You Don’t Say” February 11, 2017

“A good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and an evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of.”  Luke 6:45

Good Morning my friends!

As a child of the 1950’s, I grew up watching a lot of television. I remember how many shows posted a notification regarding the censorship of language before the show was broadcast. Rarely, if ever, was profanity a part of the dialogue in any of these shows. This reality is long gone. In fact, profanity has become so commonplace in today’s culture that it is barely given a second thought. Adults, adolescents, and even small children are known to use it with regularity. A growing number of professed Christians, especially millennials, consider its use to be harmless…mere words. A bullet is also harmless until it is fired at random. When that happens, the consequences can be devastating.

Shayne Looper, a pastor in Michigan observed, “It is no coincidence that the current breakdown in civil discourse has occurred at the same time we’ve seen a rise in the use of profanity.”  In recent protest marches, I have seen pictures of little children brandishing signs filled with profanity-laced language. Were we to take these same precious children out to breakfast, would we say “Sweetie, eat your eggs and pancakes, and that little bowl of manure and then you can have your applesauce”?

When i was a child in Sunday School, we used to sing a song that went like this: “O be careful tongue what you say,  for the Father up above is looking down in love, so be careful little tongue what you say.” Today, we’re libel to say whatever evil things happens to pop into our heads and excuse our rudeness because we are “tired” or “angry”, or we offer no excuses at all because “everybody talks that way.” Well, as the aforementioned Shayne Looper observed, “Anger is a witches brew, and woe to the person who drinks it. Yet influential people in our society are serving a cocktail of anger and contempt, and urging us to drink it.”  Guess what! We are the influential people in the lives of those around us…especially those with whom we are around every day…our children, grandchildren, friends, and co-workers. Our words carry consequences with them.

In the “old days”, many homes had a “cuss box” in which you were to drop a quarter if you uttered a profanity. Were that in practice today, many of us could likely save enough to make a car payment at the end of a month! This message is for everyone, but particularly for those who profess to follow Christ. Consider once more what he says in Luke 6:45: “A good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and an evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of.”  What fills your heart? What comes out of your mouth is a strong indicator of what is in there. O be careful tongue what you say,  for the Father up above is looking down in love, so be careful little tongue what you say.”  What you don’t say is just as important in many cases as what you do say!