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4th December 2024
TuesdayReflection
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'John Piper'
'teacher and founder of Desiring God.com'
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"Make Your Mouth a Means of Grace"
"Do not use harmful words, but only helpful words, the kind that build up and provide what is needed, so that what you say will do good to those who hear you. And do not make God's Holy Spirit sad; for the Spirit is God's mark of ownership on you, a guarantee that the Day will come when God will set you free."
..... Ephes.4:29-30 (GNT)
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".
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 "out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks."
If you don't like what comes out of your mouth, listen carefully, because the apostle Paul is at pains in this text to clean up your mouth from the inside out.
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 "
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
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This is an edited version.
The full article and Bible references are avaiable on request
'John Piper'
is founder and teacher of Desiring God and chancellor of Bethlehem College and Seminary.
For 33 years, he served as pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church, Minneapolis, Minnesota.
He is author of more than 50 books, including Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist and most recently Foundations for Lifelong Learning: Education in Serious Joy.
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