Murder In My Mouth Series

• Spoken animosity. Anger in the heart has a way of coming out through our words. To refer to someone as “Raca” means to call them an empty-head or an idiot. This offense is very serious because it lands the person before the Sanhedrin, or the Jewish Supreme Court. Proverbs 12:18: “Reckless words pierce like a sword…” That reminds me of what I read on Facebook this week: “The world would be a nicer place if everyone would take a chill pill. It would get even better if some of them choked on it.” If you’re used to calling people “idiots” or “imbeciles,” consider this: That’s not how God sees the person made in his image.

• Stated assassination. This is when we attack someone’s character. The use of “fool” in the Bible refers to someone morally and spiritually bankrupt. It was equivalent to saying that a person deserves to go to hell, which Jesus turns around to say that we’re the ones who deserve the fire of hell if we commit homicide with our tongues. James 3:9: “With the tongue we praise our Lord and Father, and with it we curse men, who have been made in His likeness.”

To allow anger to seethe and then to attack verbally and destroy someone’s reputation is tantamount to murder and is a violation of the sixth commandment. We won’t take the time to continue in this passage but suffice it say that instead of fighting with each other, Jesus wants us to forgive others. That’s exactly what the “Family Connect” sheet will help parents reinforce with their kids today: God wants us to forgive as He forgives us. 1 John 3:15: “Anyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life in him.” After reading this verse, I almost changed the sermon title today to, “The Murderer in Me.”

Because people matter to God, they must matter to us.

Positive Implications of the Command

While most of us will never murder someone in the technical sense of the word, we can still break the command in a variety of ways. To say it another way: We’re called to love our neighbor as ourselves by treating all life as sacred because it is stamped with God’s design and dignity. The Heidelberg Catechism puts it like this: “I am not to dishonor, hate, injure, or kill my neighbor by thoughts, words or gestures, much less by deeds.”

Since people matter God, they must matter to us. Let’s think about how we can live out the positive implications of this command because it’s fundamentally about how we view and treat people.

Because we do live in a culture of death, we must cultivate a view of the sanctity of life. We’re prohibited from taking life and we must also protect and preserve life. Far more than refraining from violence we must learn to value life the way God does by taking some positive action. I was challenged this week by these words from Philip Ryken: “Sometimes all it takes to break the sixth commandment is to do nothing at all.” That reminds me of that famous quote from Edmund Burke: “All that’s necessary for the forces of evil to win in the world is for enough good men to do nothing.”