Five weeks ago we began speaking about Surrender. We learned what God wants from us. The first thing, and essentially if you think about it, the only thing He wants from us. Everything else about having a life of faith, leading a holy life and being a follower of Christ, comes from fully surrendering to God. So that is always the goal. Having a life of full surrender.
First, we learned we need to surrender our habits, especially the bad ones. Then we heard about surrendering our thoughts. God knows them anyway, and they can’t be hidden from Him. Then it was our Finances. No matter what type of income we have, it was His first, and we are just being allowed to hold it, so we can use it in a Godly way. And last week we heard that God does expect us to surrender our family to Him. Not because we don’t care about them, but because He has a mission for each of us, and He can take care of our families, much better than we can.
So here we are, week 5. And this week we are going to look at surrendering our speech. We only have two points this week about surrendering our speech. First, the bad stuff. And second, the good stuff.
You may be wondering what “the bad stuff” is. Well, the easy thing to remember is the bad language. A good rule to remember is, if it would be offensive to your mother, or grandmother, you should probably not be saying it. I find an easier thing to do, is just to pretend that Jesus Christ is standing next to you. At school, at work, in your kitchen, There he is, right next to you. On your couch, watching TV, sitting in your car while you drive, there He is, right next to you. Of course the easy part about pretending He is next to you, is that He is really next to you. You might not be able to see Him, but there are times you can hear Him, and feel Him.
Of course we need to realize that if we hang out with those people that continue to use that bad language, we will, because it is our nature, begin to copy them. We do this so we can fit in, so they accept us.
Let me show you how much it is noticed if we do not fit in. About 10 years ago, just after I was led to Christ, I was helping two men move a pool table out of our Youth Center. It was a typical pool table, green felt, very big and very heavy. We had to move it around and lay it on its side just to get it through the door. Well as we were going through the door, I was on the back end, and the other two guys pulled as I pushed. My fingers got pinched between the pool table and the door frame. My face got read, I jerked my hand back and dropped the pool table. After a minute went by, I picked up my end again, and we finished loading the table on the truck. The three of us each grabbed a cold soda and set down on the porch. Of the two men, one was the truck driver and the other was a volunteer. The volunteer looked over at me and asked me, why I didn’t swear, curse and scream when my hand got pinched. I told him I just didn’t talk like that any more. He couldn’t understand. He said, if it was him, he would have called me names, swore, and used all kinds of bad language. So I asked him why he would do that. He didn’t know, other than that is what he saw other people do. He realized it wouldn’t have made the pain go away, just that it was his habit, when he got hurt like that to yell bad words. By the end of our conversation, he realized that he spoke that way by choice, maybe even by habit, but not because he had to. Of course if we think about it, we never have to. If we don’t get in the habit of saying those words, we don’t feel we have to in intense situations.
Now that I have said that, I can tell you, that I still know those bad words. I have on a rare occasion spoken those bad words. It doesn’t make it right, it only means that I learned those words, and I shouldn’t have. So, if I would have known better back then, I wouldn’t have learned them, or used them. Each of those words in my head, drives a wedge between myself and God. Every time a person uses language like that it does the same thing. Let me show you. Our scripture verse today says, “But the things that come out of the mouth come from the heart, and these make a man ‘unclean.’” (Matt 15:18 NIV) or what about the Old Testament verses like Proverbs 10:31, ““The mouth of the righteous brings forth wisdom, but a perverse tongue will be cut out.”
You see God cares very much about what we say, and not just the bad words. Remember we said in the beginning it was bad stuff. That other bad stuff, can be gossip, name calling, or just lies. It is all ungodly. It all drives that wedge between us and heaven. We are warned over and over again in God’s word that God does not look kindly on evil coming out of our mouths. We can see it in 1 Peter 3:10: “For, “Whoever would love life and see good days must keep his tongue from evil and his lips from deceitful speech.”
And as the game show host tells us, but that’s not all! We are called by God to keep our speech from being ungodly, but we are also called to lift others up with our words. We are called to build others up, not to tear them down. It doesn’t matter how old we are either. In God’s eyes the young can be just as Godly, just as uplifting and just as controlled as anyone else. 1st Timothy 4:12 tells us: “Don’t let anyone look down on you because you are young, but set an example for the believers in speech, in life, in love, in faith and in purity”.
Let me share with you another story. When I was younger, I did a lot of fishing. My family, my cousins, we all went fishing whenever we could. One night, my cousin invited me to go with him, in his boat out to a local lake for some night fishing. We got out on the water, and my cousin, God bless him, is a bit of a rough character. Not a spot of God in him. His language shows it too. So we are laughing and joking, and I want to fit in of course, so when he starts in with the bad language, so did I. We figured, there wasn’t another boat out on the water, no human being within hundreds of yards, who could it hurt. After a couple hours of being loud and obnoxious, and using more bad language then most people hear in a year, we took the boat back to the dock. As we were loading the boat onto the trailer, the Fish Warden drove up. First he inspected our equipment, made sure we didn’t have any fish we weren’t supposed to have. When he was done, he pulled us both aside and let us know that he and his fellow officer could hear every word we said, from shore. It seems that sound carries over a water’s surface way better than if you were on land. And he heard every dirty joke, every bad word we said, clearly. We felt horrible. He told us that he had never heard such bad language from two young guys before. That lesson has stuck with me for the last twenty years.
I was older than my cousin, he looked up to me. I didn’t realize it at the time, but if I used bad language, he thought it must be ok. If only I would have read the Bible verse in the book of Titus and listened to it, Titus 2:7-8 reads : “in your teaching show integrity, seriousness and soundness of speech that cannot be condemned, so that those who oppose you may be ashamed because they have nothing bad to say about us.”
Enough about that. On to the good stuff. I said earlier that God asks us to surrender our speech, the bad stuff and the good stuff. If we don’t use the bad language, if we don’t lie, gossip and call names, we still find we are missing something. Oh yeah, the good stuff. It turns out, that our tongue isn’t meant to do bad, it is actually meant to do good! 1st Thessalonians chapter 5 verse 11 tells us each, “Therefore encourage one another and build each other up, just as in fact you are doing”. Or even better, in Hebrews 3:13 it says, “But encourage one another daily, as long as it is called Today, so that none of you may be hardened by sin
