Purity of Speech Matters

So let me pray. Father in heaven, I thank you that we are here to look at your word together. And I pray, Lord, that your spirit would anoint me to be able to preach your word. To be able to preach your word, Lord, the way it deserves to be preached. I am an imperfect vessel. I am unworthy to be allowed to even see your word, let alone read it, and let alone preach it.

And I'm unworthy to be with this group of men that are trying to grow in Christ. And so help to get me out of the way and my pride out of the way and all those things that I might just give people your truth and that they may be edified by it. In Christ's name I pray. Amen. Open the Bible to Ephesians 4. Remember, this is not a knock at all on the other speakers, but the way things seem to go, and the way I paid attention, you will be turning the pages of your Bible far more the next two hours, or one hour, than you did in the other sessions.

And it's not that they didn't do something right, it's just that's my style. I want to look at Ephesians 4, we're going to start in verse 29. So I'll be reading from the ESV. I'll read three verses for you. Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear.

And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. So the one other thing I wanted to say in introduction is, you can't possibly know how much I really care for you as brothers right now. We've spent a little bit of time together.

And I just want you to know my job, I believe, is to tell you what God's Word says. My job is to give you an encounter with the living God through His Word. And I won't say unfortunately, but sometimes that results in you being stung a little bit and hurt a little bit. Somebody said earlier, I'm going to step on some toes maybe. And so I don't apologize for that whatsoever.

But I want you to know that it's not some pleasurable thing to try to incite people or anything like that. It's to try to give you an encounter with God that you may grow. And every rebuke and everything that I say, admonishment tonight, will be something that applies equally to me as to everyone in this room as somebody who needs to grow in grace and sanctification.

So with that in mind, we're going to look at corrupt communication, corrupting talk, Which is what we're told in Ephesians 4.29 is not to come out of our mouths. Now normally if I was preaching Ephesians 4.29 to somebody, there would have been probably at least 40 weeks of previous sermons that were built up to Ephesians 4.29. Those of you that go verse by verse might be thinking, man, that may be more like 100 sermons, right, to get that far in Ephesians.

So we're not going to be able to dig into the context of all the verses that came before this, but we'll try to talk about them a little bit. So you need to give me the latitude to understand that we're diving into the middle of something. Paul has built a case up to this point that I cannot possibly build in the time that I'm allotted. I like the verse in Hebrews 9 where the author says, we don't have time to go into much detail about these things right now.

And that's like my verse every time I preach, I feel like. But what I want to do is I want to look at corrupting talk, and I want to get out of your minds, I think Michael touched on this concept as well. I want to get out of your minds this idea that we live in this wicked world and people of unclean lips. We can go anywhere we want right now and we can find dirty talkers.

That's easy. You can go to gay pride parades. You can watch TV. There's dirty talkers everywhere. I'm talking about us tonight. This isn't about the world having a foul mouth.

This is Paul writing to Christians about how they're supposed to act. And so that's who I'm talking to and I want you to think about it that way. What I want to do is I want to define corrupting talk and I'm going to do that scripturally. You may actually think this guy hardly told me anything because I'm actually going to try to let the scripture tell you as much as possible.

My opinion is only relevant to the extent that I've taken every thought captive to obey Christ. I'm actually portraying to you what God has said and what God thinks. I want to try to prove to you the importance of this through scripture so that you'll understand not only that it's a command in the New Testament and that we believe it's true because we read it here, but I want to show you with an abundance of evidence how actually vital and important this is and always has been to God and in his mind.

And I want to give you some practical tips how to implement this in your life. And I'll just be honest, and I have nobody in mind, but there are things that I have heard this weekend that I think fall under the category of corrupting talk. And there are things that I may think are corrupting that maybe in your environment you don't think so. And maybe nobody has ever said to you, yeah, that's crossing a line.

And so I want you to be able to think about those things. I want you to challenge yourself to more purity. So the goal of Christian life isn't to find what's the bare minimum I have to do to feel like I'm doing Christian things. The goal is actually purity. That should be what you want. I love going after a bunch of speakers because then I can reference things they said and get it in your mind.

But as Dustin said, if your heart loves Jesus Christ and desires to be near Him, Well blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God Jesus was the one who was pure in heart right He had the pure hands and the clean heart that Austin talked about So you want to be close to Jesus If you really have that affection then you desire purity okay To use the easy example, it's not just abstaining from sex. It's pursuing purity in your sex life, which would be a good example that we talk about in men's groups a lot. But let's talk about corrupting talk.

I would argue that your dirty mouth precedes your dirty sex life. So let's see if we can work on it. Turn to Ephesians 4 still. So quickly, Paul says, Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths. And he contrasts it with that which is good for building up. And he gives us a qualification.

He says, As fits the occasion. And I think we can all understand that there's going to be times Where there's certain speech is required or acceptable that the same type of speech would not be acceptable in another circumstance. And I'll use another, I hope, obvious example. There are probably things you say privately with your wife that you should never say to other people, at least with the same language.

And I would also argue that just because you're at a men's retreat, it doesn't mean you let loose either. And all of a sudden we can be corrupt and dirty and profane and have crude joking and things like that. But when I'm preaching behind a pulpit, I may be a little more formal and careful with my language than I would be when I'm just standing next to you outside.

When I'm talking to somebody, if I'm talking to the Senate, the Ohio State Legislature that I did once, there's probably some language I would use standing around with you guys that I just wouldn't use there Because I want to be respectable. I want them to think of me as respectable. So we have to be somewhat careful. So flip to Colossians 3. A little more of a definition here.

We're going to see some of the same words we saw in Ephesians 5.31. In verse 8, Paul says, But now you must put them all away. He says, Anger, wrath, malice, slander, and obscene talk from your mouth. Do not lie to one another. Seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices. This is a parallel passage to Ephesians chapter 4.

And what we see is that there's all these horrible sins that the people in Ephesus had been a part of and that they're surrounded by. And Paul finds evil desire, covetousness, and idolatry back in verse 5. And things like anger, wrath, malice, slander, and obscene talk to be mentionable. We live in such a wicked culture. We live in a time when so many horrible things are visible to us now in the United States of America.

Things that when I was a kid were unmentionable. We live in a time that some of our little sins don't seem so big to us. And that's because our focus is on the people marching in the gay pride parades And the people fighting for pedophilia to be legal and people that want to be able to kill babies up to the time of birth. And our focus is on that and our focus is not on comparing your sinfulness to the holiness of the Lord Jesus Christ.

We don't adequately evaluate ourselves because we're comparing ourselves to this wicked world that we're around. And so we need to understand from the Word of God what the Word of God says is wicked. So things like anger and wrath, well that's a hard issue. But anger comes out in your words oftentimes. Your wrath comes out. And you know your tone changes.

And you know when somebody else is angry, you know that you can tell the difference by the way they're speaking to you. You understand those things. Slander. Slander is lying about somebody. Saying something about somebody that's not true. It's akin to gossip.

Oftentimes when we gossip, we end up slandering people because we hear one side of a story and then we hear it. Another thing about slander, biblically speaking, we need somebody that knows more original language maybe than me to deal with some of these. But in the Bible, even telling truths about somebody that are unfavorable is not always an okay thing.

It's one thing to report something, to have to go in front of people and say, this guy's a bad teacher, here's some things he did, we shouldn't follow him. I like polemics, I understand discernment and things like that. But there's levels of sharing information about other people that's unsavory, that will put images in other people's minds about that person that are inappropriate, even if it's true.

So don't use the excuse that I just said true things about the person to defend yourself when you use your mouth to hurt somebody sometimes. And then he mentions obscene talk. Obscene talk, we're talking about being graphic about things that you shouldn't be graphic about. And I'm not a person that believes in dirty words. I don't think that words inherently have dirtiness and cleanness necessarily.

And I think it's a silly argument to have. I think for the most part you know what the words are that are bad. The words that if you wouldn't say them around a lady, the words you wouldn't say them if you were the pastor in the pulpit, the words that if your kid says it, you tell them you shouldn't say that. And if your kid shouldn't say it, you shouldn't say it.

Let me put it that way. So we all know what these things are, and I understand that the words change over time, and there's different contexts, And I'm not going to say that there's words that you can't say that I'm going to give you a list. Because if I give you a list, there's always going to be one more word that should be on the list that I didn't give you.

And there's going to be one word we disagree about. And that's not what the New Testament's about. That's not what the Bible's about. It not about lists of rules to follow so you can check off that you were righteous It about loving the Lord And if you love the Lord you going to want to use pure language You going to want to and you going to find words that are pure You're going to find ways to say things that express the thoughts in your mind and the feelings in your heart in a way that honors the Lord, in a way that communicates the truth.

And there's a whole bunch of words out there that just really communicate that, yeah, you're uneducated, You don't have lots of vocabulary and you don't read much. That's what the words tell people. They don't tell people you're bad or tough or cool. It really tells people, yeah, you just don't read other people that are educated. That's what it tells them.

Turn to Exodus 20. I'll confess that I was a completely foul-mouthed person before I got saved and I had to have that cleaned up in my life. This is a very common thing in our culture. It's almost a rite of passage for young boys that aren't Christian to start swearing. It's when I started thinking I was kind of an adult, when I could say the adult words, and adults wouldn't bat an eye about it.

That's when I felt like I was an adult, you know? Exodus 20, verse 7, another aspect of corrupt communication. God says, You shall not take the name of Yahweh your God in vain, For Yahweh will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain. So blasphemy, blasphemy is a form of corrupting talk. It's not the same as saying, you know, the obscene talk and crude joking, but when you open your mouth and you blaspheme God, that's corrupting talk as well.

Don't let it come out of your mouth. God's name is pure. This could be arguable in the marketplace of Christian ideas, But speaking for God outside of his word is corrupting talk if you come from my tradition. If you say God said and God didn't say it in his word, then I think that's corrupting talk. Because I think the canon's closed and God has spoken and he's not revealing new revelation to you privately.

He's never doing it ever to people privately in that sense. So that's a form of corrupting talk. When we compare our speech to God's speech, look at Psalm 51, verse 4. When we compare ourselves to God rather than other people, we get an idea of how perfect God is. And it should make us feel as Isaiah felt. We're going to look at that passage that you guys probably already know which one I'm talking about.

So, just look at God's word in Psalm 51. David confessing his sin with Bathsheba and the murder of Uriah. He says, Against you, you only have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight. Verse 4, So that you may be justified in your words and blameless in your judgment. God's words, He's always justified. He's always justified.

And this is why, and this is a hard verse, I think, to understand. I think we gloss over it. But think about this. This guy took a woman that wasn't his wife. It was actually a loyal friend of his, a guy that worked for David, basically, that was a good guy. And you read about Uriah.

He was a great guy when you read about it. David took the guy's wife, and then he had the guy killed to cover it up. And this went on for a long time. You read through the passage, it wasn't like three days later. You can figure out how long it takes a baby to be born. You get an idea how long David was hiding things.

In this passage, he says, Against you, you only have I sinned. Because God's the one that we ultimately sin against, right? God's the one whose sin is against because he's perfect and holy. And so God's justified in his words. Look at a little contrast real quick. Psalm 52, the next page over in my Bible.

Verse 1, Why do you boast of evil, O mighty man? The steadfast love of God endures all the day. So boasting of evil. Boasting in general. Jude says they are loudmouth boasters, pursuing unnatural desires, showing favoritism to gain advantage. Boasting.

Boasting in anything but Jesus Christ is wickedness. It's evil. It's arrogant. Thankfully, we have this desire to boast, and God gave us something to boast in. Isn't that great? Can you imagine if there was no holy outlet for your sexual desires?

I mean, how good is God, right? We've talked about that a couple times, being in a men's meeting. I'm sure there's people here that struggle with pornography, that deal with the difficulties they're in, That deal with burning, passion, and things like that. And God's given us a holy outlet for our desire to be boastful. And that's to boast in Jesus Christ.

And so praise the Lord for that. He says in verse 2, Your tongue plots destruction like a sharp razor, you worker of deceit. Little cuts. Little cuts. You love evil more than good. And lying more than speaking what is right.

Lying is another form of corrupt communication. In Psalm 89, and yes, I expect you to turn there. I want you to encounter God's Word. I want to say I'm irrelevant. I'm not irrelevant. I'm preaching the Word.

But I want you to read God's Word. Psalm 89.1 I will sing of the steadfast love of Yahweh forever, With my mouth I will make known your faithfulness to all generations. So there's a contrast. There a form of non talk So as dirty as your lips are in Isaiah he says I a man of unclean lips and I live among a people of unclean lips What did God do after that A little coal came and he touched his lips, right?

Yeah. It's like now you're ready to preach my word though, right? So your dirty mouth being allowed to speak any, being able to say the name of Jesus Christ alone, that's more grace than you ever deserved. If you spoke the name of Jesus Christ one time in your life and then spent the rest of eternity in hell, you got better than you deserved, because you didn't deserve to even know who he was, let alone say his name on your dirty mouth.

But God gives us that privilege, right? He gives us the privilege of making known his faithfulness to all generations. So we've tried to define corrupt communication by looking at some scriptures, and we'll see some more. I want you to understand its importance. Look at Matthew 12. The Lord Jesus Christ is speaking.

The Lord Jesus Christ. In Matthew 12, verse 36, I heard somebody say it. You know where I'm going. He says, I tell you on the day of judgment, people will give account for every careless word they speak. And there's more context there. We'll actually look at that one later.

It's important. It's not just the big bad sins that get you landed in jail that matter. It's your sins against God that matter, every single one of them. We want to get all worked up about people that have parades and do their pride parade and all the wickedness there. And it's wicked, it's abominable. But you know, that started with idolatry first.

We have an entire, you know, sorry for all the Trump fans, but we have an entire GOP that's basically a lot of Roman Catholic types. We split off from them 500 years ago. Now we're trying to partner with them so we can win an election. You know what I mean? This is tough stuff. But idolatry is wicked just like all the other stuff.

We need to obey God from all perspectives, not just the big bad ones that have consequences in this life that we can see. In Ephesians 5.4, we're back in the context of the passage of Ephesians 4.29. Paul says, Let there be no filthiness, nor foolish talk, nor crude joking, which are out of place. He says, But instead let there be thanksgiving. For you may be sure of this, that everyone who is sexually immoral or impure, or who is covetous, that is an idolater, has no inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God.

It's serious stuff is the point. You can go your whole life being perfectly straight in regards to sexual immorality. You might not steal, but having a dirty mouth is enough to show that you're impure. And you'll give account for every careless word you speak. 1 Timothy 5, we read about the conspicuous sins, right? The sins of some people are conspicuous.

1 Timothy 5, 22, he says, Do not be hasty in the laying on of hands. Nor take part in the sins of others. Keep yourself pure. So what I'm trying to do, I'm trying to move you away from the idea of what's the bare minimum. Like, what are the words I can say? I'm trying to move you away from there and move you toward what's pure.

What would God want me to say? You're not supposed to be careless with your words. And then in 24, the sins of some people are conspicuous, going before them to judgment, but the sins of others appear later. So there's some things that people do that are so obviously wrong, they end up excommunicated from churches, they end up getting in trouble with the law, they do things that even pagans think are unacceptable.

But there's some things that we get away with in this life. You get away with it in church. The sins of some people go before them, some come later. Remember the Last Supper? Jesus said, one of you is going to betray me. Which one of the eleven said, well, I think it's Judas, because it's so obvious, right?

Nobody had any idea, except the Lord himself, of course. Some people's sins are somewhat hidden, And they don't get the consequences in this life. They're not struck dead immediately by lightning and things like that. It's a terrible judgment of God on some people to let them persist like that, but he also is giving them time to repent. That's what we hope for, for people.

So let's look at some good and bad examples here of speech. And I wanted to just survey the book of Proverbs. So turn to Proverbs 8. So we'll move quickly through this part. Just to give you, I just want to give you a taste of what, of how important this is and always has been. This is not some new teaching that Paul came up with because he noticed that, you know, people were saying bad words when he was in Ephesus.

And it's not like that. This is how God has always desired His people to behave. In Proverbs 8, so we're just going to stay in Proverbs for a minute. 13, verse 13, The fear of Yahweh is hatred of evil. Which is interesting. That's a whole different sermon.

But if you love the Lord, you're going to hate evil. Pride and arrogance and the way of evil and perverted speech I hate. And this is Lady Wisdom. But that's Jesus Christ speaking. You understand me. Perverted speech.

That's twisted. When you pervert something, you twist it. So it's when you take something and you equivocate words and you make them mean something different. And you say something, let's say, that's innocent on the surface. But you know that you just put an image in the mind of your hearer that's inappropriate. I think about that Michael Scott guy.

A lot of you guys probably know who he is, the guy from The Office. And he's got a little line he says, and I'm not going to repeat it. It's one of the reasons I quit watching the show, because it's perverted speech. He's got a little line he says, and when he says it, it puts an image in people's mind of something sexual in nature and inappropriate. But in and of itself, the phrase is meaningless.

And we all know when we do those kinds of things. And we all know when we use double speak and double talk and we get people thinking about things that we can say, well, I didn't say that. But we know we're putting it on their mind with those words. We're supposed to love our brother and build him up and help him and say what helps them as fits the occasion.

So you might have a brother who struggles with impure thoughts. Why would you want to put more in his mind? You're supposed to help your brother. Yeah, exactly. Causing people to sin. Proverbs 19, verse 1.

So we're going to look at some bad examples first. Better is a poor person who walks in his integrity than one who is crooked in speech and is a fool. A lot of people use their crooked speech to make money, right? I don't know about you guys, but before I became a Christian, I loved stand-up comedians. And I used to go watch them. We have a thing near my city.

I used to go watch these guys. And I'll tell you what, after I got saved, I listened to stand-up comedians, And I realized all these guys do basically is cuss and talk about sex and just every once in a while do it like really loud and then people just start laughing. Like it's so foolish and actually stupid. It's embarrassing for the population to me that they're entertained that easily.

Yeah, and make fun of people, make fun of Christians. That was what really started to get me when some of the guys I liked, I realized how much they mocked Christianity and I couldn't stand that. The crooked speech. You'd rather be poor than have to use crooked speech. Proverbs 18, verse 2. A fool takes no pleasure in understanding, but only in expressing his opinion.

So another form of using your speech. This isn't so much corrupting in a way, but it's just about speech. And how you get to use your speech to express your opinion. But you know what? If you don't use your mind to actually understand things first, you're not helping anyone. You're not edifying one another.

You're not going to be using speech that builds up one another as fits the occasion if all you're doing is spouting your uninformed opinion. And I'll say this as a podcaster, that most of us don't need to give our opinion on as many things as we do. And we shouldn't be as informed on as many things as we are. We live in an unprecedented age of news traveling really quickly and really far.

And it's overwhelming. And most of you know more about what's happening in Stephen Furtick's church than you do in your church half the time. And that's embarrassing as to our shame. And I'm guilty of it. I'm guilty of investing more time in online relationships, or if you can even call them that sometimes, than I am with person-to-person things sometimes.

Reaching out to my own neighbors that I can walk to their house and actually do something for them. Or maybe if needed, they could do something for me, even if they're not a Christian. Help me with a need. Those are the relationships we need to try to build. And I'm not against being out there and doing podcast things and things like that. But you need to have discipline with it and self-control in the right heart.

In verse 6, Proverbs 18 still, he says, The fool's lips walk into a fight and his mouth invites a beating. My dad was not a Christian and he told me this about myself for years. And maybe somebody had taught him that verse when he was a kid, I don't know. But my dad told me all the time, someday somebody's going to knock your teeth out because of that mouth of yours.

And he was right. My teeth didn't fall out, but I've got a 4 inch scar in the back of my head Courtesy of the Columbus Police Department because of my mouth. And I deserved it. Praise the Lord I didn't die from it. He preserved me long enough to believe his gospel one day, but my mouth earned me a beating from the Columbus Police Department. I walked into it.

I invited it. It says a fool's mouth is his ruin and his lips are a snare to his soul. So I don't know, you might not use bad words. Maybe you were raised in a house where you just never even heard them, and then when you first heard them, you didn't like them anyway. Maybe you're in construction, and that's like the stereotypical place where bad words are always used.

Or maybe you work in a place where lots of people can just swear freely. I've worked in places where non-stop cussing was the norm. And maybe for you it just feels normal. But you get to decide how you're going to speak. And a fool's mouth is his ruin. The words of a whisperer are like delicious morsels.

They go down into the inner parts of a body. So you want to be a gossiper? This might be more appropriate for ladies So hopefully there a lot of ladies watching still But you don want to be a gossiper You not helping anybody Proverbs 20 19 just skip along a little bit Whoever goes about slandering reveals secrets, therefore do not associate with a simple babbler.

That's an insulting word, babbler. It's not like, hey, just a non, a word that doesn't mean anything here. This is a word that's meant as an insult. He's calling someone a babbler. When a baby babbles, what's the point of it, right? You don't understand them, that's why you call it babble.

Otherwise you'd say, my baby's talking. You understand? Babbling, the whole point of it is somebody can't formulate thoughts properly very well, and then their mouth can't even communicate the thoughts. Don't even associate with a babbler. Proverbs 24. I got excited when Michael went here because we're going to butt right up to where he was.

But in Proverbs 24, it says in verse 1, Be not envious of evil men, nor desire to be with them, for their hearts devise violence, and their lips talk of trouble. What was that thing? Was that like a thing for me? Okay. Because I've got no clock, so I've got no idea. But there's a bonfire and you guys are happy, so we'll just keep going.

Yeah. So Proverbs 24. Their lips talk of trouble. Verse 11 and 12. Rescue those who are being... Oh, this is a big one for you guys.

Rescue those who are being taken away to death. Hold back those who are stumbling to the slaughter. So this verse is not about speech. And we'll say today is about abortion, we'll say. There's all sorts of other forms of slaughter. This is about abortion, but listen to the next verse.

If you say, Behold, we did not know this, does not he who weighs the heart perceive it? Does not he who keeps watch over your soul know it, and will he not repay man according to his work? And I'm going to tell you right now, If you didn't know that right now in our country there's an amazing amount of human beings being murdered regularly, I'm telling you now so you know it.

So there's no more of this, we did not know this. And I've got to ask you, what are you doing about it? What are you doing about it? It's an encouragement to you to do something about it because you're a man and you can. There isn't a uterus in this room and we're allowed to speak about abortion, right? We're allowed to speak about morality and we're allowed to tell people what God says.

And if you need help understanding how to do the thing, the fight against abortion, ask people. There's two of us within eight feet of each other here. We're not within six feet, so that's okay. There's two of us that I know regularly go preach at abortion clinics. You know what, I was scared when I first went. And I didn't think I'd know what to do.

And I was trying to do research and figure it out. And finally one day I said, I just have to go. I've got to stop doing research and trying to figure out how to perfect being the abortion minister guy. And I didn't worry about resources. I'll tell you what, if a woman comes up to me and says, where can I get a free ultrasound? I don't know.

How am I going to raise my baby? I don't know. I'm here to tell you not to kill your baby and how to be forgiven for even thinking about it. That's why I'm there. And I'll grow in the ability to know all the other things that are happening and where all the places are and things like that. But some of you have to get off the couch and do it.

And if you think you're too busy, come talk to me or you can talk to Dustin too. Because I'll tell you what, if you think you're too busy, I'll talk to you about my life. I'll trade with you probably, frankly. I'm a busy guy. But I have decided to deprioritize the things that aren't as important as the slaughter of my neighbor. And I don't say that to brag to you.

This is all by the grace of God, and it's recent enough that most people could say I'm a Johnny-come-lately to the scene. That's fine. I'm here now. But don't do this, if you say, behold, we did not know this. It says if you say, not if you think. If you say it.

It's our words. Our words convict us. Verse 24 of that same chapter, Whoever says to the wicked, You are in the right, will be cursed by peoples, abhorred by nations. Don't approve of wickedness and certainly don't say it out loud. There's some more verses you could look at. Proverbs 25, 20, 23, 26, 22-28.

But let's look at some good examples real quick of some good speech in Proverbs. Proverbs 18, verse 4. The words of a man's mouth are deep waters. The fountain of wisdom is a bubbling brook. So we had babbling earlier, which is bad. Now we have, it's a bubbling brook.

It provides nourishment. This is something you would look for. So the words of a man's mouth are deep waters. The fountain of wisdom is a bubbling brook. You should be speaking wisdom to people. Where do you get wisdom from?

The Word of God. Spirit-led believers study the Word of God. They sit under preaching, they go to places where they interact with others and edify one another, and you gain wisdom. You gain wisdom by testing. That's what Romans says. That by testing you may discern what is the will of the Lord.

What does it mean by testing? You ever think about it? You ever consider these things? You're supposed to get off the couch and try something. If it doesn't work, you just gained wisdom. People who are wise are people who have gotten up and failed way more than you.

It's that simple. There's no real successful guys out there. There just guys that learned from their failures a lot and just quit doing the thing that failed That all we are Guys that do things well We just learn from our failures Proverbs 24 again. 25 and 26. Listen to what good words can do for people. Like cold water to a thirsty soul, so is good news from a far country.

Like a muddied spring or a polluted fountain is a righteous man who gives way before the wicked. Talk about you, Al Mohler, right? Yeah, I'm not afraid. That's what he was. He was a righteous man that we trusted. And he's given way before the wicked.

That hurts. That hurts all the people. A muddied spring. You want to drink from a muddied spring? No. So there's all sorts of this.

Proverbs 27, don't boast about tomorrow. Let another praise you. And here's a way to edify one another. Verse 5 of Proverbs 27, a very misunderstood concept in our world, a misunderstood concept in Christianity. Better is open rebuke than hidden love. Faithful are the wounds of a friend, profuse are the kisses of an enemy.

One of the ways that you help your brother in Christ is by rebuking him if necessary. That's how he knows you love him. You want to be right. You want to be careful. You should be humble about it. You should come with so much humility if you turn out to be wrong, he's thankful that you tried and you're still brothers at the end.

You know what I mean? But better is open rebuke than hidden love. Some of us use our words to cut people down and hurt them and not build them up, and then when we actually should be actually opening our mouths to correct people, we're afraid and we don't do it. We'll do it behind their back. We'll tell other people what we think of them. Alright, so my hope here is that you're sufficiently convinced that there's all sorts of filthy speech that you're probably guilty of, that even from your heart you've been guilty of it, which we didn't even get to that passage yet, and that there's also really good speech that you should have.

And so let's talk about how to implement this in your life. So I don't just want to tell you, hey, you do all this wrong or not, and not give you any practical tips. So first of all, Matthew 12 again, Jesus speaking. Jesus speaking perfect and pure words, as always. What a man. In Matthew 12, 34, Jesus says, in the second half, he says, For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.

So here's what I want to challenge you of. If you have a dirty mouth, If you are, let's forget the word dirty for a second. If you have an impure mouth, so shoot for purity, not just the bare minimum of not dirtiness. It's because it comes out of your heart. Paul says, let no corrupting talk come out of your mouth. It's almost like it's in there and you're supposed to keep it from coming out.

And so we want to get to the heart. We want to work on your heart. You want to pray to the Lord that he will change your heart. You've been born again, but your heart still needs to be continuously changed and sanctified. And those dirty words, those filthy, obscene talk, the crude joking, the profanity, the blasphemy, the complaining, these are the things that our corrupt flesh still wants to cling to.

Because it loves those things, because it's dead. But you're supposed to act like you're alive. So pray to the Lord to help you with your heart. What are some antidotes? Ephesians 4 again. But let's finish the context of this passage.

Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, it's right in between there. Verse 32, and Paul does this a lot. If you read Paul especially, you'll see he does this a lot. He tells you what not to do, then he tells you what to do. You don't grow in Christ in a vacuum, right? You sweep everything out and like seven more demons come back.

Like the whole point is to replace all these horrible things with good things. Paul says, rather than grieving the Holy Spirit and having bitterness and wrath and slander, in 32 he says, be kind to one another. Actively seek to be kind though. It's not just, I'm not hurting the person. You're supposed to be kind. It's an active thing you're doing.

You're trying to actually do something that's not natural, that's not normal, and it's not neutral. Nobody's called kind because they just ignored you. Kindness is actually going and doing something for a person. Tender-hearted. It should actually break your heart to think about people and their sin, especially a brother. Non-believers too.

You want to be tender-hearted. You want people to perceive you as soft-hearted, not just the hard-hearted guy that always knows what's right and things like that. Forgiving one another, so you forgive people. That's one of the ways that you avoid having corrupting talk come out of your mouth. You're ready to forgive people as God and Christ forgave you.

Colossians 3, 12 and 16 are going to tell you the same things. Again, it's a parallel passage. But in Colossians 3 verse 16, Paul says, Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs with thankfulness in your heart to God. How does the word of Christ dwell in you richly if you spend five minutes a day on average reading it?

Most of you don know the word of God You know the 15 verses that you can beat up a Jehovah Witness with maybe You know the Romans Road But if you are not actively studying and reading the Word of God, two different things, but they're both part of our Christian life, you're not going to have it dwell in you richly. And I will add, you need to be memorizing God's Word. I'm not talking about a lot of verses, you know, like Romans 3.23 and then some other.

I'm talking about picking up whole books of the Bible and deciding I am going to dedicate as many months as it takes in some cases to continuously working at memorizing so I can sit down and I can quote to you a book. You know, you can pick the book of Jude. That one doesn't take as long. Don't pick Isaiah for your first one. But you need to be memorizing Scripture.

You need to be memorizing Scripture because that is how you start to speak pure words. They used to say about, what was the guy, John Bunyan, that if they cut him he would bleed, bibline they'd say. And you know, you know men that you meet, you know even women that you talk to where, Where, especially if you're on the same version of the Bible as they are, you hear so much come out of their mouth that's clearly just, they're just talking Scripture.

They're just saying pure words of life. And you can all do that. There isn't a person in here that can't memorize Scripture. And especially if you're a younger guy, you can actually earn scholarships for it. And there's people that'll help you. There's apps that help you if you like phone apps.

There's different techniques that people do and like. But honestly, if you're memorizing Scripture, the next thing that happens as a result of just trying to, you meditate on Scripture. Psalm 119, a bunch of verses, 16, 23, 27, 78, 95, those all verses were all about just meditating on God's Word. Just thinking about it. Letting it roll over in your head all the time.

And the reason why we don't do that is because our minds are filled with garbage. We have a saying in the computer industry, garbage in, garbage out. So you write a computer program and if somebody types in garbage, if you're creating a name tag, if you type your name wrong, we just print the name tag with your name wrong. The computer's job isn't to decipher your mistake, right?

What are you filling your mind with? Are you watching TV shows that have profanity and crude talking and joking? I'm not a legalist. I'm not going to come tell you which shows you can or can't watch. You have to decide for yourself though, is this helping me? Is this helping me to be a man of God?

Is this helping my family? If I look at your iPhone, I scroll over to the screen time. What are the apps that you're spending the most screen time on? Does your Bible app even pop up to the top of the list? Do you spend anywhere near as much time a week even reading the Bible as you do watching garbage on TV? Even a good TV show that's not garbage.

Like, what do you spend your time on? This is what men, men should be spending their time on, things that edify themselves and others. So think about for yourself, think about for yourself, what should I do to eliminate the garbage? I'll give you one example from my life, and I'll use my wife as the example so I don't do the hero of my own story thing or whatever.

But my wife really likes watching football. And there was one particular coach, Rex Ryan. He coached the Jets. Rob's the other brother. Yeah, so it was Rex Ryan. And for whatever reason, the CBS and them, they loved to show him when he was cussing.

And my wife one day said to me, she said, I cannot watch Jets games anymore because she would cuss in her heart. Because my wife and I, we both have quite a good testimony of self. We'll put it that way. And in our hearts, there was a lot of wickedness that God's still sanctifying. And she had to say, I need to cut out. If it's a Jets game, I can't watch it because of that.

It's been the best thing about COVID. I don't see the coaches swear with their stupid masks on. You know, it's actually been really nice watching a little football that way. But you have to figure out what's the thing that's causing you to stumble? What's the thing that's not helping you in your Christian life? It might even be a Christian thing where the person doesn't use pure words.

And you need to try to avoid it. We want to be careful not to get too legalistic. Look at Matthew 12 real quick. There was a perfect man once. And that perfect man, in verse 34 of Matthew 12, said, You brood of vipers. So if anyone tells you that speaking harshly to somebody is always wrong, you just remember Matthew 12, 34.

If Jesus, the perfect man, could speak harshly at times and truthfully, but yet do it with perfect love, then it is possible for us, by the Holy Spirit's grace, to also speak to people in a way that may seem harsh at times, But still be considered holy. Jesus calls them in verse 39 an evil and adulterous generation. So there's a way to speak to people as fits the occasion that our Lord Jesus Christ, our perfect example modeled for us, where we have to have the discernment to know, you know, sometimes we use Hard words.

Not bad words. I don't call people names when I'm preaching just for the fun of it. I try to avoid some words that I know are particularly inflammatory to people. But I use Bible words. And you can too. And you can be truthful with people.

So what I want you to remember is that Jesus Christ, if I would have read all of these verses to him, and I have about a dozen more verses from the Old Testament alone, Just those two books of Proverbs and Psalms. If I would have read those verses to him, he would have said, yeah, I kept it. He kept every one of them. Always, perfectly, at all times, from a pure heart.

And because Jesus Christ was able to do those things, and everything else he was called to do, he was able to be the perfect sacrifice for sinners on the cross. And when he was raised from the dead, and he raised himself from the dead, He has that power. Jesus Christ proclaims the gospel that all those who believe in him can be saved. So that you who have a dirty mouth and you can't possibly clean it yourself, can trust in him not only for your salvation but for your sanctification So not only for your justification but for your sanctification Let me put it that way And you can trust that by His power, by the grace that's been given to you, you can grow in this way that you use your tongue.

And when you fail, instead of making an excuse for yourself, instead of justifying yourself, Just seek His forgiveness. Confess, hey, I failed again. I don't want to talk like the other guys. I'll tell you what, you want a chance to evangelize people, seriously, just don't swear at work. People will literally be like, what's your deal, dude? They'll ask in a weird way.

They'll think, are you in a cult? They always start with, you're in a cult, or you're a Mormon. Don't wear a white shirt and black pants either. I made the mistake of wearing a white shirt and black pants and going preaching. My buddy's like, don't do that. Seriously, have a clean mouth.

And you know what will happen is you may have a thousand people mock you. There's people that will try to get you to cuss. It's crazy. What does Peter say That the time to live like the Gentiles is past Living in sensuality debauchery drunkenness orgies drinking parties and lawless idolatry He says because you don do what they do they malign you They're surprised that you don't join them.

And they try to get you to do the same things. And you trust the Lord to give you that strength and power. You don't have it. I tried to slam you with some law here, and I'm trying to give you some gospel. Because I want you to know you're not good enough. But Jesus was good enough and is good enough and he lives inside your heart if you're a Christian today.

And when you struggle with these things, instead of buckling down and saying, I'm going to work harder, I'm going to try not to swear, turn to him for help. He's the power, not you. He's the power of all of this. But he wants to help you. Like he literally, that's his desire, his holiness. I mean, it's what he loves.

And you will have an impact on people around you. You will have an impact on your family, as the leader of your home, other people who you may not know struggle in their heart with complaining, lack of thanksgiving, obscene talk, crude thinking. They will be able to be helped by your purity as well as you lead them. So let me pray Father help us to think about these important things from your word Pray that your Holy Spirit would get a hold of our hearts and cause us to be people who love Jesus Christ more every day.

That we would be so filled with awe when we think about his person, His wonderful works, His perfect sayings, His atoning death, His glorious resurrection, His perfect ascension into heaven, the fact that He rules and reigns and is seated at your right hand, Lord, help us to, when we think and meditate about those things, to be empowered to live lives that show that we really do have affection for Him. And when we fall, Lord, give us repentance and give us humility and bring us all home one day to that glorious day when we will no longer say we are men of unclean lips among a people of unclean lips, but that with perfectly pure and perfect glorified lips we will sing your praises for eternity. I thank you for the attentiveness of these men, and I thank you for the perfection of your word, and I pray that you would use those things for your glory.

In Christ's name I pray. Amen.