Your Words Can Heal or Destroy | The Power of Words

Good morning.

Uh I look around the room, and I think most of us, except for maybe Gen Z or maybe some Gen Alphas in here, I don't know.

Uh, but most of us have learned something similar when we were out in the playground growing up as kids.

Maybe you remember the words.

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.

You guys remember that one?

Some of you?

Yeah?

Now, if somebody really got under your skin, like they really got underneath it, and that's when you really pull out the big one.

You guys remember that one?

I'm rubber, you're glue.

Whatever you say bounces off of me and sticks onto you.

Right?

As kids, we said that almost like a magic spell.

We said it because, well, we needed it to be true.

But I think deep down we we all knew it was a lie.

Yeah, sticks and stones do break bones, but the bones heal.

You know, maybe after six weeks, eight weeks, the cast comes off, and you're fine.

But the words somebody spoke over you when you were a kid, when somebody spoke those times, those didn't heal in six weeks.

Some of you are carrying those words from 30 years ago, 40 years ago.

Maybe it's the name you got called.

Maybe the thing your dad said to you the day he left.

Maybe the teacher who told you that you're never gonna amount to anything.

Those words didn't just bounce off.

They stuck.

They stuck to you.

You see, that rhyme had it backwards.

Words can do what sticks and stones can't.

They reach a place inside you that no doctor can touch.

And here's the part that none of us, not a single person in this room, including myself, gets to dodge.

We've been on both sides of that.

See, somebody broke you with the words.

And you have broken somebody with your words too.

This morning, we're gonna go through.

Well, we've been going through selective Proverbs over the past couple of weeks.

This morning we're gonna look at Proverbs 18.

If you have Bibles, please open them up to Proverbs chapter 18.

Proverbs 18 · chapter mention

We're gonna look at verse 21.

It tells us this the tongue has the power of life and death, and those who love it will eat its fruit.

Life and death.

The Bible puts your mouth in the same sentence as life and death.

Now, in the Hebrew, the the language this was first written in, it actually says something stronger than that.

It says, Life and death are in the hand of the tongue.

In the hand.

It's like your tongue is is holding something like it picked up a tool.

You know, think about a hammer.

You can take a hammer and build a whole house with it.

You can also take that hammer and swing it and bust a hole through a wall.

Same hammer, just depends how you use it, that's your mouth.

Every time you open it, you can swing it to bust a hole through a wall or to build a house.

You can use your mouth to build somebody up or to break them down.

To tear them down, to destroy them.

And here's what makes the tongue so dangerous.

You can't take it back.

You ever try to put toothpaste back into a tube?

Right?

You squeeze too much out, and you start trying to try to put some of that back in, you kind of push it back, you scrape at it.

I mean, you can work at it for an hour, but it's not going back in.

It's out.

That's your words.

You can say sorry, and you should.

You you can ask for forgiveness, and you must.

Scripture tells us about that.

But you cannot unsay the thing you said.

Once it's out, it's in the room.

It's in their memory.

The toothpaste is out of the tube.

Over my years in ministry, I've sat with people, 40, 50 years old, grown men, grown women, who will who will start telling me about something that their mother or their father said to them when they were eight years old.

And they're not sharing it, they're not telling me the story like it's some old story.

They're crying over it, like it happened this morning.

That is what words do.

And the wound that the words create, they don't just close on its own.

It keeps bleeding quietly for 10, 20, 30, 40 years.

And listen, I don't want you guys to get the wrong idea.

This sermon is not about being polite.

But I want you to begin to see the God we're talking about this morning.

Because we have a God who speaks.

We have a God who spoke the whole world into being.

And he made you in his image.

He made all of us in his image, which means our words, your words, also carry weight in this world.

Real weight.

Right now, today, your mouth is holding life and death.

The thing you said to your kid this morning, it landed somewhere.

The text message you fired off is doing something in the person who read it.

You have never, let me let me make this clear, you have never, you have never once spoken a word that just sat there and did nothing.

So let me ask you, think about the closest people to you.

Your kids, your spouse, your friends, the people you live with.

If you added all of it up, every word, just from this past week, I'm just giving just the past seven days, if you added all of it up, every word you spoke for the past week.

Which way has your hammer been swinging mostly?

Building up or breaking down?

And look, for many of us, the answer may scare us.

Because for many of us, you keep breaking the people, you keep breaking the ones who you love most with your words.

In fact, you keep promising yourself that you're gonna stop, but you can't, and you keep thinking, why?

Why can't I get my own mouth under control?

And look, there's an answer to it, and we're gonna get to it.

But I want to look at our second verse for today, which comes from Proverbs 15.

The soothing tongue is a tree of life, but a perverse tongue crushes the spirit.

Soothing tongue is a tree of life, but a perverse tongue crushes the spirit.

You've got two tongues.

One heals, one crushes.

And that word crushes, it's actually a very heavy word.

Again, if you look back in the Hebrew, it's a word for breaking bones.

In other words, a bent tongue doesn't just sting somebody, it fractures something inside them.

It fractures something, it breaks them.

Now look, before we go straight after the tongue, I want you to hear this too.

A lot of the time, we don't tear people down because we're we're monsters.

You do it because you wanted something and you didn't get it.

You wanted respect.

Maybe you wanted a little peace in your in your own home.

You know, those aren't evil things to want.

But here's the problem: the human heart is always reaching for something to make us feel safe or or important or happy or in control.

And when that thing becomes more important than God, the Bible calls it an idol.

Our hearts are idol-making factories.

So respect can become an idol, control can become an idol, comfort can become an idol, peace can become an idol.

And when our idol gets threatened, our mouths often become a weapon.

Let me play this out for you.

I want you to watch how an idol gets to your mouth.

If respect is my idol and my wife disrespects me, well, I'm gonna use my words to punish her.

No, don't worry, I don't do that to her.

That's if it was an idol.

If control is my idol and my kids blow up my plans, I'm gonna use my words to put them back in their place.

If comfort is my idol and somebody interrupts my night, my tongue is gonna start dripping with contempt.

Are you starting to see some of the connections on how our idols can work its way to our mouths?

You see, your tongue isn't actually the root problem.

Your tongue is showing you what's happening in your heart.

The idol is the problem.

So we've got to stop calling it just a temper.

We've got to stop calling it, you know, we're just venting.

When your God, little G, gets threatened, you pick up a hammer of your tongue and you swing it to make somebody pay.

So that's not just a personality issue, that is your heart worshiping the wrong thing.

And God has a word for that.

Anyone know what that word is?

It's called sin.

I mean, think about it.

Look, we we've all done this.

I've done this.

We struggle with this.

But I want you to think about something.

You take the same mouth you praise God with on a Sunday morning, and then you use it to cut down a person he handed you to love on a Monday.

And then you justify, you tell yourself, well, they made me do it.

They didn't.

They just threatened an idol, and your mouth rose up to defend it.

Your author C.S.

Lewis said it like this.

I love the way he describes this.

If there are rats in the cellar, the best time to see them is when you walk in suddenly and you flip on the lights.

You see them there, right?

Now, the rats didn't show up because you suddenly opened the door and turned on the lights.

No, you caught them off guard.

They were already living down there.

The suddenness, the quickness, you caught them out in the open.

That's what hard moments do to you.

The traffic, the kid who won't listen, the comment from your spouse that lands wrong.

The moment didn't put the anger in you.

It just turned the light on.

And it caught was already living down there.

And look, my family will tell you, my words don't always build up.

Well, I'll give you an example.

I'll open our fridge at home.

I'll look at it and think, oh, this is disorganized.

I can't find a thing.

And out comes the attitude.

I'll throw out some snappy comments.

I'll do a very big, exaggerated sigh, you know, like a making sure everyone in the house can hear it.

The whole performance clicks on.

You know what my wife does?

She looks at me and says, You don't even cook.

What am I supposed to say to that?

I mean, she's right.

I'm up in arms about a kitchen I rarely ever use.

That's a heart problem, friends.

That's not a fridge problem.

And look, we've all got our version of it.

Take your marriage.

The person you promise to love is the one your tongue cuts the quickest.

We get careless with the people closest to us.

So this week, let me give you an application for this week.

Watch your tone even before you watch your words.

Because listen, your wife can survive being disagreed with, but she can't keep bleeding from being looked down on.

And wives, for your husbands.

Your husbands hear enough all day of what he is not.

Be the one voice that tells him what he is.

With your kids.

With your kids.

Speak who they are over them.

Not just what they did wrong.

I'm preaching this to myself.

The words you say over your kids will one day become the voice in their own head for the rest of their lives.

I can see a lot of heads nodding.

There's a voice in you, it's either your father or your mother's voice.

So what voice are you handing them?

The voice of a parent who sees what God is making them, or the voice of a critic who only sees what they're not.

Now I want you to hear me on this because what I'm saying right now, there's a risk that it could get all twisted up.

So I don't want anyone to get this all twisted up.

A healing tongue, a tongue that builds up, is not always a soft tongue.

It's always a tongue aimed at their good.

But sometimes love still has to say the hard thing.

So I don't want you to get that all twisted up.

And we're going to come back to that in a couple of weeks in another sermon where we're going to talk about how to have difficult conversations.

But for now, soft or hard, every word, every word we speak comes from the same place.

Your heart.

And that's where the real trouble is.

And it's trouble because none of us, as much as we try, none of us can fix this by just trying harder.

It's not going to happen.

You can't straighten out your tongue without straightening out your heart.

And you can't reach down inside you and straighten out your own heart.

You've tried, you failed.

I mean, you you've apologized on a Sunday only to do the same thing by Friday.

Why?

Because the idol factory is still going, pumping out idols in your heart.

And look, this is true for me too.

You know, out of all my kids, the one most like me is my son Ramsey.

And I spent years trying to keep him from every mistake that I've ever made.

So every time he slipped up, even something really small, I would come down on him hard.

Now I told myself it was out of love.

But the truth is, there was a fear in me.

And that fear turned into anger.

And that anger came out of my mouth and it landed on my son.

Yeah, I used words to build him up.

Yeah, I definitely did that.

But far too many times, I used words to tear him down.

And he didn't even do the things I was so afraid of.

You see, the fear was mine.

The harsh words were mine.

But he carried them.

And I know, I know I'm not the only father in here who's done that.

I'm not the only parent who let their own fear come out as a sharp, harsh word over their child who deserved better.

So what do we do?

If the problem is a heart we can't reach and a tongue we can't tame on our own, we just stuck.

No.

We're not stuck.

We're actually finally in the one place where grace can reach us.

And to see that grace, I've got to take you the I've got to take you back.

I've got to take you all the way back to the beginning, to the very first words ever spoken.

They were spoken by God.

The Bible opens up with, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

And how did he do it?

He said it.

And God said, Let there be light, and there was light.

He didn't build the world with his hands first.

He spoke it into existence.

He said a word and the light came running.

Words made the world.

Words made the world.

In fact, words make worlds, even in our own homes.

Words made the world.

But then you turn the page, you got a garden, you got a snake.

Snake opens up his mouth.

He twists a few words just a little bit.

Did God really say?

Woman listens, man goes along with it, and the world, the world got spoken to beauty, gets spoken into ruin.

Not by a weapon, but by words.

Words made a world, words broke it.

And here's the question the whole Bible is asking.

Who is going to fix what words broke?

And the answer is one of the most beautiful sentences in all of Scripture.

It comes from the Gospel of John.

John in his gospel, he says this, in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.

The voice that spoke the world into being isn't just a sound, it is a person.

And John says that person put on flesh and moved into our neighborhood called earth.

Jesus is the word, God's own voice, walking around in a body.

And why did he come?

The word came here to heal the world.

I mean, remember our verse the soothing tongue is a tree of life.

Now that word soothing, it means healing.

A tongue that makes people whole.

Jesus shows up and you watch his mouth do exactly that.

I mean, he says to a man covered in disease, be clean.

And the man is clean.

He says to a man who hasn't walked in years, get up and walk.

And guess what?

The man walks.

He stands up.

Jesus stands at a grave that already smells like death, and he says, Lazarus, come out.

And this man, the dead man, walks out into the sun.

Proverbs shows us what a healing tongue looks like.

Jesus shows us that a healing tongue, he shows us the healing tongue in the flesh.

Every word out of his mouth gave life.

He never once, never once broke a soul, he should have healed.

And then comes the part that should stop, should just kind of cause us to skip a beat.

The one man Now in all of history that spoke life, that only ever spoke life, got shot.

Roman soldiers arrested him.

The religious leaders put him on a trial.

A governor named Pilate signed off on it.

And scripture tells us he was led like a lamb to the slaughter and like a sheep before shears is silent.

So he did not open his mouth.

Stood in front of men who were about to kill him.

And he said nothing.

He could have spoken one word and ended the whole thing.

But he stayed silent.

Why?

Why would the healing word go quiet?

Because the death that our mouths earned had to land on somebody.

Every cruel word, every lie, every sentence that we ever used to break a person.

It all earned a sentence of death.

And the only one who could pay it was the one who had never spoken a single word of death in his life.

And understand something, it wasn't just the soldiers.

It wasn't just Pilate.

It was our sin.

Including every word we used to wound, lie, accuse, and destroy that brought Jesus to the cross.

And he took it.

He took it for us.

You know what?

It goes even further than that.

See, because some of you didn't come in here today feeling guilty about your words.

You came in here wounded.

Carrying words somebody spoke over you that never stopped bleeding.

Remember earlier that that wound that doesn't close on its own?

Here's how it finally closes.

It is by his wounds that we are healed.

The word was wounded so that your wounds could be healed.

The word was silenced so that word sinners, that's you and me, could go free.

Now look, I know some of you probably need me to slow down a little bit right here.

I don't want to just skim past this.

See, some of you you've been counting the words you have to answer for, all the all the words you've used to break people.

But again, there's that other pile too.

The words that have been spoken over you.

The words you never asked for, the name that's stuck, the the lie that said you were worthless, the voice in your head that still sounds like your father or your mother or your abuser or the critic.

I want you to hear this.

Jesus did not only come for the words you spoke, he came for the words that crushed you.

He saw them.

He knows where they landed, and on the cross, he carried the entire, the whole curse of sin upon himself.

So you do not have to bleed anymore.

He saw it.

He carried it.

And he walked out of the grave with the final word over your life.

You are mine.

You are loved.

You are forgiven.

You are redeemed.

You are my son.

You are my daughter.

That is what is true of you.

That is who you are.

So I want you to hear the good news.

Whether you walked in guilty or wounded or both.

Look, we said the real problem was your heart that you can't straighten on your own.

But thanks be to God that you don't have to straighten it.

God gives you a new one.

When you put your trust in Jesus, you get joined to him.

You get united to him.

That means you belong to him now.

And his life starts flowing into you.

And the spirit, the spirit of God himself, moves in and goes to work in you from the inside out.

Look, God doesn't just put a muzzle on your old mouth.

He begins to grow you a new one.

He doesn't just manage the old heart.

He replaces it.

The stone heart comes out, living heart goes in.

And look, I'm sure many of you, maybe, maybe, maybe not, I don't know, but you I would, I'm sure you know or you've heard down here in Florida with fruit trees.

Think about a fruit tree.

A grower takes a branch that can't bear good fruit, and what does he do?

He doesn't just toss it, he joins it to a strong living tree.

Right?

Nobody nobody lectures the branch into making oranges.

The branch gets grafted in to another tree that's strong and living, and the life of that tree begins to flow into that branch.

That is you when you are joined to Jesus Christ.

You're not gonna be able to just lecture yourself into a new tongue.

You can't do that, it's not gonna work, but you get grafted into him, his life moves into you, and a healing tongue grows out of a new heart, a new heart that Jesus made new.

The fruit comes because of the tree you're joined to.

And that tree is Jesus.

And listen, it doesn't all happen instantaneously at once, where you're gonna see all the suddenly I don't say an ill word ever.

Here's how it usually looks the same spirit who raised Jesus from the dead, he now lives in you if you're in Christ.

He knew what was down in that cellar of heart of your heart, and he moved in anyways.

But it works slowly, and he's patient with you.

So start paying attention to the small stuff.

A sharp word that you're that you really want to say, but you catch it before it lands.

A cruel sentence you swallow instead of speak.

An apology that that used to take a week, now it takes less than an hour for you to do.

Those are some markers for you to see that the spirit is at work in you.

That's not you finally trying hard enough, it is the Spirit of God growing new fruit in you.

Slowly, but actually, from the inside out.

See, that is grace.

Jesus takes the mouth you once used as a weapon, and he begins to turn it into a tree of life.

So here, I want you to hear the whole thing for a moment.

Just kind of a summary sentence for you.

Words made the world.

Words broke it.

The word came to heal it.

Words made the world, words broke it, the word, Jesus Christ, came to heal it.

The word was broken so that your words could heal.

Now I told you earlier about my own failings in this.

My son Ramsey, he isn't here this morning.

And honestly, there's a part of me that's glad because it's hard.

There's a part of me that's sad.

Because you should hear it.

So I'm gonna say it all to you guys, and you guys are gonna hold me to it.

You guys are gonna hold me accountable because this week I am going to sit down with him.

I'm gonna sit down with my son, and I'm gonna tell him that I let my fear turn into anger.

That I use my words way more often than I should have to tear him down when he didn't earn it, when he didn't deserve it.

That was my sin, not his.