Has what you said ever gotten you in trouble? Welcome to the human race! Unless you never say anything, either with body language or with the tone of your grunts, you will make mistakes in your communication. Wars have been started over words. Drawing a picture can get you killed. What you say in a BLOG can get your arrested. Can you wait a minute, there is someone pounding on my door.
The focus of today’s text is verses two and three. We discovered that the qualification for entering the LORD’s presence is perfection, that none of us is qualified to enter. This is the overarching answer to David’s question of who will get to heaven. But then David lets us know that what we do matters. It is not simply what we have in our minds, our thoughts and intentions, but what we do with the rest of our body that make the difference.
So David starts with the most rebellious part of our body, the tongue. There are four statements about what we say in these two verses, twice as many as the other examples of righteous and blameless living. Twice as many statements, twice as important. Or maybe twice as difficult to master.
The first gets many people in trouble. We are to speak the truth from the heart. Some people take this to mean that we are brutally honest, with the emphasis on brutal. They say what they perceive as the truth with such directness that it injures those who are on the receiving end. That is not what this is talking about. When truth is spoken it must take into account the hearer. Truth must be spoken from the deepest part of who we are to the deepest part of who they are. If we speak it in such a way that it never reaches their heart, it wasn’t spoken from our heart. If we really want them to receive what we have to say, it must come from our heart. We might say it isn’t coming from their head. Speaking truth takes into account the hearer’s capacity to hear our message.
The other side of this line of our text is that we are to be speaking truth, not our truth, but His truth. Not truth as we see it from our perspective. We need to make sure what we speak to another person’s heart is the truth. But often we shade the truth in a way that we benefit from its application. But truth is an equal opportunity offender. Truth steps on everyone’s toes.
This ties into the next line dealing with slander, the use of our words to color someone else as the bad person. Remember, ninety percent of what we communicate is not what we say with our words. It is our body language and the tone of our voice that carry the lion’s share of communication. Our words can say that we trust the neighbor, but the roll of our eyes sends a stronger message of mistrust. You can say “trust him” as a question, a command, a sarcastic snipe, or a reassuring encouragement.
The next two lines of verse three expand slander toward other people. Slander can end up doing harm to other people. When we don’t speak the truth from the heart we end up hurting others. It can be as destructive as if you stabbed them with a knife or hacked into their bank account and stole their money. What gets said in the press can ruin a business or a family.
You see, we are responsible for not just what we say and how we say it, but also to some extend how it is received. We have a responsibility to know the hearer and their heart condition, and speak the truth to them in the best possible way so that they are able to hear the truth. And in the process we have the responsibility to protect others from what other people might hear about them as the truth is spoken. We don’t want our telling to injure them.
Speaking the truth can be difficult, but we must learn to do it. But we need help. We must do this perfectly. We must be blameless. Lord, help us!
The Arnold Journey 