A Nugget from New Life Network
Scriptures for the Day (April 18, 2017)
Thou art snared with the words of thy mouth, thou art taken with the words of thy mouth. (Proverbs 6:2) Death and life are in the power of the tongue: and they that love it shall eat the fruit thereof. (Proverbs 18:21)
We have been sharing in our last few devotionals about the importance of the words that come out of our mouth. The power of life and death are resident in those words. We can choose to bless or choose to curse. Some may look at this concentration on, and control of what we speak, as legalistic and unattainable. It’s neither! The words out of our mouth reveal what’s in our heart in abundance (Luke 6:45). We need to make sure our heart is full of the Word of God, the love of God, and the Holy Spirit of God. Light will always dispel darkness and if our heart is full of His Word, His love, and His Spirit, it will crowd out and overrule all those other words (that we all still remember) and we will choose not to speak them. It’s not a matter of legalism. It’s a matter of what we choose to fill our heart with.
The following are a few additional scriptures from Proverbs that bear on this very important topic:
He that speaketh truth showeth forth righteousness (Proverbs 12:17)
The tongue of the wise is health (Proverbs 12:18)
The tongue of the wise makes knowledge appealing (Proverbs 15:2)
A wholesome tongue is a tree of life (Proverbs 15:4)
Righteous lips are the delight of kings, and they love him that speaketh right (Proverbs 16:13)
Whoso keepeth his mouth and his tongue keepeth his soul from troubles (Proverbs 21:23)
Listen to what The Message Bible says about this topic in the Book of James::
A bit in the mouth of a horse controls the whole horse. A small rudder on a huge ship in the hands of a skilled captain sets a course in the face of the strongest winds. A word out of your mouth may seem of no account, but it can accomplish nearly anything—or destroy it! It only takes a spark, remember, to set off a forest fire. A careless or wrongly placed word out of your mouth can do that. By our speech we can ruin the world, turn harmony to chaos, throw mud on a reputation, send the whole world up in smoke and go up in smoke with it, smoke right from the pit of hell. This is scary: You can tame a tiger, but you can’t tame a tongue—it’s never been done. The tongue runs wild, a wanton killer. With our tongues we bless God our Father; with the same tongues we curse the very men and women he made in his image. Curses and blessings out of the same mouth! My friends, this can’t go on. A spring doesn’t gush fresh water one day and brackish the next, does it? Apple trees don’t bear strawberries, do they? Raspberry bushes don’t bear apples, do they? You’re not going to dip into a polluted mud hole and get a cup of clear, cool water, are you? (James 3:3-12, The Message Bible)
Look at it this way. The words out of our mouths are seeds. They are going to produce good fruit or bad fruit, blessing or cursing. Whatever we sow, we will reap, so let’s sow good seed so that we can have a good harvest at some point down the line.
