This morning started off like “one of those days”. I woke up to the sounds of children fighting and crying. Before I had even poured my first cup of coffee I was being asked to mediate a dispute.
I dispensed quick judgment and retreated to my room, looking for my husband. I wanted someone to listen as I poured out my frustration about the kids’ infractions. He offered a few words of encouragement, but they fell on deaf ears. I didn’t want to hear it! I just wanted to let off steam. And I wanted my husband to hear what I had to say, but not to take any of it seriously.
I knew once my frustration was vented, I would feel so much better, and I didn’t really mean the things I was saying. I knew I was exaggerating. My situation felt very bleak at the moment, but I knew it wasn’t truly bleak. Everything would look better after I had my second cup of coffee.
My husband knows me. He knew I was exaggerating how bad the kids were being, and he called me on it. Not ten minutes earlier I had told the kids not to exaggerate one another’s mis-steps in their desire for justice. And here I was, doing the same thing.
I felt convicted when he called a spade a spade. I was sinning. I had justified my idle words because it made me feel better to say them.
As I thought about my words, spoken in anger, I was grateful that my husband was the only one who had heard them. Did the men and women of the Bible know that their careless words would be recorded for all time?
Moses said, “Lord, please send someone else.” Did he know that the Lord’s anger would burn against him? (Exodus 4:13)
David wrote a letter that said ‘Put Uriah in the front line where the fighting is fiercest. Then withdraw from him so he will be struck down and die.’ (2 Samuel 11:14-15) When he tried to hide his adultery with Bathsheba did he know that the rest of us would all be reading of it thousands of years later?
Peter said, “I don’t know the man!”
Martha said, “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself?”
Would they have been more careful had they known others were listening? How might they have spoken had they known that their hasty words would never be forgotten until the end of time?
Oh, that I would take my own idle words this seriously. Even though they won’t be recorded in holy Scripture for all to hear, they don’t fall on deaf ears. The Lord hears those sinful words before even one of them is spoken.
Matthew 15: 11, 18-19 “What goes into a man’s mouth does not make him ‘unclean,’ but what comes out of his mouth, that is what makes him ‘unclean’….the things that come out of the mouth come from the heart, and these make a man ‘unclean.’ For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander.”
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