Words

During my time with the Lord this morning I was listening to an old message by my dad entitled "Encourage." It's all about our use of words and honoring the Lord with our speech. It reminded me of a little series that we did on the blog a few years back, taken from this very message. I thought it would be fun to revisit the series this week. Mom started it off with the first post.

My husband C.J. gave the message that forms the basis for the series we are doing this week. His message was entitled "Encourage" from Ephesians 4:29: "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."

It was about speech, communication, conversation—something at which we women are prolific! It was certainly convicting to me, and this is probably the third time I have heard this message. Some of us were talking after the meeting about how we needed to go home and apologize to our kids for unkind words that very morning!

C.J. pointed out that speech is significant. In other words, our words matter. It's just that there are so many of them—an estimated 25,000 per day—that we don't often take them seriously. But, as Paul Tripp wrote in his book War of Words: "When we speak, it must be with the realization that God has given our words significance. He has ordained for them to be important...God has given words value. So we must do all we can to assign words the importance Scripture gives them."

This week we will examine our 25,000 words per day in light of Ephesians 4:29 and assign those words “the importance Scripture gives them.” We’ll also discover the kind of words that bring glory to Him: edifying, appropriate, and purposeful words. And we will look at how this verse applies to our speech as women.

If you would like to listen to C.J.’s message, you can download it by clicking here.

Update: The link to the message has been fixed. You can also listen to it online.