Gossip or Grace?

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.

Ephesians 4:29

A man won the million-dollar lottery. He flew with his wife to New York City for a weekend get away. They had such an argument over how to spend the money that she threatened to divorce him. In a fit of anger, he went to the top of the Empire State Building. She ran up after him, thinking he might do something crazy. Once she got to the top she said, “Honey, I love you. We can work it out.” But by the time she reached him, he had already torn the check into pieces and thrown the pieces to the ground. They got to the ground as quick as possible to gather up the pieces of the check. But it was too late. The wind had gotten a hold of the pieces. They couldn’t piece the check back together again, no matter how hard they tried. That’s how it is with gossip. Once gossip gets out, it gets out of control. Once it gets into the wind of people’s ears, there’s no way to put things back together again.

Whether we admit it or not, we have a fascination with gossip. Proverbs says gossip is like a tasty morsel that we like to savor. Proverbs 18:8 says The words of a whisperer are like delicious morsels; they go down into the inner parts of the body.

We know what gossip is when we hear gossip or when we speak gossip. But we don’t often take time to define words like gossip. Simply put, “gossip” is talking about people behind their backs.

The New Testament Greek word for “gossip” (psithuristes) is literally “a whisperer” - a person who whispers behind your back with the intention of hurting you. The Greek scholar Godet describes a gossiper as someone who pours out his poison by whispering in our ears. With the telephone and mobiles today, we don’t even have to whisper behind people’s backs. We just badmouth them over the phone without their knowing. With the advent of social networking, gossip spews forth through the Internet onto the computers and mobiles in our homes and work places.

Paul says, "Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up" and then he shifts from the what to the why, "that it may give grace to those who hear." It is not Christian just to stop swearing. It is not Christian just to put good language in the mouth instead. It is Christian to ask the deeper, internal question: am I speaking now to edify? Is your mouth a means of grace? All our secular work is to be a display of grace; and all our speech is to be a display of grace.

What does Paul mean by calling language evil or corrupt or unwholesome or rotten. If we think of spoiled or rotten fruit, like Jesus did, we can derive certain implications.

Rotten fruit does not nourish. Neither does rotten language. It does not strengthen or improve or help. It is not useful for food. It is good for nothing but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot by men. Also rotten fruit smells bad and makes the atmosphere unpleasant. And rotten fruit can also mean that  it probably comes from a diseased tree. If the fruit is rotten as soon as it appears on the branch (as soon as the words come out of the mouth), then the tree is bad.

We might expect Paul to admonish us to clean up our language. We might expect him to talk about words that are not vulgar or rotten or corrupt, but are pure and wholesome and creative and clear. But Paul doesn't do what we expect.

Instead of proposing clean language, he proposes a whole new way of thinking about language. Instead of saying, "You don't need dirty language to communicate your intention," he says, "The root issue is whether your intention is love." In other words the issue for Paul is not really language at all; the issue is love. The issue is not whether our mouth can avoid gross language; the issue is whether our mouth is a means of grace. You see he shifts from the external fruit to the internal root.

We need to remember what King Solomon said in Proverbs 4:23; “Keep your heart with all diligence, for out of it spring the issues of life.” And we need to pray as King David prayed in Psalm 141:3, “Set a guard, O LORD, over my mouth; keep watch over the door of my lips.” As something begins to come out, we need to say, “Stop! Who goes there? If you do not fit in with God's good purposes, you may not come out of my mouth!”

Dear Friends, Jesus warns us about sins of the tongue in Matthew 12:36: “I tell you that men will have to give account on the day of judgment for every careless word they have spoken.”

This Lenten Season may we use our mouths to gossip less and make it a means of grace for all filled with nothing else but love.

God Bless You.