SERMON: Wisdom For How We Speak

Thank you for subscribing to the Shepherds Church podcast. This is our Lord's Day sermon. And we pray that as we declare the Word of God that you would be encouraged, strengthened in your faith and you would catch a greater vision of who Christ is.

May you be blessed in the hearing of God's Word and may the Lord be with you. Over the last several weeks, we've been working through what we call or what we have called the anatomy of wisdom. And for the first four weeks, that question was essentially, who are we to become?

Sanctification Changes Every Part of Life

What does wisdom look like in all of the various parts of our life when the saving work of Jesus begins working its way through the whole of us? And we saw that because Christ has finished the work of our salvation, because His Spirit has taken up residence within us, that He begins sanctifying every part of us.

He gives us eyes that are learning to see the truth rightly, hearts that are learning to love the truth diligently, minds that are learning to think deeply about the things of God and feet that are learning to walk swiftly in obedience.

In other words, the first four weeks of this wisdom mini series has been largely about who are we becoming in Christ. But last week, as you will remember, we made an important turn in this series. Last week, we moved from who are we to be to now talking about what are we to do.

Because sanctification doesn't merely change what kind of people we are becoming, it also changes what we do. It changes the way that we use our eyes. It changes the way that we employ our hands. It chooses the way that we engage with our feet, especially with our mouths.

And we began that turn last week talking about what must we do by talking about the tongue. And last week, we largely talked about what must a Christian mouth not do? What must a Christian mouth not say?

What must it not engage in? Last week was a theology of the tongue in the negative. And we saw that if a tongue is disconnected from a sanctified heart, that what proceeds forth from it will actually lead us to our ruin.

Our tongue cannot be left to speak carelessly. We are commanded to guard our mouth. We are commanded to restrain our tongues. Those are the things that we must not allow to happen that come out of us.

But this week, we're gonna talk about it from a different angle. Okay, this is what we shouldn't do. Now, what do we do? We can't merely be men and women who know what not to say. Eventually, our mouth has to open and say something.

So we need to know what we ought to say. That's the question that today, and that's what makes last week and this week's sermon both intensely, relentlessly practical. You know me, I enjoy getting into the depth of biblical theology.

I love talking about typology, and I love talking about all of those glorious truths. But today, it's gonna be much, much more practical. How should we use our tongues to glorify God? That's what this sermon is about.

How does it actually teach us to communicate with one another? And is our communication healthy? That's the question we're gonna be looking at today. Do we actually know how to talk to one another? Do you know how to talk to your wife?

Do you know how to speak with your husband? Do you know how to be an effective communicator? Do your words harm or do they heal? And ultimately, does your mouth speak in ways that God has sanctioned us to speak in Scripture or not?

The Four Rules of Godly Communication

And here's the problem. You and I can know an enormous amount of theology and still be a fool in how we use our mouth. We can know the majestic heights of the doctrines of grace. We can know every single sub-point of the Reformation, and we can still live like people who are ditch-dwelling fools.

You can affirm biblical inerrancy while telling a very errant story out of your mouth, designed to make yourself look innocent and the person you're corresponding to to look guilty. You can possess the truth and yet you can deliver it so foolishly that even your sinful manner of speaking would become an obstacle to the people listening to you.

And Solomon will not allow us that luxury. He will not allow us to simply shrug and to say, well, I'm just not very good at communication. That's not my gift. I don't like to speak, I'm awkward. But we can't say that.

We don't have the right to say, I'm just not a good communicator. In the same way that a husband can't say, well, honey, I'm just not good at being faithful. So whenever I do cheat, you're gonna have to overlook it because that's just not my gift.

No wife would go for that. Well, in the same way, a wife can't look at her husband and say, you know, I'm just really not good at not aborting our children. Every time we get pregnant, I just have this compulsion that I'm gonna terminate them.

And when I do, you can't get mad at me, it's not my gift. No one would accept that because there are some things in the scriptures that we are commanded regardless of our giftings. For instance, you must be good at not killing people.

Sort of obvious. You must be good at not bowing down and worshiping idols. You must also be a good and a righteous communicator. Why? Because God has clearly spoken about it in his word. It's not left to the imagination.

We can't take the path of least resistance and to continue an unintentional, unsanctified slothfulness in this area because it's unfaithfulness to God. We may not be naturally gifted communicators. We may bumble through sentences, but as we're gonna see in scripture, all of us by the power of the Holy Spirit must become better at it, must become sanctified in it because God has spoken about it.

So today, after studying what not to do with the tongue, now I want us to see what God has said that we must do with the tongue. And to do that, we're gonna look at four points. And these points build upon each other.

I'm calling them the rules for communication, four things that we must do to be good communicators so that we can glorify God and actually bless one another. The first thing is we must only ever speak the truth.

That's rule number one. Rule number two, when we speak the truth, we must actually listen first before we speak. Number three, when we speak, we must deliver it in a way that the other person can actually hear it.

And number four, when we use words to cut, they must only be used to heal. We don't cut to harm, we cut to heal. That's our four rules of communication today. I'm gonna read multiple passages that we're gonna unpack these things together.

Proverbs 13, five. A righteous man hates lying, but a wicked man is loathsome and comes to shame. Proverbs 16, 21. The wise in heart will be called prudent and sweetness of the lips increases learning.

Proverbs 16, 23. The heart of the wise teaches his mouth and adds learning to his lips. Proverbs 18, 13. He who answers a matter before he hears it, it is folly and shame to him. Proverbs 18, 17. The first one to plead his cause seems right till his neighbor comes and examines him.

Proverbs 20, verse 15. There is gold and a multitude of rubies, but the lips of knowledge are a precious jewel. Proverbs 21, 28. A false witness shall perish, but the man who hears him will speak endlessly.

Proverbs 25, eight through 10. Do not go hastily to court, for what will you do in the end when your neighbor has put you to shame? Debate your case with your neighbor and do not disclose the secret to one another, lest he who hears it expose your shame and your reputation be ruined.

Proverbs 25, 11. A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold and settings of silver. Proverbs 25, 12. Like an earring of gold and an ornament of fine gold is a wise rebuker to an obedient ear. Proverbs 25, 15.

By long forbearance, a ruler is persuaded and a gentle tongue breaks a bone. And then finally, Proverbs 28, 23. He who rebukes a man will find more favor afterward than he who flatters with the tongue.

Let's pray. Lord, there's so much in your word about how we use this organ called the tongue. This small little spark that starts forest fires and yet the same organ that we say we love you and we curse our brother.

Lord, help us in this organ that has a world of restless evil in it. Help it to be bridled for the sake of Christ, obedient to the cause of Christ, for the good of our brothers and sisters, for the glory and praise of God.

Lord, help the thing that the enemy uses most effectively as God really said, lies on the lips, accusations, this tongue. Help us, Lord, to be redeemed to be a people who use it now for the glory of God.

For all of its power for evil, Lord, let our tongues be used for good and for your glory and for the advancement of your kingdom. It's in Jesus' name we pray, amen. Today, we're gonna learn how to speak.

Today, we're gonna learn how to communicate. We're gonna learn a very simple four-step guide on how to communicate effectively. Four steps that Solomon teaches us in Proverbs that will cause us to be world-class communicators, that will cause us to speak life in our relationships instead of misery and death, that will cause us to heal wounds, break bitterness and lead flourishing lives, have happy marriages, joyful homes, thankful bosses and blessed friendships all downstream of a submitted and sanctified tongue.

If you take hold of what this sermon is teaching and if you implement what Solomon is telling you, your entire life could actually change just by setting your tongue apart for the Lord and letting him make it holy.

That's powerful. And there's power in this message because I'm praying that you will grab hold of it because it will actually heal your marriages right now. It will embitter or it will cause embittered, poisoned words to dissipate.

It will cause friendships that you have at odds to heal. It will cause misunderstandings that are marred in all kinds of bitterness to be gone away if you will just set apart your tongue for Christ and use it in the ways that he would command.

Speaking Truth Without Manipulation

And to do that, the first thing we need to understand, the first rule of godly communication is we must only speak the truth, which is sort of an obvious thing, but we don't like it. Proverbs or Solomon tells us this, a righteous man hates lying, but a wicked man is loathsome and comes to shame.

I want you to notice what Solomon is saying. He's saying that the righteous ones, the ones who know how to use their mouth in righteous ways is ways that are pleasing to God despise any kind of untruth.

That means any lie, no matter what it is, why it is said or how big it is or small it is, the righteous man with a righteous tongue hates it, finds it offensive, even noxious to his own soul, which also means that if we participate or approve of any form of lie in any way, we are not righteous, according to this passage, we are wicked, loathsome to God, and the text tells us that we will come into shame.

Those are incredibly strong words about the consequences of our speech. Either we will love God by speaking the wholeness of truth with every word that we have, or we will become loathsome to God in flippancy of speech and deliberance in lies.

And just to be clear, Solomon is not describing a righteous man as the kind of man who happens to have a decent relationship with truth, a decent relationship with avoiding lies. He's describing a man whose whole nature is revolted by falsehood.

He's describing a man whose base level natural knee-jerk reaction in all communication is that it must be true without a twinge of deceit or falsehood. Now, all of us would say, amen. All of us would say that we hate lying.

We abhor it when it happens to us, against us. We despise the one who uses their mouth to harm us. But when you peel back the onions a little bit, you realize that we don't actually hate lying, not in any meaningful sense.

We hate it when it's done to us, but not necessarily so much when it's done through us. And that's because instead of being repulsed by it, some of us, most of us, all of us simply manage truth to our own ends and employ it as a tool in order for us to get ahead.

We find lying sinful, but we also find it useful, which is still wickedness and loathsomeness to God. We tell ourselves that we're honest men, honest women, who only occasionally shade the truth, only sometimes round the corners, only bend the truth a little bit when the pressure's on, and only, only, this is our rule, only for a very good reason.

That's not what this verse is describing. Solomon is telling us that a righteous man professes within himself a settled hatred of falsehood, not merely refusing the lie when it's convenient, not merely regretting a lie after it's blown up.

The righteous man has a gut-level hatred that fires instinctively before the calculations in his brain can come to a point where he realizes whether honesty is good or bad or advantageous. He hates falsehood, and he loves truth.

And that's what godly communication begins with. A man who loves truth, a woman who loves truth, who speaks it in all circumstances, and frankly, that ain't us. And here's the test. Here's how you'll know if you actually love the truth.

If you're righteous in regards to your application of truth or loathsome in your speech, here's some questions that we can ask ourself. Number one, maybe this is the only question we need to ask. Is it easier for you to hate the lie that wounded you than the one that you told that benefited you?

Is it easier to hate that lie that was against you or the one that you said that was against someone else? What's easier? And we all know the answer. The employer who lies to his workers and tells them not to waste their hours in all of these different, we hate that.

We get frustrated at that, yet we waste our week away squandering and staring at a screen, turn in a, I know we don't have time cards anymore, but you get the point, turn in a time card with wasted hours and say, this is what I worked.

That's a lie. We don't hate that. We say, that's what I'm owed. Imagine if you turned in a time card with 29 hours on the week. Well, that's how many actually worked when I wasn't twiddling my thumbs and doing nothing.

We don't do that. We lie about our performance. We get mad when we're lied to though. The husband, here's another example. The husband hates it when someone lies about his wife, but he doesn't care when he stands there right in front of her and lies to her face.

In order to avoid an argument. And this teaches us something. There is no virtue. There is no holiness in merely hating the lies when it makes us the victim. The man who does that, I mean, a man who's only about himself can do that.

A woman who is filled with pride can do that. A couple who are filled with all kinds of resentment can do that. Every narcissist can do that. The real test is whether you hate the lie that serves you.

The lie that protects you. The lie that would have gotten you out of trouble. Do you hate that lie? The lie that would have saved you thousands of dollars. The lie that would have made you look innocent.

The lie that would, if it were ever discovered, would have made you look foolish. The lie that would have worked and you would have gotten away with it. Do you hate that lie as much as the others? Because the righteous man, according to Proverbs, doesn't merely hate falsehood pointed at him, he hates falsehood at work in him.

And this makes this really personal. And I want us to examine ourselves and our approach to communication because do you actually hate the version of the story that's told that makes you look better than you were?

Do you even revile your memory of an event that you've crafted and curated over decades that makes you the hero of your own story? Do you hate our tendency to twist, to bend the truth in ways that benefit us, to stack the deck in our favor, to lead the witness, to poison the well as a way of using our tongues for our own advantage?

Do you hate that? That's the problem. We hate sin in others more than we hate it in ourselves. That's one of the chief consequences of sin. One of the superpowers of sin is it causes us to hate it in someone else and dislike it or not dislike it in ourselves.

I've said this example before, but I think it's so profound. Johnny Carson was talking about, again, old reference, back when time cards were a thing. Johnny Carson said that when someone cuts me off, I hate them.

But when I do it, I had a good reason. It's because we hate the sin in others. We don't really hate the sin in ourselves. And it's not just flat out lies that we tell either. It's also facts that we present with a little bit of a false picture.

Deception doesn't always require an outright lie, does it? Sometimes you simply choose which facts to tell, which facts to leave out, where to place the emphasis on the syllables. Think about Joseph's brothers.

Curating Facts and Creating False Impressions

It's a good example of this. After throwing him into a pit, after selling him into slavery, they grab his coat of many colors, the one that they knew that his father had given him. They drench it full of the blood of a goat, and they take it to their father, and they do not say, hey, dad, we sold our brother into slavery, and we decorated his coat with goat blood.

They say, hey, dad, do you know whether this is your son's tunic or not? They never tell Jacob, hey, a wild animal killed him, which is not true, but they didn't even tell him that. They led him to the conclusion that they wanted him to have.

They used their communication to lead him to a conclusion that would cause their father to wallow in bitterness and sadness for 20 years because they presented a false picture. They intentionally placed it before him.

If you want to be righteous in your biblical communication and the way that you speak, if you wanna speak in the way that God commands and you must love truths that are inconvenient to you, you must love more than the lies that you love that benefit you, and you must also love the clarity that comes from not curating facts in a way that actually sets you up for what you want.

And while none of us can do this perfectly, a Christian should be one who does this truly. We can't do it perfectly. Like Paul says, we do the thing we don't wanna do. We don't do the thing we ought to do.

We still are struggling against the flesh. Yes, but as Christians endowed with the Holy Spirit of God, the same spirit who indwelled the holy of holies, we should be growing. We should be becoming sanctified in this area.

If Christ is the vine and we are the branches, then we ought to be being fed by his life in a way that actually is producing fruit in us. And that fruit in this case is communication that is increasingly over the course of our lives committed to truth.

That's the first thing that we learn, that Christian communication begins with a commitment to an increasing, growing, sanctifying commitment to truth, even the truth that's inconvenient, even the lies that benefit us, a commitment to those things.

Listening Before We Answer

That's the first thing. The second thing, if we're gonna speak truth, if we're gonna be people of the truth who allow truth to come out of our lips, and we know that when you say truth, sometimes it stings.

When we say truth, sometimes it's loving but hurts. So we're gonna be that kind of people who only ever communicate the truth. We have to know how to do that. And the first thing, which is the second rule of communication that I would tell you, is that you really ought to listen before you speak.

Solomon says it like this, he who answers a matter before he hears it, it is folly and shame to him. And this goes far beyond, well, good communicators are not interrupters. Yeah, well, yeah, of course that's true.

But Solomon means something more serious than that. He's saying the fool is not merely rude. Instead, he's saying that the one who speaks before he understands a matter is revealing how shallow of a listener he is and how inaccurate his communication is.

Because if you don't understand before you speak, you're basically guaranteed to speak folly. And unsurprisingly, you and I know this person because we are this person. How many of you men have stopped listening to your wife several paragraphs in and instead have been planning your response in your next offense?

You haven't listened. You haven't heard. You're planning your rebuttal. You haven't understood her. You've just started planning your little Johnny Cochran moment. What is with me and old references today?

Who here, what woman here has assumed you knew exactly what your husband meant? You knew his precise motivations. You rightly have prejudged his motives without hearing him out. This happens to all of us across the entirety of our human experience, which why Solomon pairs these two specific words together, folly and shame in the same passage.

And on purpose. Because folly is genuinely, it's genuinely foolish to conclude anything before you have all the information. You wouldn't build a house with half the plans. You wouldn't assemble a car without the manual.

Yeah, we do that with our communication. And shame because when the truth eventually does come out, and it usually does, the man who answered too quickly, the one who prejudged too quickly is the one who's left standing there with words they can no longer defend.

This is exactly why Solomon says, the first one to plead his call seems right until his neighbor comes and examines him. Solomon is describing something that the modern pseudo scientific field of psychology in all of their brilliance has finally come to later call the anchoring effect, which in their way of defining it is simply a phenomenon in communication where the first coherent explanation that you hear becomes the lens through which you hear everything that comes after it.

It's a general pattern that humans have where the very first thing we hear becomes the calculus through which we view everything else. Which means that your understanding of reality in a large degree is often dependent upon the facts that you hear first, not necessarily the ones that are true.

For instance, if you look back with me at a classic example in the book of Joshua chapter nine, there was these people called the Gibeonites. They were Canaanite people who were marked out for destruction by God in the conquest of Canaan.

And after hearing of what Israel had done in Jericho and Ai, they dressed themselves in worn out sandals. They carried moldy bread and they came to Joshua and they said, we are travelers from a far country and we're begging for a covenant of peace, which was a wild and outlandish lie.

None of it was based in reality. But sadly, the men of Israel looked at the evidence right in front of them. These guys have cracked wine skins. These guys have sandals that are straps are broken. They have stale bread, stale bread.

And all of it seemed right. So they believed it. They believed the first thing that they heard without taking counsel from the Lord. And they made a decision without understanding it. And because of that, they lived with the consequences of that for generations.

The first story seemed right to them. They didn't think to ask questions to expose whether it was true. This happens to us every single time we act on the first version of events that we see, whether it be a rumor that we heard.

Hey, can you believe someone did that? No, I can't. And then immediately you're like, that's what that person is. You get a one-sided account in a family dispute. Can you believe Aunt Gertrude? No, no, I can't.

Major updates that we see on X. You know, the ones with the fire alarm symbols beside of it. All caps, major update, emergency update. I can't believe that happened. We believe those things without even investigating they're true.

Now, I wanna be clear. None of this means that we're supposed to doubt every hurting broken person who comes to us or to treat every account that we hear with suspicion until it is proven otherwise. I don't mean that.

Compassion is not the same thing as adjudication. You can believe a person is experiencing real pain without immediately believing every interpretation that they've attached to it. Real empathy, not the sinful kind.

Real empathy should make us more attentive, but never more gullible, which tells us something about our communication. Before you respond to anyone, we should be asking questions like this. I heard what you said.

Is this what you meant? Did I understand that correctly when you said this? Can you explain that to me in a different way? Can you help me understand this? Because listen, we're not omniscient. We are prone to misunderstanding.

Asking these kinds of questions helps us get to the bottom. We get the truth. These are questions that actual good communicators ask. You can go buy a book on communication and hear these things so you get it for free today.

Solomon said it thousands of years ago. It's folly to speak before you've understood. Asking questions help you. Asking questions keeps you from looking stupid when you open your mouth before we've taken the time to actually consult our head.

And I don't mean asking questions as a hostile interrogator. I mean asking questions as an ordinary tool that a person uses to understand a matter before speaking about it. And this is something that I have woefully and greatly struggled with for most of my life until I implemented this wisdom from Solomon in the book of Proverbs.

I was very quick to think that I understood a matter. I was very quick to think, I know what that person's thinking. I was quick to formulate my ready, canned response that almost never represented the situation fairly or accurately, almost always made the situation worse.

And I kept doing it for some crazy reason. All because I didn't really understand before we open our mouth, before we exercise our jawbone, we actually have to understand what we're talking about. And because of repeated failures in this area, I started slowing myself down.

Now I try to listen. I try to listen without formulating my response. And the way that I do this most effectively, the way that it's been helpful for me is I ask a ton of questions. It slows me down. I'll listen to what someone's saying.

And when they're finished talking, I will follow it up with a question. I'll say something like, okay, I heard you say this. Did I understand that correctly? Usually they will say, not really. And then they'll go and tell me again.

And I don't do it to be annoying. I actually am trying to do it to get enough details so that when I speak, I actually have something to say. And inevitably the person I'm speaking to will say something that interests me, will say something that intrigues my curiosity.

I think about it like I'm Joe Rogan and the person across the table from me is the most interesting person in the world and I wanna figure out what they have to say. I put myself in that frame because how could I possibly understand what they're saying or even respond to what they're saying if I don't?

And I'll go on, treating it like I'm interviewing them. And while they feel blessed by this, they do because they feel heard. They don't feel annoyed by this. We all like to talk about what we feel. So when I'm asking someone to tell me, they feel blessed, they feel heard by it, but I'm actually equipping myself to be able to help answer whatever it is that they need help with.

I repeat it back to them and the best way that I know how I ask them if I've gotten it right. If I did, praise God, then I'll speak. If not, I'll ask more questions. Now that kind of approach that I'm describing is not a thus saith the Lord.

That's what's been helpful for me is to ask questions, to slow things down. Because rule one of biblical communication is I must speak truth. How can I rightly speak truth if I haven't understood? How can I understand if I don't ask questions?

I'm not that smart. I'm not God. I need to do some digging. And this is really, really important because if you cannot actually state the other person's position in a way that he or she would recognize as fair and accurate, you're not ready to speak on it.

And you're certainly not ready to offer any kind of truth that would offend, correct, or admonish. And this gets escalated really quickly because when you're not a good listener, you can do tons of damage in your relationships.

When you see when your patterns of communication are not biblical, not healthy, not righteous, it can go very quickly into bad places. A good question to ask is what happened? Help me understand. The wrong question is to ask, I think I understand.

And then when we do that, when we say I think I understand, then we start developing this idea that we know why they said it, why did it happen, and then we start attaching to the person, I know who you are because you let it happen.

We move from good communication, help me understand to I get it, I know you're wrong, really quickly. It's what happens when we don't take our time to really listen to what someone else is saying. And usually, as they're talking, we've already assembled the firing squad because we in our infinite intelligence know exactly what they meant, and we don't.

But the good news about all of this is that it's actually a really easy fix. All of the pain and turmoil, all of the strife and conflict, all of the arguing, backbiting, bitterness and wounds that arise out of poor communication can all be avoided with repenting of this communication, which involves, as we've learned so far, saying the truth and waiting until you understand to speak.

Just those two things would heal so much brokenness in your relationships. And here's why this matters so much to me, because I've done marriage counseling now for 15 years. And I would say that 90 or more of marriage conflict, maybe higher than that, originates from two people who think they understand each other, but are totally speaking past each other.

Almost every marriage counseling I've ever been in is that. They're both responding to what they think the other person said, and because of that, because of the version of the person that they think they heard, they're lobbing bombs instead of doing the hard work of actually understanding each other.

And frankly, frankly, I'm tired of seeing marriages fail. I'm tired of marriages with people that I love and care for falling apart over something so ridiculously simple. You can put away your guns. You can put away your landmine-loaded comments.

You can put away your history lesson about everything that the person has done wrong, and you can listen to each other, and I guarantee you that it would help at almost every level, especially in your home.

That's the second thing. You always tell the truth, but before you do that, you listen before you speak, and it will be so practical and so helpful if you do. The third thing, because that's only half the battle, because even a man who's listened well can know exactly what is true and still deliver that truth in a way that harms instead of heals.

Delivering Truth So It Can Be Heard

As my grandma used to say, you can be right in all the wrong ways, still wrong, which is why now I want us to look at how you deliver that truth. You have to say the truth. In order to say the truth, you listen before you speak.

Now, when you speak, how do you do it? And I would call this speaking so that it lands. And it's here that I want to say how glad I am for Scripture, because we don't have to guess what God would expect from us in these areas, because the Bible is not just a book that tells us how Jesus saves our souls.

Praise God that it tells us that, but it tells us more than that. It also tells us how we're to use our bodies to glorify him now that we're saved. And I love that because there's no guesswork. How should I worship?

Go read the Psalms, maybe. How should I love holiness? Go read Leviticus and go read the law or read Hebrews. How should I conduct myself in the ordinary parts of human life? Read Proverbs. You are not without instruction.

There's biblical wisdom all over the Bible, especially for those who are Christians, because we have a rich view of what the Bible is. The Bible is not a book that just simply tells us how to get to heaven.

The Bible is a book that tells us how God is bringing heaven into us. The basic storyline of the Bible is you've sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. Christ came as the glory of God and succeeded where you have failed.

He gave you his Holy Spirit to bring you into that glory and victory so that you will begin growing in obedience to the ends of the earth. Obedience to what? All the parts of the Bible that you could not do before you were saved, now you can grow in now that the Holy Spirit is in you.

And that certainly includes what we say and how we say it. For instance, Proverbs 16, 23 says, the heart of the wise teaches his mouth and adds learning to his lips. And we use this for a verse last week about what it applies to our communication and how out of the heart, the mouth speaks.

But Solomon's not only saying that we're to control our mouth, he's also saying that the heart actually trains the mouth. The heart is a craftsman of the mouth, a trainer of the mouth in the same way that a person is training an apprentice underneath him, which means that the heart is responsible.