A Word in Season: No Corrupt Word (Ephesians 4:29)

What characterizes your speech? What's the tenor of your words? When the

Apostle Paul writes to the Ephesians in chapter 4 and verse 29, he tells them, Let no corrupt word proceed out of your mouth, but what is good for necessary edification, that it may impart grace to the hearers.

He's talking to men and women in whom the Holy Spirit is at work. They have been delivered from darkness and they've been brought into the light of God and they're now walking in light.

And under the influence of the Holy Spirit, Paul expects and instructs that they will live as men and women who are following in the footsteps of Jesus Christ.

And so he tells them that their words are not to be marked by corruption. That's words with the stench of decay upon them.

Rotten words. Words that, if you will, carry disease into the lives and the souls of other men and women and that leave weakness and frailty, that drag down, that undermine.

And too often Christians are guilty of this kind of speech. The cutting word, the sarcastic remark, sometimes even a silence can be corrupting.

But Paul's talking here then about the words that rip and that destroy. Now he's not certainly saying that there's no space for straightforward instruction or, if necessary, for proper rebuke, because those things, as we'll see in a moment, are themselves profitable.

He's talking rather about those often careless or sadly sometimes deliberate words that dig and that rip and that tear.

The contrast is words that edify, things that are good for necessary edification, things that are deliberately intended to build up other believers in our most holy faith.

And perhaps we could extend it to say that are intended to draw others to the Lord Jesus Christ.

But our speech to our brothers and sisters in Christ should always have the intention of doing them good, of helping them on toward Christlikeness.

And so whether it is instructions or rebukes, whether or not it's encouragements or reminders, our speech needs to be seasoned with salt.

Our speech needs to be rich with the truth of the Holy Scriptures so that as we communicate with one another, we're constantly admonishing one another.

We're putting one another in mind of what God has said about himself, about us, about our relationship to him in Jesus Christ.

And in this way, we are imparting grace to our hearers. We're actually communicating

God's favour toward them by bringing God's word to bear upon them.

So again, what is characteristic of your speech? If someone were to be with you perhaps for a few hours, let's say, or maybe even a few days or weeks, if under, say, quarantine circumstances, it was just you and somebody else in a house for perhaps weeks on end, what would be the end result of your speech over that period?

Would that person come out nourished and nurtured, built up in our most holy faith with a clearer view of God, a richer sense of Jesus Christ, more confident in their relationship to him, with their graces encouraged and stirred, with an increased and enriched sense of what

God in Christ is toward them? Or would they come out perhaps crippled and diminished, undermined, their confidence shot, their sense of God flat, even if not in itself diminished, their awareness of Christ dented, their sense of themselves as an object of God's affection without any real richness or depth?

Too often we are not thinking about the way, then, that we ought to be speaking.

We should make it our intent, as we open our mouths in these days, to speak what is good for necessary edification, that we may impart grace to those who hear.

We need to be praying, then, to the Holy Spirit that, indwelling us, he would so work in our hearts and in our mouths that when, out of the abundance of our hearts, our mouths speak, there's richness in our souls from our own dwelling upon God in Christ Jesus and feeding on the word of God, so that when that heart expresses itself through our mouths, it is what is good for necessary edification, not corrupting, but building up, imparting grace to those who hear.