As we continue on our journey to offer our lives to God, today we want to commit to offering our mouths.

Will we strive to submit the power our words have over others to God’s leading and direction? Will we choose to encourage others, rather than tear down?

I remember when I was three causing quite a reaction with one simple word that I spoke. My mom says I had just started preschool, and I was outside playing with a neighbor from down the street.

I have no idea what happened, what we were doing, or anything, but I remember my friend left to go home. I was standing in the middle of the street in front of our house, and I was mad that he was leaving.

So, in the middle of the street, three year old me yelled out at the top of my lungs, “You little f-----er!” Only I actually said it.

And they say you don’t learn anything in preschool…

Well, my mom heard this.

She ran outside, grabbed me by the arm, dragged me inside the house, and set me down on the stairs and just started crying. As I remember it, which of course may be wrong, she didn’t even really say anything to me at all. She got on the phone and called my dad, almost hysterical.

“Gregg was outside swearing at the neighbors and we’re horrible parents and I’m SURE he’s going to become a juvenile delinquent now!” Or something to that effect….

I still didn’t get what all the fuss was about, but I knew without a doubt that words can definitely cause a reaction! In fact, I think that was the end of my time at that particular preschool.

We also learn at a very young age how much words can hurt us.

“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me” is just one big fat lie. Words do hurt. Words matter.

We learn quickly that other people have immense creativity in ridiculing us over body parts, or the clothes we wear, or an infinite number of other things.

We learn that there are cool people when those cool people use words that exclude us, and it hurts. We learn that people constantly use words to divide and rank us, and those words hurt when they demonstrate to us and everyone else that we don’t measure up.

Even when teachers of kids try to soften the words, the power of the words still gets through to kids. It doesn’t matter if reading groups get labeled with colors or flowers or animals, every kid knows which is the “smart” reading group and which is the “dumb” one.

Negative words have the power to hurt us, long passed childhood, throughout our entire lives.

We’re hurt by what others say about us, and we often pass along that hurt. Negative words are catching, as my mom found out after I’d only been at the preschool for a short time.

They are so powerful and so pervasive and so catching that we often don’t realize it could and should be different.

In college, Steve Fawver and I made a commitment to each other to stop using sarcasm for a period of time.

I made the commitment easily and lightly….and then, I quickly realized how difficult it was going to be to keep this commitment. Sarcasm and negative humor were so much a part of the air around me, so much a part of how I spoke.

Yet this experiment helped me realize how often the things I said to be funny came at the expense of someone else.

Part of our brokenness as people is that we’ve been hurt and wounded so often that it seems normal to hurt others in return. Part of our brokenness as a society is that words must be used to keep others in their rightful place.

The book of James cuts through all that.

It helps us see clearly the power of words, and the ridiculous way we mix together words that injure with words that encourage. It’s so “normal” to us that James has to go to great lengths, using powerful images, to help us realize how wrong it is NOT to get our mouths under control and offered up to God.

We heard this passage read earlier, but I want to read James 2 again, from the New Living Translation. [READ 2:2-6]

So, James, why don’t you tell us how you really feel?

I used to think that James must have had a really bad childhood, you know, been the one that everybody else teased. And that may have been true.

More than anything, though, James is trying to help us see ourselves. He’s trying to help us hear our own words, and the scarring power they have. He goes on, and it isn’t real positive. [READ 2:7-10]

James calls the tongue, calls the words we use a fire that can burn like hell itself.

He calls it an uncontrollable evil. He says the power to tame the tongue would be huge, like a small rudder turning a huge ship, like a tiny bit helping a huge horse be guided.

If we offer God our mouths…if we offer the power of our words to God, to be used for blessing and not cursing…James says the whole course of our lives can be turned around!

I think I’m pretty convinced that this isn’t just hyperbole!

Changing how we speak to and about others has powerful consequences. Because we begin to see, like in my sarcasm experiment, just how many ways words are used to hurt others.

Words can be used to actually inflict pain.

When I try to think of examples for this, somehow I always think of my high school baseball coach!

I remember a horrible game my senior year in high school, where I had three errors in a single inning, and a 1-1 tie game went quickly to a 5-1 loss because of me. In the locker room after the game, I was hanging my head. My coach put his hand on my shoulder, and it looked like he might actually try to encourage me.

I said, “I can’t ever remember playing that poorly.”

He said, “Oh, come on! Don’t you remember that game at David Douglas when you were a freshman? You threw two balls off the side of the SCHOOL!”

And if I asked you for examples, you could give them easily, ones that brought much deeper and more significant wounds to you.

Fathers who told you that you were stupid and worthless. Mothers who said they wished you were never born. Friends who in their own hurt broke off a friendship with you and did it in a way that left scars you feel to this day.

Our words can destroy like a wildfire.

Words can be used to limit our possibilities, our goals.

“You’ll never amount to anything.” “People like you could never hope to be a leader.” “Why don’t you keep your sights on something a little more realistic for your abilities?”

I know some people hate and ridicule the whole politically correct movement, and wonder why some people care what we call things. But our words, our descriptions of things, can limit what we imagine for ourselves.

I’ll just give one example, and that’s as a father of three girls.

I want my girls to think the sky is the limit. I want them to feel free to pursue whatever it is that God wants them to do. But I know that the words and stories in the world around us are going to confine them, remove things as even being possibilities for them.

Right now at our house, we’re in the third round of reading a classic in children’s literature, “A Fish Out of Water.” Aubrey asks for it often now, just as her two big sisters did when they were young.

It was written in the sixties, by a woman; but one thing I noticed the first time I read it with my daughter Natalie sitting on my lap is that there is hardly a single woman in the story. At the end, you can find one or two in the crowd by the pool, but other than that, nothing.

It’s the book I end up editing the most as I read. Otto, the fish, becomes a girl. The policeman becomes the police officer. The firemen are the firefighters.

You may think that’s a stupid use of energy, but it’s important to me.

I love this book, “My Lift the Flap Plane Book.” It has a woman as the Captain of the airplane, and a man as the flight attendant (not the stewardess!).

What we call things can limit the horizons of people. Even deeper, our words can create boxes and walls for people that they can only climb out of with great effort.

I’ve spoken with women who feel shut out of ministry in the church, women who feel that their God-given giftedness as a leader has constantly been squelched by the words of others.

I’ve listened to the pain of men who feel they can’t pursue the dream they want for their lives because too many people have told them they aren’t good enough, that they shouldn’t take the risk. There’s no end to the ways that people have been stifled by the words that others have spoken about them.

Our words can be a deadly poison.

But what if, in offering our mouths to God, what if we choose to turn that around?

What if, instead of inflicting pain and wounds on others, we choose to speak blessing and encouragement?

What if, instead of killing dreams and putting people in their place, we choose to speak possibilities and hope to others?

When you think back on your life, can you think of an example of a time when someone’s encouraging words made a difference for you?

Would anyone like to share one of those times when someone used the power of their words to make a difference in your life? [ASK]

We affectionately called my high school speech teacher “Edge”.

She had a way of making us think we could do anything. Speech was a required class that most people came into with a bad attitude, and went out with it as their favorite class.

I remember her telling us much of what I’ve said today, that words have power. I remember her saying that if we could learn to use words in front of others correctly, it would make all the difference, whatever career we chose.

But mostly, I remember how she used her words to inspire us. I remember her utter glee when she’d talk about speech contests and winning loot. She lined the room with all these shelves, and each “speechie” had one. Whenever we would come back from a tournament, we’d stack the certificates and ribbons and pins and trophies on our shelf, and she would joyfully point out the new loot to every class.

She had a way of making anyone feel like they could win trophies, too. She had a way of opening up possibilities in each person that we didn’t know were there.

One last caution, and it’s connected with last week.

The words we speak must be true. Encouraging words that don’t mesh with reality can cause more harm than good.

I love the thought of us becoming the kinds of people who encourage!

The kinds of people who use our words, who harness our tongue, who offer our mouths to God in a way that encourages others and helps them feel as if the sky is the limit!