Psst! Have You Heard...? - Part A

You can say a word that destroys. You can say a word that delights. You can say words that enrich. You can say words that kill.

Incredible potential. Let me give you another verse out of Proverbs. Does the same thing.

It wraps all of this potential up both negatively and positively in one little nugget. Proverbs 12 verse 18. There is one who speaks like the piercings of a sword, but the tongue of the wise promotes hell. You see how you got a bad way to use your tongue, a good way to use your tongue.

There's the potential. Which way are you going to choose? The Bible tells us that death and life are in the power of the tongue. Your words can destroy or they can build up. And today on Connect with Skip Heitzner, Skip talks about the power of your words and how you can use them to glorify God and strengthen others.

And at the end of today's program, Skip and his wife Lenya share encouraging insight if you've ever experienced the devastating effects of gossip. Go directly to the person. If there's something going on, somebody said something, don't go through other people.

Go to the person. Ask where you heard it. If somebody brings it up, ask, can I quote you on this? You know, you want to resolve it.

You don't want to just keep the string going. Thanks, Skip. Be sure to stay tuned after today's message to hear the full conversation. Now we want to tell you about a resource that will help you grow even stronger in your knowledge of God's word. What would it look like if God threw a party? Well, the Old Testament shows that the Jewish calendar is anchored with regular mandatory holidays and celebrations. And the Book of Esther says that God wants his people to experience light and gladness, joy and honor at such times.

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Visit connectwithskip.com slash offer to give online securely or call 800-922-1888 and request your copy of happiness, holiness and holidays with Skip Heitzig. Okay, we're in Leviticus chapter 19 as Skip Heitzig starts today's study. We're doing a series. We call it White Collar Sins. And the idea is that these are sins that we dress up and make them look respectable. And yet they can be and and really are at the root very vile.

So we want to address those and we've had a believe it or not a great time so far in this series. So we're at Leviticus chapter 19. As we begin, I want you to look up at the screen and take a look at the power of the tongue for a moment. Now that's a snail on the left and on the right is the tongue of the snail magnified in a microscope a couple hundred times. So a snail we know is slow and slimy and sluggish but strong. And its strength is in its tongue.

It's like a secret weapon all curled up. And the average snail has 1000 sharp teeth on the tongue. Some species of snails have over 10,000 teeth. And one scientist under the microscope guessed that about 30,000 teeth on a single tongue of a single snail.

So it uses these teeth to saw through leaves and stems and the like. So it's very, very strong. But that that tongue can be very destructive.

That's the point. Well, the Bible tells us of another tongue that's the point. Well, the Bible tells us of another tongue that can inflict great harm. And that is your tongue and mine.

It is the human tongue. Probably more sins have been committed by our mouths than all other body parts combined. I was listening to a radio talk show a while back Christian program, where people would call in questions they would be answered or discussed on the air. And I tuned in right at the time when they were talking about speaking in tongues, the controversy of that spiritual gift that is disputed by many different churches. And as they were going back and forth about is it okay to speak in tongues? Is it not okay to speak in tongues is legitimate gift or not?

I thought, well, nobody seems to be really concerned about the real problem. And the real problem isn't just speaking in tongues. It's speaking. It's using our tongues, period.

That's really what we have to watch. And in particular, it's speaking a certain way. It's using our tongues to form words for a specific purpose. As I described this vice to you, it is personified and you'll be able to tell what it is. I am more deadly than the screaming shell of a cannon. I win without killing. I tear down homes, break hearts and wreck lives.

I travel on the wings of the wind. No innocence is strong enough to intimidate me. No purity is pure enough to daunt me. I have no regard for truth, no respect for justice, no mercy for the defenseless. My victims are as numerous as the sands of the sea and often is innocent. I never forget and I seldom forgive. My name is gossip.

Now that we've named it, let's study it. And to do so, I've asked you to turn to Leviticus chapter 19. Now, the Bible does talk about gossip in a number of different passages from Genesis to Revelation. But the reason I've asked you to turn to this passage is because we are given a direct command from God not to do it. It's a hefty, unmistakable, thou shalt not command. In our anchor text is Leviticus 19, go down to verse 16, where it simply says, you shall not go about as a tale bearer among your people.

It doesn't get any more direct than that. You shall not go about as a tale bearer among your people. Now, let's just step back for a moment because we're looking at the book of Leviticus and this book has a single theme. It could be summed up in one word, holiness. The book of Leviticus is about holiness, God's holiness. And I suppose that of all the attributes that God has, holiness is God's least attractive attribute.

If you just think about how people deal with God, holiness would be his least popular one. We love to make a lot of God's love. That's an important attribute to us. We want to talk about God's mercy and God's grace, important attributes to us. We want to talk about the fact that God knows everything. He's omniscient. God's power is another attribute.

He's omnipotent. But God's holiness probably takes lowest billing. It scares us. And that's probably because number one, we don't really know what it means. And number two, we don't really know what it would mean to us.

But here's what you need to know. Of all the attributes of God written about in Scripture, holiness is talked about more than all of them. In fact, God is called holy more than he is called loving or gracious or merciful or powerful. He's called holy.

So it's obviously very important to him. And I share all that upfront information because you're going to come across it in some of the verses we're going to look at. So the theme of this book is holiness, gods and yours. And the book of Leviticus could be divided simply by saying that the first half of the book is about approaching God's presence. And the second half of the book is about accepting God's precepts. So approaching God's presence, accepting God's precepts.

Chapter 19 falls in the second portion of the book. So it's about accepting God's precepts. And you're going to notice something. It's familiar to you as I read. What we are going to look at are what you know as the 10 commandments.

They're repeated and then they're flushed out. That is, they're explained in various life situations. So for example, if you look at verse one of Leviticus 19, and the Lord spoke to Moses saying, speak to all the congregation of the children of Israel and say to them, you shall be holy for I, the Lord, your God am holy. Every one of you shall revere his mother and his father and keep my Sabbaths. I am the Lord, your God. Do not turn to idols, nor make yourselves molded gods.

I am the Lord, your God. So just in the first four verses, we have a repetition or a hint of the first five of the 10 commandments. Then in verse 11, he starts dealing with, among other things, what we say, our speech, our words.

And what I like to do in verses 11 through 18 is look at four practical observations about our words. So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to start wide and go narrow. That's the approach. I'm going to go very general and then we'll get specific.

Or if you like, I'm going to start shallower and go deeper. So the first observation about words is that words are personal. Words are personal.

They personally convey who you are as a person to others. So notice a word as we go through a couple of verses. Look at verse 11. I'm going to emphasize the word.

You'll see why. You shall not steal, nor deal falsely, nor lie to one another. And you shall not swear, verse 12, by my name falsely, nor shall you profane the name of the Lord your God, I am the Lord. Verse 14, you shall not curse the deaf, nor put a stumbling block before the blind.

Boy, you got to be creepy to do that. But you shall fear the Lord your God, or fear your God, I am the Lord. Verse 16, you shall not go about as a tale bearer among your people, nor shall you take a stand against the life of your neighbor. I am the Lord. Now I counted in this chapter, the word you 54 times in this chapter alone. God is speaking through Moses to the people, telling them about their personal expression, their personal life, fleshing out the 10 commandments to them personally.

So here's the theme. God has given us an incredible capacity to communicate who we are through the use of our words. We can communicate our thoughts, our feelings, our values, our ideas, our ideals to people, our desires, our dislikes to our words, and we do regularly. The average person will end up speaking one-fifth of their entire life.

That's incredible. You will spend one-fifth of your life talking. Now some will do much more than that.

Some will do much less than that. One-fifth of your life will be spent verbally communicating, talking. If you want to know what that looks like, if you were to take the words you speak in a single day and translate them into published literature, a single day of your speech would produce a book that's 50 pages long. A 50-page book. In a single year, that would be 132 volumes of 200 pages per volume.

So that your whole lifetime would be upward of 3,000 volumes or 1,500,000 pages. And that's the average. The average person speaks for one-fifth of his or her lifetime. Now you also know there is a difference in the genders between male and female. And I'll put this very delicately, but it would seem that females have a very different linguistic ability.

Let's put it that way. A more developed linguistic ability, able to use words maybe better, maybe differently. So what the experts tell us, and you've probably read many of these kinds of things, but the average woman speaks 25,500 words a day. That's average. The average male speaks 12,500 words a day.

So there's a big difference. Now what does that mean? It means he comes home after eight days or eight hours of work, comes home, and he's already used up 12,495 words. He's got five left.

She's just getting revved up. So he's got five words left. What's he going to say?

Well, he's going to say, what's for dinner? That's three. And good night. He's done. That's five words.

Now here's the result. If you were to ask him, hey, how's everything at home? He's going to say, great.

Ask her how everything's going at home. And she might say, well, he never really tells me anything. This is why I've always found it humorous in the Bible that when Zacharias the priest is burning incense in Jerusalem, in the temple, and an angel comes to him to announce that his wife, Elizabeth, is going to have John the Baptist. Zacharias, who is talking to an angel, angel says, this is going to happen. John the Baptist says, prove it. It's like, really prove it? An angel's talking to you.

Isn't that proof enough? He goes, no, give me a sign that this is really going to happen. So the angel goes, really? You want a sign?

All right, I'll give you a sign. You won't be able to talk till that baby's born. Now, how is that for him going home and he can't say anything or stop any conversation, but his wife is awfully excited about a miraculous birth. She's an old lady having a baby and she's going to be talking to him all day and he can't say a word.

And it's frustrating for her because he can't say a word. I've always thought that was just a humorous portion of the Bible. So words are personal. We use them to communicate who we are, but we are faced with a challenge in our day and age because we not only speak words, but we write them down. We write them down on paper. We type them into our computer screens. We text them on our mobile devices.

We post them on social media. And with each of those steps, our communication becomes more and more impersonal. We get less personal with all those stages. So written words or texted words are more difficult to understand because you're seeing the word and ascribing meaning to the word that you see, but you cannot hear the intonation or the voice inflection. And that would change everything. And so a better form of communication than reading a text or an email would be to pick up the phone and talk to the person because they might say that sentence a little bit differently than you read it to me. Because now you're getting a fuller communication. You're hearing tone and inflection. But even that isn't ideal because there's still a lot of the conversation that you don't pick up on because you don't see what experts have called for a long time body language, which changes everything.

So a person might say something using the words that you would read in a text or using a voice inflection you would hear on a telephone. But when they say the sentence, they raise an eyebrow. Well, that means something. Or they might say a word but give a smirk.

Well, that means something. Or they'll talk and as they talk, they shift their posture without all of that means something. So the fullest form of communication is to eye to eye have a conversation where you are engaged in that conversation, hearing words and using words.

Now I say we have a challenge. What do I mean? Well, social media has revolutionized the way our culture communicates. Nobody will dispute that everybody's been studying this for years would agree with that, that social media has revolutionized the way our culture communicates for the first time in history, it's possible to have friends you've never met. To follow people you don't even know.

So our language itself is changing meaning. By the way we communicate, we are cultivating what Harvard Business Review calls thin relationships. Thin relationships as opposed to full rich relationships thin relationships. Gervais Markham, a Mozilla Foundation computer programmer wrote this and I quote, social networking encourages people to have a greater number of much shallower friendships.

I know what 15 of my friends had for breakfast. But I don't know whether any of them is struggling with a major life issue. If this trend continues, says Markham, people in 2020 will have hundreds of acquaintances, but very few friends. So you see a fellowship is limited to 140 characters.

It's not real fellowship. So words are personal. We use them to communicate who we are.

Now let's go a little deeper. Words are not only personal, words have potential. As we look at the verses that are before us with our open Bibles, we can look at them and we can surmise that there is great potential in the tongue. Now here the potential is seen negatively. It's put in negative form. You shall not do this. So the reason it's put in negative form, you shall not is for impact and to restrain the improper use of the tongue and to redirect a proper use of the tongue.

Right? So if we reverse these negative commands, we can see the potential instantly. For example, look at verse 11. We're told in the second verse, a second part of that verse that we're not to lie to one another. Okay, so that's what we're not supposed to do. Don't do this. Don't lie to each other. Now turn that around. If we're not supposed to lie to each other, it also means we can what beat, tell the truth, be truthful, be honest.

That's the potential. We can lie or we can be truthful. We can be honest.

We can be wholesome. Also look at verse 12. You shall not swear by my name falsely. There's another negative. Don't do that. Don't swear by God's name falsely.

Okay, now turn that around. We can't swear by God's name falsely. So that means we can pray. We can worship. We can offer intercession. We can bless in the name of the Lord.

Go down to verse 15. There's no negative. There's just a positive.

It says, in righteousness you shall judge your neighbor. Now just think of the incredible potential to make personal judgments of human beings, personally or civilly in a courtroom. So all of this incredible potential can be summed up by a single verse in the book of Proverbs, Proverbs 18 verse 21, that says death and life are in the power of the tongue.

There's the potential. Death and life. You can say a word that destroys. You can say a word that delights. You can say words that enrich. You can say words that kill.

Incredible potential. Let me give you another verse out of Proverbs. It does the same thing.

It wraps all of this potential up, both negatively and positively, in one little nugget. Proverbs 12 verse 18. There is one who speaks like the piercings of a sword, but the tongue of the wise promotes health. You see how you got a bad way to use your tongue, a good way to use your tongue. There's the potential.

Which way are you going to choose? There's one who speaks like the piercings of a sword. I bet all of you know a sharp tongued individual. You can see that person in your mind's eye. It might be somebody you saw in the mirror today. It might be yourself. Sharp-tongued people, verbal terminators, I call them. It's like a fire-breathing dragon. There are those who speak like the piercings of a sword or a snail, but the tongue of the wise promotes health. That's the potential. That's Skip Heitzing with a message from the series White Collar Sins. Now let's go in the studio with Skip and Lenya as they share encouraging insight if you've ever experienced the devastating effects of gossip. Today you talked about the positive and negative potential of words.

Yowza. They hurt or heal, right? Unfortunately, gossip has become so widespread in society and social media does feed into that. It's without impunity.

You can just say these things and not see the face and not see the damage. It's definitely infiltrated the walls of the church as well. Skip, someone listening today may have been the target of gossip, maybe even in their church.

What would you say to encourage them? First of all, I'm sorry. And on behalf of the body of Christ, if that's happening to you in a church, I just want to say I'm sorry. And it shouldn't happen, but it does because we are fallen creatures.

And unfortunately in the church, it gets dressed up in spiritual dress and it's called a concern or a prayer request or whatever. Go directly to the person. If there's something going on, somebody said something, don't go through other people, go to the person, ask where you heard it. If somebody brings it up, ask, can I quote you on this? You know, you want to resolve it. You don't want to just keep the string and then this realize everyone thinks something about you and probably tells it to somebody else.

Okay. So that's just life. Everybody thinks something about you and probably tell somebody else.

And by the way, so do you, everybody does that. So we just have to watch ourselves and make sure we're not spreading. Thank you, Skip and Lenya. We hope this conversation with Skip and Lenya encouraged you in your faith.

Now we'd like to tell you how you can help keep these biblical messages coming to you and others so you can keep growing in your walk with Jesus. Just visit connectwithskip.com slash donate. That's connectwithskip.com slash donate or call 800-922-1888.

Again, that's 800-922-1888. Thank you. Tune in tomorrow as Skip Heitzig shares how you can guard against gossip by being purposeful with your words. Be sure to join us. Connect with Skip Heitzig is a presentation of Connection Communications, connecting you to God's never-changing truth in ever-changing times.