Watch Your Mouth

DEVOTION

PROVERBS

WATCH YOUR MOUTH

Prov 16:23

23 A wise man's heart guides his mouth, and his lips promote instruction.  

NIV

There is a saying that goes something like, “it is a good thing to engage your brain before your mouth” or something like that and it appears it may have been taken from this truth here. So often some people make so many words without ever engaging their brains. Some would babble on and on perhaps just to hear the sound of their own voices. It seems there are so many, even believers, who spend an enormous amount of words on the mundane things of life,  such as sports teams, and their super heroes, television programs and their super stars, our homes, our cars, our vacations, our new this or that, our favorite singing group or super gospel singer, even our own hobbies, and we should not forget our favorite, talking about others, known by some as gossip, but the one thing which seems to be missing is the hearts guidance of the mouth in order that the lips, our words spoken promote instruction. We must be careful not to engage in such babbling on and on. We must be careful not to practice the art of nonsense. Each of us has things in our life which we like to talk about, perhaps to promote ourselves more than instruction, of course the only thing worthy of instruction, is about God. Perhaps when we believers gather we should be spending more time talking about the things of God than about all the other stuff. Could we be as so bold as to think that if we do not allow our heart to guide the words of our mouth so they promote instruction, that we are not wise but rather foolish? Of course the words of our mouth must depend on where are heart is. The scripture tells us that where our treasure is there also is our heart. That is whatever we place value on, whatever we put importance on that is our treasure and if we talk about all the stuff of life mentioned more than about God, than we must ask if that is where our heart is? But if we are wise than our heart, our treasure is in Christ, and therefore our lips should promote instruction regarding him. Does that mean we should never talk about all the other stuff? No, but we should certainly not ignore Christ in our conversations. We really need to watch out mouth.