Colossians 3:8b-9a

Colossians chapter 3, I’m going to read verses 5 through the first part of verse 9. Our focus is on the latter part of verse 8 and the first part of verse 9. Colossians 3, beginning with verse 5. Mortify, therefore, your members which are upon earth, fornication, uncleanness, inordinate affection, evil concupiscence, and covetousness, which is idolatry. for which things sake the wrath of God cometh on the children of disobedience in the which ye also walked sometime when you lived in them but now ye also put off all these anger, wrath, malice, blasphemy, filthy communication out of your mouth, lie not one to another. May God bless to us the reading of his sacred and holy word. A woman had a throat operation. She was forbidden to speak for over a week, so when she had to communicate with her family members and others, she had to write everything out on a piece of paper. It was somewhat of a tedious task. However, it was also a profitable exercise, she said, for she had to think more carefully about the words she would use. and write. There were times when she was angry, she caught herself writing something that was evil, and she stopped herself and crumbled up the paper and threw it away. And she was thankful that those words never actually got spoken, even though she was writing them out to say them to someone. Paul is presently speaking here of various vices. you as a Christian are to put off. And he has focused on two main areas. We looked at one area last week with sinful anger. We’re looking at verses 8 through 9a here. And we talked about anger, anger, wrath, malice in our last study. But the second part of this has to do with sins of the mouth. The scripture teaches, out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks. In Matthew 1234. So what comes out of your mouth reflects then the inner state of your heart. Since the tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity, as Scripture indicates, in James 3.6, you as a believer have to be careful to put off certain types of speech. And he mentions three specific sins here in these verses. Blasphemy, filthy communication, and lying. And I’d like to talk about those sins of the mouth this morning. Now, like the woman that had the throat operation, it would be best to catch yourself before speaking sinfully. Scripture says the tongue can no man tame. And we’re taught from scripture that we need the Holy Spirit to help us to keep us from sinning and with our time. We need to control our speech. First, let me say this. You are to put away the sin of blasphemy. Now, you can be guilty of blaspheming God and you can be guilty of blaspheming men. Let’s talk first about blaspheming God. The word blaspheme, blaspheme in the Greek, you can see it just sort of transliterated into the English, is to speak reproachfully to rail at, to revile by evil speech. God is frequently said to be blasphemed by men when his judgments fall upon them. In the book of Revelation, chapter 16, Verse 9, we read this. And men were scorched with great heat and blasphemed the name of God, which have power over these plagues, and they repented not to give him glory. Also, verse 21 of Revelation 16. And there fell upon men a great hail out of heaven, every stone about the weight of a talent, and men blasphemed God because of the plague of the hail. When some dark providence falls upon you, there may be a temptation to rail against God. You remember how Job’s wife gave him the foolish counsel, why don’t you just curse God and die? That would be a terrible thing to do, to blaspheme God. You can also blaspheme God when something repugnant to his nature, nature is attributed to him. Remember Christ teaching about blaspheming the Holy Spirit? It was attributing the Holy Spirit’s work to the devil. Satan is doing this. Christ is doing this by the power of Satan when he cast out demons. You can blaspheme God by attributing what is the property of God to a creature. Remember how Christ was wrongly accused of blaspheming because he claimed the power to forgive. sin, according to the scribes and the Pharisees, nobody, but God can forgive sins. What they didn’t realize is Christ was God, and therefore he had every right to forgive sins. But that was classified as blaspheming. So blaspheming God is a very serious sin. In fact, in Scripture, in the law, it’s a capital offense. Leviticus 2416, he that blasphemeeth the name of the Lord, he shall be put to death I remind you that Paul said he was a blasphemer before he was converted. We read that in 1.13, for he railed against Christ, the God man. Did he not? You as a believer must not lapse back into worldly ways where you would blaspheme God because of some difficulty that comes up in your life or some dark providence and railhead, him, realize God is working all things for your good as a believer in the Lord. We need the attitude of Job when all the troubles came down on his head. He said, what shall we receive good at the hand of God and shall we not receive evil? And all this did not Job sin with his lips. He was not about to curse God because of it. You can blaspheme God. You can also blaspheme man. Perhaps this, in a more general way, you can use evil speech and revile and rail against men. There are several passages that the interesting thing is it’s not translated as blaspheme in these passages in the Old Testament, but the word is the same. Romans 3.8, we read about Paul. He says, says we be slanderously or blasphemously reported. This is what we’re being accused of. Being defamed, we entreat. Being blasphemed, we entreat. Put them in mind to speak evil of no man, Titus 3-2. Put them in mind to blaspheme no man. Blasphemeing in men is disgraceful. It’s contemptuous speech, and it’s against your neighbor. here in this case. This is either done by openly railing against our neighbor, or we can also be guilty of secretly gossiping or wounding the reputation of our neighbor in a more covert manner. Rashed angry people usually take the open course to injure, whereas the crafty and malicious people usually take the secret course, but either way you’re railing against. blaspheming men. Sadly, truth often is not even considered. People are maligned falsely at times. In Romans 14, 16, we read, let not your good be evil spoken of. Let not your good be blasphemed. Scripture says thou shalt not go up and down as a tailbearer among the people. Leviticus 1916. Also, 1. Corinthians 6 says, revileurs. shall not inherit the kingdom of God. You remember the prophet Jeremiah and how the people of his own town conspired against him. Come, let us devise devices against Jeremiah. Come and let us smite him with the tongue. Let us not give heed to any of his words. We read in Jeremiah 1818. The goal was to speak as much evil as they could against Jeremiah, to ruin his reputation. No one would listen to what he said, to blaspheme him. Load him down with reproaches, take away his good name, and bear false witness against him. Now the fact that we’re told to put off blasphemy, and this text indicates to us the danger, that we could be guilty of this sin. You know, the scripture says, if you bite and devire one another, take heed that you be not consumed of one another in Glacians, 515. Have you ever heard of one snake eating another? Zookeepers have reported the two reptiles will sometimes grab different ends of the same piece of food. And when they’re eating, they meet face to face at one point in the middle when they’re finishing up. And whoever has the wider jaw will keep on eating and swallow the other snake up. And bite and devire, one another sort of has that kind of connotation with it where we eat the other person up, swallow them up. Christians have been known to rail against, to fame, to vilify, and to consume one another. So we should not be guilty of blaspheming God nor man. Now, you should realize why this sin is grievous. The first thing we should recognize is this is evidence of an unregenerate heart. If we would stay in this habit of doing this, not that we couldn’t fall into it, but if we have a habit of doing this, it’s an indication of unregenerate heart for Jesus said, O generation of vipers, how can ye being evil speak good things? For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh in, Matthew 1234. The passion, the habit of blaspheming God or man argues for the fact that something’s wrong with the heart, that the heart needs to be changed. they’re still evil there. The second thing I suggest to you, it aligns you with Satan. Is not Satan always spoken of as the accuser of the brethren? He’s always railing against and defaming and vilifying the people of God. Dare we stand with him in doing the same kind of thing. It also harms good men. You know, the evil speaker looks for nothing but defects. a way to malign others. His goal is not to help a brother, but to disgrace him. Have you ever noticed that flies avoid the healthy parts of an animal’s body, but if there’s a sore or a wound, that’s where they flock. They look for the weak part, or that part that is wounded. So the evil speaker doesn’t notice or care about the godliness of anyone, they focus just on what weakness or failure there is in this person. It’s like Judas who condemned Mary for wasting her precious ointment in anointing Jesus but couldn’t appreciate the fact that he was honoring Jesus. She was honoring Jesus in this. So you’d put away the sin of blasphemy. Secondly, you’re to put away filthy communication. Put filthy communication out of your mouth, he says here. Put it away. What is filthy communication? In Ephesians, in a corollary passage, he calls it corrupt speech or corrupt communication. Something that’s rotten, something that’s putrid, if you would. It’s impure speech. We talk about people being. foul-mouthed or we talk about people having using bad language or perhaps we could take in the whole aspect of swearing cursing saying sexually impure things things of this nature would all I think fit under this idea of corrupt speech dirty jokes things of this nature when I worked as a partsman for a diesel engine company. There were a number of what I would call foul-mouth mechanics that worked. I was in the parts department, the mechanics need parts, so you have to deal with them somewhere along the line. There was one man in particular there was in the transmission department who grieved me every time I had to have any dealing with him because this man couldn’t complete a single sentence without using a four-letter work. It was constantly spewing forth from his mouth. And you felt like you need to wash your ears out after even just a few sentences with this man. It was so defiling. Another problem you find is this idea of sexually explicit speech. When I worked at this diesel engine company, the attitude of some of the men toward women was really bad. if one of the young ladies from the office ventured in the parts department, all kinds of sexually profane things would be said about these young women behind their backs, of course, but these things were so immoral. You know, you had to get away from this kind of talk. It’s not without reason that Scripture classifies men as brute beast because they’re completely directed by animal-like desires with no restraint. Friends, I use these examples not because I think they’re extreme, because I think it’s typical of what you will often find in the workplace, in the world in large. You know, the Bible says it’s a shame to speak of those things which are done of them, the ungodly and secret. I think Christians are supposed to have a holy bashfulness about them when it comes to openly speak of explicitly sexual things and impure acts, which is, you know, adultery or homosexuality or lesbianism, or whatever, is done in secret. While a husband and wife may intently talk of sexual things, it’s not for everybody’s ears. When the Word of God speaks about these kind of sexual impure things, it is always very carefully worded. If you ever know this when you read the Scripture, It doesn’t try to entice you. It tells you what happens. It tells you why it happens, but it doesn’t entice you. Even the Song of Solomon, and it has some very, a lot of sexual overtones. If you ever read through the book carefully, I mean, it has a lot of sexual overtones in it. But it’s very purely worded. So there’s nothing that is corrupting or defiling about the worded is the way it’s stated. Today, people often engage in experience. explicit, sexually promiscuous phone calls, text messages, profanedly-laced messages on answering machines and everything else. All of this is filthy communications. Unbecoming of a child of God and we’re to put these kind of things off. I feel almost embarrassed to tell you this, but I mean, it seems obvious, it’s so obvious, I shouldn’t have to tell you this. But Paul mentions it here, and we have to be careful that we mention it, make sure we emphasize that we shouldn’t have any of this in our lives. This is what filthy communication is. Now, why should you put it off? It’s an abuse of the gift of speech. You know, God, when he created all the various creatures that he made in this world, he only gave human beings the gift of speech. We’re the only creatures that have this gift. But man, in his fallen condition, condition greatly abuses this precious gift and the tongue is set on fire of hell as the scripture indicates. Scripture says let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth but that which is good to the use of edifying that it may minister grace under the hears. Ephesians 429. As a believer, our goal should be to restore speech to its rightful place and that is to be speaking grace to edify. So when we use our tongue, it should be in a more positive manner. We should restore it to its proper place. Don’t abuse the gift of speech. Secondly, filthy speech is an indication of a corrupt mind. You know, out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaketh. Speech is an overflow of what we’re thinking. What’s within us. If your heart is corrupt, then you can expect, you know, your language, your words will be corrupt, because that is the source of your words and your language. Bad fruit comes from a bad tree. And a man’s discourse is the fruit of his mind. And when someone is constantly spewing forth filthy communication, his heart has to be defiled. It cannot indicate a renewed mind. The third thing is this. Filthy communication corrupts both the speaker and the hear. You know, sadly, when someone speaks in a putrid manner, he’s not the only one that’s affected. Everybody that hears this is also affected. The hear is exposed to this file language or this explicit sexually charged language, and is contaminated as well. You know yourself, if you have a rotten apple or the type of, or tomato in a bag or a box that those other vegetables or fruits next to it will get contaminated by the one that’s rotten. And so that’s the same way we have in the issue of sin. Remember how righteous lot was fenced with a filthy communication, the behavior of the people in Sodom Gimorah. And that behavior. included speech. So Christians, therefore, must put off filthy communication themselves, and I suggest we attempt to avoid it whenever possible, in contact with others. So you’re to put away filthy communication. The third thing he says here is you’re to put away lying. Lying not one to another. Here’s what Augustine said about lying, how he defined it. is the voluntary setting forth of what is false with the intention of deceiving. You lie when you knowingly say something is false, but you say it anyhow in order to deceive someone. Now it is possible to say something false without lying because you yourself are mistaken. You know, when Jacob’s sons brought Joseph’s bloodied coat to him. to their father. They suggested that a wild beast must have killed their brother. The truth is, they sold Joseph, you recall, as a slave down to the Midianites, and he went down to Egypt. But they doctored the coat in order to deceive Jacob. It was all a lie. When Jacob’s sons later went down to Egypt to buy grain, and they had to deal with Joseph’s unwittingly they didn’t know he was Joseph. They were called spies and they were closely asked about their family. and they lied when they said, the youngest is this day with his father and one is not, Genesis 42.13. One is not. One has died. He didn’t die. And they know he didn’t die. However, Jacob actually believing that Joseph was dead did not lie when he exclaimed later Joseph is not. And Genesis 42. He thought it was true. He had no purpose to deceive. So lying is a deliberate act, and you know what you are saying doesn’t agree with the truth. Sadly, I’m afraid there’s nothing more common in our society than lying. It seems to be a constant way of life. You see, falsehood spoken every day in personal relations, in business work, in the government. And sadly, like the psalmist, you may be tempted to say, all men are liars, as Psalm 116.11 says. He was tempted to do that. Our text is an indication that Christians at times may lie, but they must put off this. This is not something we should continue doing. We may slip into a lie. But this is not something it should be a way of life for the Christian. it’s a corruption of the old man that has to be put off. Now, let me say this. Having defined lying, I don’t believe there are any lawful lies. There are some who teach, or at least claim, that it’s permissible to lie to protect your life, or to protect your family, something of this nature. Abraham lied on several occasions, saying that his wife was really his sister, in order to deceive. He did this because he was afraid that being in contact with heathen kings, those heathen kings would want his beautiful wife, and they would kill him. But scripture does not commend Abraham for this. It showed a lack of trust in God that God would protect him in these circumstances. On both occasions, when Abraham lied, it was exposed. Genesis 12 and Genesis. 20, and he was rebuked by these heathen kings. There are no grounds, I don’t think, from the Bible, to consider Abraham’s actions as a good example. I think they demonstrate a spiritual failure on his part, an uprising of the flesh. Scripture is very clear in condemning all lying. Jesus, who is certainly our prime example, never lied in order to keep himself from death. Did not try to deceive. In fact, at times he just didn’t say anything. He just remained silent. It’s better to be silent, I think, than to actually say something if we’re going to deceive. It better just to clamp our lips shut and not say anything. Don’t answer the question. Lying lips are an abomination to Lord, Proverbs 1222. Thou shalt destroy them that speak least or lies Psalm 56. All liars shall have their part in the lake which burns with fire in brimstone. Revelation 21 8. That’s not something you want to have your name tagged with, being a liar. So you may not do evil, lie that good may come to preserve even your own life. I think the end does not justify the means, and so I don’t think we should we should lie. We should be very careful about that. The book of Ephesians in a corollary passage says this in Ephesians 425, wherefore put away lying, here’s what you should do, speak the truth every man to his neighbor. So you must avoid lying and be careful that what we say or what we do say is the truth. All who are Christ are obligated to speak the truth one to another. Zachariah 8.16. This means we not denying that you know the truth, whatever you say should be the truth, and you don’t try to conceal the truth. You must speak the truth as to honor God and to benefit your neighbor. We want to avoid dishonoring God. We want to avoid deceiving our neighbor. This care to speak the truth, demonstrate you’re a child of God for. Who is Satan? Is he not the father of lies? He’s the father of the law. Let me close by saying the woman with the throat operation had to write out what she wanted to say, and it kept her from various things. If she had her throat available to speak, she would have said these things, but she stopped herself. You are called upon to put off. the sins of the mouth and I remind you what James says in James 1.26. If any man among you seem to be religious and bridleeth not his tongue but deceiveth his own heart, this man’s religion is vain. That says a lot about control of the tongue, doesn’t it? In our case. What need there is to pray is the psalmist. Psalm 141.3. Set a watch, O Lord, before my mouth. Keep the door of my lips. Now, you wouldn’t pray this without a conviction of the importance of the subject. Everything is transacted by speech, and therefore much depends on the good or bad management of your tongue. Notice something else. You would never pray this without a conviction that you could be in danger of this sin. Why this song? pray that God would guard his mouth because he knows how prone we are to say things we shouldn’t say. We’re liable to commit sin with our mouth. And lastly, you would never pray this prayer without a conviction that you’re unable to preserve your own lips. You realize you can’t do it. You need God’s help. And that’s why this prayer is prayed. We can’t watch our own lips as we should. We need Lord to help us in this regard. Well, let us pray along with the psalmist that the Lord would keep a watch over our mouths. Let us close over to pray.