The Danger Of Idle Words

Matthew 12 36. I tell you that every careless word that people speak they shall give an account for it in the day of judgment. I wanted to share a couple of thoughts on this memory verse. This is in the passage and if you don't have your bibles you can turn there to Matthew chapter 12 verse 34 through 37 where he's talking about this and he talks to the pharisees and he says you brood of vipers in verse 34 how can you being evil speak what is good for the mouth that speaks of out of that which fills the heart the good man brings out of his good treasure what is good and the evil man brings out of his evil treasure what is evil then he says this verse but I tell you that every careless word that people speak they should give an accounting for it in the day of judgment for by your words you will be justified and by your words you will be condemned so we see about evil words here Jesus calls the pharisees a brood of vipers and evil now these were people who were faithfully preaching the law of Moses but they were not obeying it they were preaching God's standards but they were not obeying it and they had distorted God's standards focusing on sacrifices and not on mercy and compassion so as a result of it their hearts remain hard and evil and so no matter what they did despite all their pious language and acts of service all came all that came out was evil words and God Jesus saw through them and saw evil snakes James 3 has a passage on the tongue and he says that the tongue is can bring the fire of hell itself with it there's a Japanese proverb I've heard that says that the tongue is only three inches long but it can kill a person who's six feet tall three inches of tongue can kill a person of six feet tall it's another easy way to remember James three six three and six three inches causes you to be able to kill six a six foot tall person and we can teach our children not to fight because we it'll be a terrible shame for us if our children become a murderer one day but Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount and James here tells me that it is an equal shame if we kill our loved ones over and over again with our speech and words of anger so that's evil speech but in this particular verse in verse 36 Jesus says not evil words but idle words he doesn't he uses a different word here he talks about careless words or idle words and I was thinking about that what is an idle word one way I looked at thought of it was you could technically argue it's neither good nor evil statements like you know between husband and wife did you see what she just wrote on Facebook or on the channel did you hear how he just spoke can you believe what they did and they don't seem wrong those are just it's not a good not bad they seem idle but they seemingly harmless words that idle can come from a heart and the heart is definitely not idle the heart is deceitful as Jeremiah says and out of the heart comes evil thoughts slander and falsity is Matthew Jesus says that in Matthew so I could say technically there's nothing wrong with what I said but Jesus says what you're calling idle you'll have to give a full account of it you're going to have to explain one day on the day of judgment the motive behind why you said that idle word and account for the why behind what you said and so as far as I know we have to be careful about these idle statements we have to judge our hearts and that's why the spirit of God must be allowed to have free course so he can use the word of God as a sword to divide between soul and spirit and to expose the thoughts and intentions of my heart and I must ask the Lord as I hear him speak on Sundays or through any message I heard or read God's word Lord sharpen your word I just don't want to get information I want your word to become sharper to expose the thoughts and intentions of my heart because otherwise I'll fool myself that I'm speaking a lot of words and there's nothing wrong with it but we're calling just idle neither here nor there God saying I'm looking at your heart and another danger that I saw relating to words was grumbling I searched for the word grumbling and the very first time the word grumbling occurs in the Bible is after the Israelites crossed the Red Sea before they crossed the Red Sea there was also the Israelites were under great oppression but it says in Exodus chapter 2 that the sons of Israel sighed in verse 23 and 24 and they cried out but God doesn't call it grumbling he calls it groaning in verse 24 and God remembered his covenant and God heard the groanings and so I have two choices I can groan as we heard against sin or I can grumble against God and when I groan or I choose to use my utterances to focus on groaning against sin then I'm appealing to God and he remembers the covenant and he remembers the blood of Jesus that can cleanse me of all sin and he can send me his Holy Spirit who groans alongside me but the moment the Israelites crossed the Red Sea they sang a song of praise as a as an immediate feeling response because they felt great but literally three verses later and three days later after they saw the most amazing miracle of their lives when the Red Sea parted and the entire Egyptian army and all these people have been oppressing them all of them drowned just three days later three verses later they start grumbling that's where that word grumbling begins and the Israelites kept failing to see God's ways despite them being in the wilderness and being without water all they wanted was one miraculous act one miraculous work so that's why they never stopped grumbling and the danger of that was after they never addressed it time after time they were not prepared for the final test God gave them when he sent the scouts out and said will you conquer the giants they didn't know this was the final test so yet against they grumbled and I saw that in Numbers 14 where this passage is described as this incident is described where they went out to look and they saw the giants the Lord was angry with them and said how long shall I bear with this evil congregation who are grumbling against me that's what made them evil evil they weren't doing a lot of horrible things but they grumbled and that was the final test that they got so I want to focus the words of my heart away from idle words away from evil words to focus on a groaning against sin and I want to focus my energy away from grumbling about anything to focus on the sins in myself or the sins in my family the sins around me in the church or even in the world that I may focus my heart on groaning not grumbling also I saw that a word accounting and I was blessed as I thought about that word accounting because accounting made me think of a financial word and I saw that my words can have value I saw that the words that come out of my mouth can be like currency imagine if I worked for hours and hours and I didn't get paid for it nothing wrong with it maybe I got some exercise but what if I could have worked and got paid for it similarly imagine if I spent all day talking to my children to my wife to my co-workers I didn't get any value out of it just a bunch of idle words but then there was another person working in the same field in the same mill but they were different they were able to use their words to produce game in the words they typed on a whatsapp message in the words they spoke on a phone call in the words they spoke on a dining table or even the words they spoke through their eyes the unspoken words that communicated a warm look of love or a smile and I have an opportunity to earn eternal currency today and I can encourage my family my children I can store up treasures in heaven heaven can become richer because the word that I share in the right season can help harvest a lost soul the right word or the right look from a gentle kind word from a husband can help draw his wife close and save a marriage it says in the revelation chapter 12 that they overcame the devil by the word of their testimony it's not a and that word is not a specific word spoken specifically against the devil it's the summary it's the accounting of all the words that we've spoken through our testimony through our looks through our words that we spoke through the things we thought and we god adds it all up and that's what we testify through our thoughts through our lips through our actions and then we have a final accounting or a summary that is all within my heart and I feel that that's what the bible says that's the word of all that you're testifying and we can what a tremendous opportunity for us to make heaven richer what a tremendous opportunity for us to overcome the devil with the words that we can focus on not having idle words but good words that come out of a heart that has been cleansed that can reap eternal benefits can draw people souls into the kingdom we live among neighbors who are also sheltering in place I want more and more to become a fisher of men and women and children my own family but also the neighbors around me that I may have the right word I don't need to spend hours and hours talking to them but if the lord can place me in the right situation give me the right word at the right time I pray that that'll happen in my life I pray that it'll happen in your life