The man in the Disney movie was an inventor. One of his inventions was a shrinking machine. There's been some suggestions that that's what happened to me - I got into a shrinking machine. Anyway, this actually did happen to his kids' baseball. It crashed through the window of his laboratory. It landed in dad's shrinking machine, turning it on as it landed, and the kids were amazed to see how their ball suddenly shrank. Thinking this machine was really cool, they started playing with it...until the machine suddenly shrank them to an almost invisible size. And the anguished cry of the father is the title of the movie "Honey, I shrunk the kids!"
I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about "The Chainsaw in Your Mouth."
Sadly, too many of us have a shrinking machine that is shrinking our kids, maybe our spouse, other people we love. That shrinking machine is in your mouth. It's a tongue that says things that repeatedly diminish some of the very people you love the most: angry things, cutting things, sarcastic or critical things, discouraging things.
It's almost as if we have this verbal chain saw in our mouth that keeps cutting people we care about. It may be that you've been doing this for so long you hardly even notice how destructive some of your words are. But the people who are hearing them are not only noticing your words, it's quite possible they will never forget them. We can still remember the names we were called decades ago, right? Some of us have even defined our self-worth, or our lack of self-worth, based on some of those shrinking things that someone said to us. That's how what you say impacts those you love. There's so much power in your words!
The Bible doesn't talk about a verbal chainsaw, but it does talk about a verbal sword. It says, in Proverbs 12:18, "Reckless words pierce like a sword." Proverbs 18:21 raises the stakes even higher: "The tongue has the power of life and death." Your words are either making the people around you feel more alive inside, or it's killing them inside. We replay people's failures over and over, we diminish people by constantly comparing them to someone else, we mark them, maybe for life, with the names we call them. We spew out reckless words to win the moment, but we scar someone for life.
Jesus said, "Out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks" (Matthew 12:35). A runaway mouth comes from something down deep inside; a dark, angry, wounded heart. Until the heart gets fixed, the mouth is just going to keep shrinking and scarring people we care about. It's all part of this sin thing the Bible talks about; our separation from God because we've pushed Him out to do the things we want to do the way we want to do them. The hurt we inflict comes from a sinful heart.
God knows that. That's why He sent His one and only Son to pay the price