Summary
The Heart and Words
Words have a way of escaping before reason can stop them. Everyone has said something they wish they could pull back, or at least "round the edges" of after the fact. Scripture takes this common experience and uses it to open a window into something much deeper than verbal carelessness: the condition of the human heart.
Two preachers in the New Testament use the very same striking phrase—"You brood of vipers!" John the Baptist hurls it at the Pharisees and Sadducees who come out to the Jordan Matthew 3:7, and Jesus uses it after healing a demoniac, when the Pharisees credit His power to Beelzebul Matthew 12:24. He uses it again in the woes of Matthew 23:33. Vipers were poisonous snakes that hid in brushwood and struck without warning—the same creature that fastened on Paul's hand in Acts 28:3. The image fit. False teaching poisons everyone within reach.
The diagnosis Jesus presses in The Heart and Words: "Trees and Hearts" is unsparing: "Either make the tree good and its fruit good, or make the tree bad and its fruit bad, for the tree is known by its fruit… out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks" Matthew 12:33-34. What comes out of the lips is simply evidence of what is already in the heart. And the heart, by inheritance from Adam and Eve, is diseased from the moment of conception Psalm 51:5. Bad fruit grows because the tree is bad. This is why there is no rounding the edges of the law: its job is to act as a mirror and show us what we actually are.
Jesus' warning is sobering: "On the day of judgment people will give account for every careless word they speak" Matthew 12:36. Revelation pictures the books opened at the great white throne, the dead judged according to what is written Revelation 20:12. Every careless word, every sin of thought, word, and deed, every good thing left undone—all of it recorded. On those terms, no one can stand.
But another book is opened: the Book of Life. For everyone whose name is written there, the record of sin has been blotted out by the blood of Christ, who bore every careless word on the cross. God looks on the baptized clothed in the perfect righteousness of Jesus and sees no condemnation. Ordinary water joined to His word of victory becomes the washing in which He says, "You are mine, and I will never let you go."
That same baptismal grace gives a new heart—a heart transplant—and begins the slow, sanctifying work of guarding the lips. David's prayer becomes our own: "Set a guard, O LORD, over my mouth; keep watch over the door of my lips" Psalm 141:3. When sharp words rise up and get caught before they fly, that is God at work. When we still fall short—and we will—He meets us with the gospel, raising us up new each day as we return to our baptism in repentance. The law has no rounded edges, but neither does the gospel: in Christ you are fully His, and heaven's doors stand open.
Video citations
- The Heart and Words: "Trees and Hearts" — Would you open your Bible's please with me to the 12th chapter of the gospel of Saint Matthew? If you're using a few edition you'll find in the rack in front of you or underneath you, that's on page…