Trinity Baptist Church

The Spirit of God

Grieving the Spirit

Ephesians 4:29-32

 

We have spent the last several weeks learning about the Spirit of God.  Even though He is God’s intended way to make Himself personal to us, in many ways He is an absolute stranger.  We read and sing about Him, but really don’t understand His ministry among us.  That’s why we’ve been seeking to get acquainted with some of the things Scriptures says about the Holy Spirit. 

 

There are four specific commands given to us as believers in Scripture regarding the Holy Spirit. Two fo them are positive and two are negative. So far we’ve looked at the two positives, be filled with the Spirit and walk in the Spirit. 

 

Today we’ll look at the first of the negatives which is “Do not grieve the Holy Spirit” and next week we’ll see the fourth which is “Do not quench the Spirit”. 

 

Let’s begin by reading

Ephesians 4:29

 

If we read that verse in other translations, we would see it rendered in various ways. 

 

NIV:  “Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen.”

 

KJV: “Let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth, but that which is good to the use of edifying, that it may minister grace unto the hearers.”

 

HCSB:  “No foul language is to come from your mouth, but only what is good for building up someone in need, so that it gives grace to those who hear.”

 

None of them really capture the intensity of the Greek language and what Paul is saying.  The word that is translated unwholesome of corrupt or foul actually means rotten. It was the word the Greeks used to describe decaying flesh or rotting fish or spoiled fruit.

 

A literal translation would be, “Don’t let any putrid words come out of your mouth.” Or we might say in street lingo, “No trash talking!”

 

So what qualifies as rotten speech? Here are a few examples:

 

Obviously it would include vulgarity and obscenities.  No indecent language.  We could include dirty jokes and off-color stories and pornographic language.

 

But we would also have to include racial or ethnic insults and jokes and humor that is meant to insult or to put someone down.

 

How about throwing a fit and being harsh?  Mean-spirited comments that are intended to hurt or embarrass someone?

 

And I’m sure it includes gossip and rumors and false accusations.  We could throw public criticism of your family or church in the mix. 

 

Yelling and screaming.  Making threats.  Cheap shots.

 

Talking too much.  Talking without listening.  Condemning others.  Exaggerating the faults of others.

 

Excusing unkind words by saying, “I was only joking.”

 

In fact, the list is quite long for what qualifies as rotten speech. 

 

And the way the verse is put together is unusual also.  The verse opens with a Greek word that means “all, each, every.” Then the word meaning “no” occurs later in the verse. That gives a particular emphasis to his words that is something like this:  :

 

Every critical comment that comes out of your mouth … not!

 

Every filthy word that comes out of your mouth … not!

 

Every harsh word that comes out of your mouth … not!

 

Every cheap shot that comes out of your mouth … not!

 

Every bit of gossip that comes out of your mouth … not!

Why is this so important? Proverbs 18:21 says, “The tongue has the power of life and death.” Every time you open your mouth either life or death comes out. The Bible speaks of the throat as an “"open grave” (Romans 3:13).

 

When there is death on the inside, it will eventually show up in the your words. According to Proverbs 12:18, “Reckless words pierce like a sword, but the tongue of the wise brings healing.” And James 3:5-6 offers this penetrating warning:

 

Likewise the tongue is a small part of the body, but it makes great boasts. Consider what a great forest is set on fire by a small spark. The tongue also is a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body. It corrupts the whole person, sets the whole course of his life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell.

 

And for the Christian who is saved by the blood of Jesus, baptized with the Spirit, filled with the Spirit and walking in the Spirit, Ephesians 4:29 offers a Christian alternative.

 

First, we are to speak good words that build up instead of tearing down. And second, we are to speak words that minister grace to those who hear them. And we are to do it all the time and in every circumstance. We are to speak good words that bring grace according to the need of the moment.

 

That means every word we speak is to always be good and convey grace all the time.

 

All good!  All grace!  All the time!

 

 

Gordon MacDonald tells the story of a trip to Japan he took as a young man. One day, while walking the streets of Yokohama with an older pastor, he made a comment about a mutual friend. It was a quick, sarcastic comment that was unkind and unnecessary.

 

The older pastor stopped, looked him in the face, and said, “A man who truly loves God would not talk about a friend like that.” Gordon MacDonald said it was as if a knife had been plunged between his ribs. The pain was so great that he didn’t know how to respond.

 

Reflecting on that experience 20 years later, he remarked that the memory of those searing words had helped him 10,000 times when he was tempted to make a critical comment about a family member, a friend, a colleague or someone he knew casually. Many of us need to take that story to heart. “A man who truly loves God would not talk about a friend like that.”

 

We all have our excuses for what we say, don’t we? We’re tired or we’re provoked or we weren’t thinking or we didn’t mean it or it’s true so we said it. On and on we go, justifying our verbal diarrhea. We all have people in our lives that drive us nuts. Some people just seem to have the “spiritual gift” of irritation. They know how to get under our skin. It might be a friend or a spouse or our children. It certainly could be an ex-husband or an ex-wife.

 

But no matter what the circumstances of the background, God’s word says, “No more rotten, stinking speech!” 

 

Instead, “All good, all grace, all the time!”

 

Then notice verse 30. 

 

Here’s what happens when your speech is full of rottenness.  You grieve the Holy Spirit. Did you know that you could grieve the Holy Spirit who lives within you?

 

The word “grieve” comes from a Greek word that signifies deep emotion. You can only grieve a close friend or a loved one. You can’t grieve a stranger you meet on the street. You can irritate a stranger and you can offend a casual acquaintance, but you can only grieve someone very close to you. And it is possible to grieve God’s Holy Spirit. You can make the Spirit weep because of your thoughtless words.

 

Here’s the reason: The Holy Spirit not only lives in you. He also lives in the Christian brother or sister you just slandered with your lips. Evil speech destroys Christian unity. And He is burdened for the souls of the lost person you cursed. 

 

So no matter if a person is lost or saved, that person matters to God and when we use rotten speech regarding them instead of all good, all grace all the time as we are instructed we misrepresent God, we ignore the commission of Christ and we injure the Holy Spirit. 

 

Every time I speak carelessly, I hurt at least five persons.  The person I speak carelessly about, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit and myself.

   

 

In fact, every time I open my mouth, one of two things will happen.  I either build someone up, or I tear someone down.

 

This does not mean that we will never say anything hard or difficult. It doesn’t mean we aren’t to speak the truth in love.  Proverbs 27:6 reminds us that “faithful are the wounds of a friend” (KJV).

 

Sometimes true friends “wound” each other in order to bring healing. Just as a doctor must sometimes cut us in surgery in order to remove what is killing us, true friends sometimes say things that aren’t easy to hear. But in those cases, true friends first remove the 2x4 from their own eye before they remove the speck of sawdust from someone else’s eye.

 

Then notice verse 31

 

Not only do we grieve the Spirit by rotten speech, we also do it by

 

 

Now that makes all kinds of sense because those two things can never be separated.  What does the Bible tells us?  Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks. Whatever is in the heart must eventually come out in the words we say. Whatever is down in the well will come up in the bucket sooner or later.

 

So Paul says, “Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice” (v. 31).

These words describe a collection of wrong attitudes that corrode the soul from the inside out. They form a kind of spiritual staircase of descending evil.

 

First there is

 

 

The word means “pointed” or “sharp,” referring to the pain we feel when we think we’ve been mistreated. It speaks to a deep emotional reaction that keeps us from thinking clearly. If we dwell in bitterness long enough, it produces a wounded spirit and a hard heart.

 

The second step is

 

 

The word translated wrath is a word that originally meant to snort. It has the idea of the nostrils being flared in anger. This is hot-tempered anger that explodes under the slightest provocation. We use the same image when we speak of someone being all steamed up, with smoke coming out his ears.

 

That leads to

 

 

This word speaks of a settled condition of the heart. Did you ever know a person who was angry all the time? They get up angry, they shower angry, they eat breakfast angry, they go to work angry, they come home angry, they watch TV angry, and they go to bed angry. And when others are happy, that makes them even more angry.

Nothing pleases a person like that. Anger leads to jealousy, harsh words, and it can even lead to murder.

 

Angry people often express themselves through

 

 

The word means to raise your voice. It includes all forms of physical and verbal intimidation. It has the idea of shouting back and forth during a quarrel. How many arguments could be avoided if we didn’t raise our voices. “A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger” (Proverbs 15:1).

 

The next step is

 

 

Paul uses a very strong word to describe this form of evil speaking. It means to make false accusations about someone or to offer vague insinuations that make another person look worse than they really are. We can slander with our words, with a lifted eyebrow, with an unfinished sentence, with a rhetorical question left dangling in the air, or by quoting someone but taking their words and twisting them into something sinister.

 

We can slander through insults, ridicule, cruel jokes, taunts, unkind nicknames, rumors, mocking, belittling, or by passing unfair and hasty judgment. In legal terms this is called “defamation of character.”

 

 

Words give us control over others. We all feel better if we can name something. Every word we say impacts our relationships for good or for ill. Once a slanderous word escapes our lips, our relationship is changed forever. It can never be the same again.

 

This was the particular sin of those who crucified Jesus. They mocked him and lied about him and falsely accused him. As a result of their slander, the Son of God was crucified. When you slander someone, you join with those who crucified our Lord.

 

The final word is

 

 

It’s a general dislike of others. Malice can be described as congealed hatred. A malicious person can’t get along with anyone.

 

Notice the digression in these rotten attitudes:

 

Bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor, slander and malice.

 

What starts in the heart ends up on the lips. What begins with bitterness ends with slander. We think, we feel, and then we speak. What starts as a grievance becomes an outburst of wrath that hardens into anger that expresses itself in clamor and ultimately as slander.

 

Malice marks such a person through and though. And it all starts with personal hurt that becomes bitterness. Stop it at the first and you won’t have to stop it at the last. That’s why Proverbs 4:23 reminds us to “guard your heart for it is the wellspring of life.”

We are doing Satan’s work when we descend that staircase. Every downward step is a step for him.

 

And notice Paul says to get rid of “all” these wrong attitudes:

 

No bitterness, no wrath, no anger, no clamor, no slander and no malice!

 

As long we harbor these things within, the Holy Spirit weeps inside us.  Those things must go … and be replaced with something much better.

 

Verse 32

 

Kindness speaks of gentleness in the face of provocation. It reaches out to the unworthy and withholds punishment even when it is deserved. Kindness is daring and dangerous because some mistake it for weakness. It is “the oil that lubricates the machinery of life.”

 

Tenderheartedness comes from a word that means “good intestines” because the ancients thought the intestines and the bowels were the seat of the emotions. We mean something similar when we speak of a belly laugh. Compassion says, “I will care for you and I will not shut you out.”

 

The key to forgiveness is the middle syllable—give. Forgiveness is a gift we give to those who don’t deserve it.

 

Note that verse 32 starts with us and ends with God. We are kind, compassionate and forgiving to others because that’s how God has treated us.

 

We do for others what God has done for us. We have been forgiven; we know what it is like. Now do the same for others. We are not left to wonder what it means to forgive those who have hurt us.

 

You cannot understand the cross unless you see in it God’s love.  Man’s murder became God’s sacrifice. A heinous crime paid an impossible debt. Through the death of an innocent man, we the guilty go free. If we had been there, the stench of death would have overwhelmed us, but the cross smelled good to the Father. The work of salvation was finally done:

 

If you want to see your faith get down to the nitty-gritty, them spend some time with this passage of Scripture because here is where it gets very real and personal. 

 

The most practical spiritual duties are here connected to the most amazing of spiritual truths. 

 

In the context of the very sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross for our sins, Paul says, “No more trash talk!  No more bitterness.  No more wrath.  No more anger.  No more clamor.  No more slander.  No more malice.  And no more making the Spirit of God weep within you.

 

God asks us to do what he has already done for us. We are not to forgive in order to be forgiven. We forgive because we have been forgiven.

 

Richard Wurmbrand was a Romanian Christian minister of Jewish descent. He was a youth during a time of anti-Semitic activity in Romania.

 

In 1948, 10 years after becoming a believer in Jesus Christ as Messiah, he dared to publicly say that Communism and Christianity were not compatible and for that, he was imprisonment and tortured for his beliefs in a communist jail in Romania.

 

Eventually he was released and he and his wife, who was also imprisoned, spent the rest of their lives trying to bring the persecution of Christians around the world to the public’s attention.  He wrote more than 18 books.  The most widely was “Tortured for Christ”. Variations of his works have been translated into more than 60 languages. 

 

Part of his ministry was the founding of the magazine Voice of the Martyrs.  Back in December of 1998, the carried an article written by Richard Wurmbrand himself. This is part of what he wrote:

 

“Let me tell you about a man who was in prison with me. Demitri was a pastor whose backbone had been beaten with a hammer. When certain vertebra was hit, he was paralyzed so that he could only move his neck.

 

You can imagine what a tragedy this was. If he had been in a home or hospital, he would have had a wife, mother, or nurse to take care of him. How would we take care of him? There was no running water to wash him, no linen to change him. He lay there in his human waste. He could not stretch out his hands to drink a cup of water. The others who could walk and work were taken to slave labor during the day. When they came back in the evening, he had to wait for them to help him drink a cup of water.

 

He lay like this in prison for a couple of years. It was hell on earth. Then in December 1989, Romania had a revolution and dictator Ceausescu was overturned. Freedom came and Demitri was released from prison to be with his family and friends. No doctor could help him, but now he had loving hands to help him. He still could not move hand or foot.

 

One day someone knocked at his door. It was the Communist who had crippled him. He said, “Sir, don’t believe that I have come to ask forgiveness from you. For what I have done, there is no forgiveness, not on earth or in heaven. You are not the only one I have tortured like this. You cannot forgive me; nobody can forgive me. Not even God. My crime is much too great. I have come only to tell you that I am sorry about what I have done. From you I go to hang myself. That is all.” He turned to leave.

 

The paralyzed brother Demitri said to him, ‘Sir, in all these years I have not been so sorry as I am now, that I cannot move my arms. I would like to stretch them out to you and embrace you. For years I have prayed for you every day. I love you with all my heart. You are forgiven.’

 

Demitri had learned love from the Jesus who called Judas “friend,” who prayed for those who crucified him, and who accepted Saul of Tarsus, the persecutor, and made him an apostle.

 

Our faith in Jesus means imitating him. Jesus, as often as he met a sinner, did not reproach him. He took that man’s sin upon himself and suffered on the cross for the sin.

 

If you want to know what love is like, go to Golgotha and fix your eyes on the man hanging from the center cross. Study what he did and you will know true love.  Then go and do for others what God has done for you.”

 

But you say, “I can’t do that. You don’t know what they did to me.” What if God treated you as you treat others? You’d be in hell already.  What if God were as unkind and unmerciful as you are? What if he kept a record of your sins? You’d never get within a million miles of heaven.  “I’m going to trash him like he trashed me.” What if God said that about you?  “I don’t know how much I can take?” Just go as far as Jesus went for you.

 

Do you want to know what troubles me most about this text with its warning against rotten speech and rotten attitudes that grieve the Spirit?  I see far too much of myself in it. It is so easy for us to be unkind and ungracious. I find it all too easy to violate the very things I have preached to you today. So I confess my own weakness and ask the Lord to baptize my mouth, sanctify my lips, and transform my heart.

 

Maybe you need the same thing. Perhaps you need to have a heart-to-heart talk with the Lord and then with others close to you.  Whatever God tells you to do, do it. Stop making the Holy Spirit weep because of your unkind words and your inner ugliness. Cry out to God for his help. Ask the Lord to open your eyes and see the uncleanness within. Pray for a fresh vision of Jesus dying for you.  Do not grieve the Holy Spirit any longer.

 

Let’s pray.