‘Shut up.’ We could summarise a decent amount of the book of Proverbs like that. When we’re tempted to argue: shut up. When we’re about to cut someone down, even with good cause: shut it. When we want to force our words on some poor innocent listener no matter how they feel: keep your mouth shut. But there’s no point in cutting out unhealthy words if we don’t have healthy, life-giving words to replace them with. ‘Speak life.’ There’s a wonderful, gentle way of speaking life that we pick up on if we spend time in the book of Proverbs. What’s the core of it all? Wisdom. Keep wisdom in view like we keep the steering wheel in the centre of the road, and don’t let our words wander to the ends of the earth. That means stripping away words that aren’t wise and life-giving - not that we can’t ever speak other words, but look at the ratio: if we’re mostly speaking indifferent or critical words, think again. Let wisdom fill our words. That doesn’t mean we go around spouting proverbs like a wizened sage. It just means that we get the content of the proverbs in us. So Proverbs 15:1 teaches us how to tackle a heated, furious argument. And Proverbs 27:2 teaches us how to talk about our own successes. If you can get those inside you, then you’ll change rooms. God promises that you’ll lead people into better friendships, better moods, and even better thinking about God.

What now?
Think creatively about how your words build up others. You can start with how you praise God - maybe you’ve felt praise music or prayer language getting stale recently. So get creative. Pick a word like ‘righteous’ and think ‘what fresher word could I say instead that might inspire me to love God more fully?’