Uncivil Discourse: Why Our Speech Matters

Send us Fan MailKen Myers has observed, “The Christian tradition has long placed great value on care about speech.” He notes that the sacred importance of language is signaled by the fact that two of the Ten Commandments are concerned with speech. One of them has to do with the way we speak about God. The other, not surprisingly, deals with the way we speak about others. It seems that the tongue is the primary instrument we use to fulfill the two Great Commandments, to love God with heart, soul, and mind, and to love your neighbor as yourself (Matt. 22:36-38). Our most corrupt speech is often the most commonplace, expressing those sins that we have learned to tolerate in ourselves.Dr. John Koessler is an award-winning writer and retired faculty emeritus of Moody Bible Institute. John writes the Praying the Word column for the Lifeway publication Mature Living and is the author of 16 books. His latest book, On Things Above: The Earthly Importance of Heavenly Reality, is available from Amazon.  You can learn more about John at https://www.johnkoessler.com.