Words are fundamental to our lives. We
use words to share, to create, to love, to define ourselves, and to build
societies and worlds. We live through words. That’s why one of the most
powerful things you can do for someone is to help them give a voice to their
own words. When one of our children reached the age at which she should have
been speaking words but hadn’t said anything yet, the health professionals took
it very seriously. They worked with us and with her preschool teachers to
encourage her to speak, and we’re so grateful they did. It’s now a joy to
listen to her words and speak words of our own to her. That experience drove
home to us how precious and indeed how powerful words are. Words don’t come
easily to everyone; when they do come, they are something we should never take
for granted.

Yet because words are so powerful, they
also have the potential for great harm. Social media technologies show us that,
don’t they? Social media gives a far-reaching voice to our words, and yet it also
distorts our voice. Social media magnifies our words and diminishes them at the
same time. It broadcasts our conversations, and so turns personal relationships
into news stories. It makes us both hyper-connected and at the same time misconnected;
in our rush to have our voice heard, we leave behind the normal cues of
face-to-face communication, and so motives are easily presumed and anger flares.
Social media brings us together, but often makes us feel even more alone. It
filters and tailors the words we see and hear to suit our own individual likes
and preferences; so we lose the art of listening to others. It processes and nudges
and prioritises every word to fit the favoured narrative of the powerful
interests with money to pay to the providers; so we lose the art of true
criticism. Yet social media is the place where so many of us now use our words.
And so, social media is the place where so many of us now, in a sense, live.

In these verses in Ephesians, the apostle Paul writes to believers in Christ about how to use our words:

Make sure no rotten word goes out of your mouth, but only what is good for building, as needed, so that you might give grace to those who hear; don’t grieve God’s Holy Spirit, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption.Ephesians 4:29–30

Of course, since Paul is writing at a
time before social media technology existed, he’s assuming that words are normally
communicated through our mouths, in personal, face-to-face speech. And personal
speech is still basic to the way we communicate. So what Paul says here is
highly relevant to the way we use our own mouths. But today, as we’ve just
seen, social media is also a place where we live and speak. So these verses are
also relevant to the way we use our fingers to create words online. You could
swap “mouths” for “fingers” in this verse, and it would be just as applicable.

The main thing that Paul is interested in
here is the purpose behind our words. Paul isn’t telling us precisely what
to say. It’s more fundamental than that: he’s telling us why to say what
we say. Why do you speak? When you are using your mouth or your fingers to
create words, what are those words for? So often, our words are for ourselves,
aren’t they? Deliberately or subconsciously, we design our words to make
ourselves feel better or look better or gain something for ourselves. But here,
Paul tells us that our mouths and our fingers aren’t just for us, to use for
our own purposes. The gospel of Jesus Christ has given us a whole new reason ...