The Bible speaks of wise men and foolish men. It says that the fool’s mouth is his ruin, and his lips are a snare to him (see Prov. 18:7). A person would need to be foolish indeed to use her own mouth and words to ruin her own life, but people do it all the time. Why? Simply because they don’t understand the power of words. We know that our words impact other people, but we do realize that our words impact ourselves and our lives? People always with bad luck often talk themselves into all kinds of bad situations.
It’s no wonder Proverbs 17:20 tells us that “he who has a wayward and crooked mind finds no good, and he who has a willful and contrary tongue will fall into calamity.”
One of the biggest mistakes we make is to think we have no control over how we feel or what we do. God has given us a spirit of discipline and self-control, and it is called self-control because God gives us this tool to control ourselves. We all have it, but do we use it? Anything we have but never use becomes dormant and powerless. Do you work out regularly? Why do you do that? You exercise to keep your bones and your muscles strong - to guard your health.
The writer of Proverbs also tells us that “he who guards his mouth and his tongue keeps himself from troubles” (21:23). That is a wise man.
Millions of people live miserable and unfruitful lives because they are deceived. They believe they are merely victims of whatever comes their way. If they wake up feeling depressed, they offer no resistance, but erroneously assume that they must behave the way they feel. I know this very well because I lived in the same type of deception for a large part of my life. If the deceived person is offended and feels angry, he usually expresses his anger and even hangs on to it as if it is a battle prize. It occurs to every few that they can let the anger go and trust God to take care of their vindication.
The world is filled with discouraged, downtrodden individuals who could make their situations better by simply choosing to continue on in hope. Once we learn the power of hope and practice it, it is a hard habit to break. Just as a person can form a habit of being discouraged each time things don’t go her way, she can learn to encourage herself through hoping that a blessing is right around the corner.
What we say in difficult times determines how long the difficulty will last and how intense the difficulty will become. I am certainly not saying that we can control everything that happens to us by choosing right words to speak, but we can control how we respond to the things that happen to us, and choosing right thoughts and words helps us do that. You can’t control the wind, but you can adjust the sails.
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