Even with the rise of Facebook, texting and tweeting, our most common form of communication is still the humble conversation. Statisticians have estimat­ed that the average person engages in 30 conversations a day, and each of us will spend 13 years of our life talking (some you know will far exceed the average!). Every day, our words could write a book of 50-60 pages (cited by John MacArthur in Exposing the Truth About Men’s Hearts¹).  As you consider the book that might be made of your words, what would it look like? Would it be a book you would like to give away as a birthday present? Would it be a book you could read to the grandkids? More importantly, would it be a book you would be content to sit down and read with the Lord?

Psalm 15 describes the character qual­ities of the person who lives in com­munion with God. Verse 4 in particular highlights the quality of their speech. You could say, this is the person whose multi-volume works of conversation the Lord is pleased to have on his shelf. They don’t just walk the walk of the Christian life, they talk the talk of the Christian life.

At this point I’ll add a disclaimer. This Psalm is not saying you need to have pure speech in order to earn ad­mission into the presence of God or to be right with him. For that you need to embrace Jesus Christ in faith. You can only be admitted into the Lord’s presence by his mercy (Psalm 5:7). This Psalm is about dwelling with God, about enjoying communion with him. And the communion we have with the Lord is enjoyed when we are people of pure speech.

One of the things that God does in the life of every Christian, is to progres­sively sanctify our speech. Sometimes he does this in rather dramatic ways. Of the Welsh revivals of the early 1900s, it is said that in one town where many miners came to saving faith, they lost a third of their vocabulary in one day! They stopped swearing as their speech was transformed.

In verse 4 we have a description of what our speech as Christians should look like. We should have no slander on our tongues. The word “slander” literally means “to spy out”. So this is the person who goes about snooping into the lives of others to find out about their sins and shortcomings. It’s the busy-body who’s always probing to find out the latest tasty morsel of church gossip. It’s the person who is always watching others to pick up their faults and defects. The purpose implied in Psalm 15, is that they do this in order to pass it on to others.

What possesses us to spy out the failure of others? It is not simply idle curiosity. There are usually more sinister motivations lurking in our hearts. Perhaps it is a defense mechanism. It is much more comfortable to look at Bill’s life and notice how he struggles with self-discipline, than it is to examine my own heart and see what sin lies there. The other reason we do this is because we all have a problem with self-righteous­ness. It makes us feel good to find out about the sin of others, because then we can feel so much better about our­selves. We think to ourselves, ‘I’m glad I’m not like them, I’ve never done that before’. Or perhaps we think ‘they’re just as bad as I am.’ Instead of looking to the righteousness of Christ, we are trusting in our own.

The other part of verse 3 speaks of not casting a slur on our fellow man. This forbids defaming the reputation of another person. We do this in a variety of ways. We do this when we pass on gossip about someone. We do this when we speak about an incident we had with someone, and we only pass on the bits of information that cast them in a bad light. We do this when we are critical of a person behind their back, passing on all their faults and flaws. Then there is the pious version of casting a slur on our fellow man. Who hasn’t been at a prayer meeting where someone has said ‘I really think we need to pray for Dorothy, because she’s really struggling at the moment with her temper with the kids.’ This is just a pious way of sticking the knife in someone’s back.

Why do we do this? Why do we find ourselves passing on information that is going to damage the reputation of others? Perhaps it’s because we are angry with another person. We harbour some bitterness toward them and instead of working things through with them, we sabotage their reputation. Perhaps it’s because we are afraid. We are afraid to confront another person directly, and so we hope that the information will get back to them via the gossip chain. However, if your brother is caught in a sin, go and speak to him about it to his face, not behind his back.

Perhaps the most common reason we do damage to the reputations of others, is our self-righteousness. I feel better about myself when I put others down. Men in particular can have a perverse kind of delight in this. When a group of blokes get together, have you noticed that one of their favourite games is to tear each other down? The men actu­ally start hen-pecking each other – they drag up past failures of someone in the group, they highlight someone’s incom­petence with power tools or driving or some other manly activity, or they even bag someone because they’ve said or done something nice. Anything to get a laugh from the boys. But it’s pretty much what is being spoken against in the Psalm – don’t cast a slur on your fellow man. Someone once said that this kind of thing is like a water-polo game – I can lift myself up by putting someone else down. The trouble is, by lifting myself up, I am drowning the other person.

A verse that we should all hide in our hearts is Ephesians 4:29. ‘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.’ The pattern we are to learn ac­cording to Ephesians, is to put off the unwholesome talk, and to put on a new way of talking about others.

Sometimes we’re not sure if what we are saying is unwholesome. A few ques­tions might help you to determine if you are gossiping or damaging someone’s reputation. Firstly, ask yourself why you are passing on this information. Are you trying to help the person you are talking about, or trying to hurt them? Secondly, do you have all the relevant information? Do you know the full story, or are you passing on rumours and hearsay? Thirdly, are you building up the person you are speaking to? Can they actually do an­ything with the information you have given to them, or is it going to be to their harm? (These questions come from Bridling the Tongue, by Chris Vlachos²). One of the Puritans said: By the grace of God I am resolved to speak about another mans sins, only before their face, and of their virtue, only behind their back. What a glorious place of peace and security our churches would be if we did this more often.

Now, you might be able to control your own tongue at times, but what do you do when someone comes to you with a bit of gossip, or a critical comment about someone else? You could do what Augustine did. He considered this, such a serious matter, that on his table he had the following words carved:

He that loves with bitter speech the absent to defame,
Must surely know that at this board (i.e. table) no place is for the same.

He banned all bad reports about others. And we can do the same without damaging our tables. When people bring a bad report about somebody, you can defend the reputation of the other person. You can say ‘my experi­ence of that person is vastly different. That doesn’t sound like something they would do.’ Or you could take the more direct route. You could say ‘pause there for a moment’, and you can go and find the person they are talking about, bring them back and say ‘now continue what you were saying’. Perhaps a less humili­ating option is simply to say ‘You may have a point, let’s go and find Bill and talk to him about this directly, just like the Bible commands.’

Guarding our tongues, and stopping our ears, is one way to deal with the problem of our impure talk. In some ways this only addresses an exterior problem. Our speech is simply alerting us to our deeper issues. Our tongues are actually just dobbing us in. Every time we say something to tear another person down, our tongues are saying, ‘you’ve got a heart problem’. Isn’t that what Jesus said in Matt 12:34? ‘Out of the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks.’ We need our hearts to be transformed and shaped by the gospel, and then our lips will naturally speak that which is useful for building others up. Therefore our constant prayer must be what David prayed for elsewhere: ‘Create in me a pure heart, O God...’ Psalm 51:10. May the Lord be pleased to answer that prayer.