“A time to keep silence and a time to speak….”
Ecclesiastes is an unusual book and some things in it are hard to understand. Our text verse in chapter 3 is not difficult to understand: There is a time to close our mouths and a time to open them. if you are like me, there are times that you speak out of turn and say to yourself later, “Why did I say that?” I want to feed off of the wisdom of this short verse in this article and point out some times that it would be good to keep silent. It is good to be silent when you don’t really have anything to say. Sometimes we talk just to hear ourselves talk, or we want to throw in our two cents worth to add to the conversation. We need to learn that if we don’t have anything to say that will be helpful to the conversation it would be better if we just kept our mouths shut. As I type this, I am saying to myself "physician heal thyself.” A good lesson to learn is that if we do not talk out of turn, we will never have any reason to regret what we say. It’s good to be silent when we don’t have anything constructive to say. What I mean by this is if what we have to say does not offer encouragement to the person with whom we are talking, it is better just to be quiet. Sometimes discouraging words will come up in our mouths before we get our minds in gear. One of my daily prayers is that I will be an encouragement to somebody on that day. Most often that encouragement, or discouragement, will come from what we say. I do not mean to imply here that we always have to say positive things to encourage people, but I think that the positive things that we say to other people should be predominant. Some of the best advice that I have gotten from people has been about something negative, but the people who said the negative things said it in a way that was constructive. We will never grow if all we ever hear are things that appeal to our egos. I think that this is what Paul meant in Colossians 4:6: “Let your speech be always with grace, seasoned with salt, that you may know how you ought to answer every man.” A good rule of thumb is that if what you have to say, negative or positive, will really help a person, say it, if not seal your lips. It’s good to be silent when we have not heard the whole story. Proverbs 18:13 reminds us: “He that answers a matter before he hears it, it is folly and shame to him.” This is how gossip gets started. It is really best to not speak about anything before we know what the real story is. One story that I have shared over the years about this is about Senator Inouye of Hawaii. When he was sworn in as senator, the editor of a newspaper made a big deal out of the fact that Senator Inouye took his oath of office with his left hand raised instead of his right hand. Imagine how he felt when he was told that Senator Inouye could not raise his right hand because he lost his right arm in the Second World War. A good thing to do when we hear something about somebody is to just not say anything to anybody about it. I certainly have not written this to be judgmental toward people, for I have to watch my words just like everybody else. I know that we would all be better off in our families, communities and churches if we would all follow this sound biblical advice. Bro. Joe
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AuthorDr. Joe Beauchamp is the author of this blog and website. Categories
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