Please turn your Bibles to Luke chapter 6 as we continue our practice on simplicity.

Have you ever said something only to later regret it? Because you made a fool of yourself

or you made a fool of somebody else and hurt a relationship even beyond repair? Or have

you ever not said something only to later regret it? You kick yourself. I think, what

was I thinking? Why didn't I say something? And now it's too late. Now we don't have the

digital apparatus to pull you in real time. But I imagine you would all say, yes, you are

not alone. Dr. Francis Collins, who for many years was the head of the Human Genome Project

and is considered by many to be one of the great scientific minds of our era and also as

a follower of Jesus. In his book The Language of God, he writes about how human beings at the

level of genetic code are in essence a living language that what separates us from the

animals is our capacity for speech. Run that idea through the grid of what theologians call

original sin. And it comes as no surprise at all that our highest highs come from language.

Think of poetry, which many consider to be the ultimate expression of the human soul or literature

or religion and philosophy or think of scripture itself that we're about to read, where the mind of

God and the mind of humanity come together on the page. And at the same time, our lowest

lows also come from language. The philosopher Dallas Willard said the mouth is the main thoroughfare

of evil in human life. Read the news. I mean, most of it, read it tomorrow morning. Most of it is

about the havoc left behind by what somebody said in particular in our current political climate.

Think about kind of your own autobiography and broken relationships in your own life,

a wound that you have or a wound that you gave that is likely the byproduct of a careless word.

And while we often follow up a careless word by saying something like, oh, I didn't mean it,

if we are honest with ourselves, a lot of the time we did meet it. And that's the problem.

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