Closing The Loopholes, part 2

"Closing The Loopholes" (part 2)
Ephesians 4:25-32


Last week, the message was about the first part of these verses.  I talked about how Paul is instructing us to close up the loopholes through which evil tries to get in and disrupt our faith in Christ.

If we allow evil through these loopholes, says Paul, we are giving it a destructive foothold, from which can be launched an all out campaign to bring our faith in Christ down.  Paul gives us a list of six loopholes that need to be closed in a believers life.  The first three, that I spoke about last week, are lying, anger, and greed.  This morning I want to finish up with comments about the final three in Paul’s list:  foul and dirty talk, grieving God, and being unforgiving.


Popular artist, Norman Rockwell, once explained why he painted the kinds of upbeat scenes that he did.  “When I grew up,” he said, “I found the world wasn’t always the pleasant place I had thought it would be.  So I unconsciously decided that if it wasn’t an ideal world, it should be.  And so I painted it that way.”

This is the way to look at the loopholes here in Ephesians 4.  Paul is saying we aren’t perfect people.  The world isn’t a perfect place.  But God wants to paint us how we should be.  If we allow God to paint us in His own brush strokes, we (and hopefully the world around us) will end up looking more according to God’s ideal.  That’s Paul’s purpose in bringing his list to our attention.

So let’s turn to the last three of these loopholes that need closing.  The fourth loophole Paul speaks to has to do with the way we talk to each other.  He wrote:
Watch the way you talk.  Let nothing foul or dirty come out of your mouth.  Say only what helps, each word a gift...Make a clean break with all cutting, backbiting, profane talk.

We need to know what Paul is describing in his own Greek language.  He is actually using a lot of building, construction type terms that don’t translate well.

When he writes about foul and dirty talk, the words he is using literally describe something that has gone bad because it is rotten.  It’s a kind of rottenness, like deteriorated wood in an old house.  It’s gone bad with dry rot or termites, or it has become so weak as to be dangerous.

I love to go rummaging through old, abandoned, broken down farm houses.  These decaying structures are hidden behind aging shelter belts of trees, themselves old and weary looking.  The houses are sad visages with caved in wooden floors and collapsed wooden stairs.  Lath and plaster walls are crumbled away, looking like open and raw sores.  Layers and layers of once distinctive wall paper peels away like thin skin.  Rafters, like graying compound-fractured bones, hang down from above.  Sometimes I try to find a safe place to just sit and imagine the stories of the people who had lived in each of these crumbling homes.

There is no way to fix these kinds of houses.  They are absolutely unreclaimable.  You wont find any of these kinds of home on one of those "Flip This House" kinds of shows.  They are structures that have become totally useless, except for maybe being bulldozed, or just allowed to finally fall down.

That’s what Paul is describing as foul and dirty talk.  It’s using words that turn lives that were once proud structures of human living into sad ruins.  They are words that infect a person’s bones with dry rot.  They are words that scratch open sores on the walls of people’s spirits.  They are termite words that infest and eat away the inner strength of a person’s soul.  And there’s usually no way to fix the harm that’s been done.

“You’re an idiot.”
“You make me sick.”
“You’re ugly.”
“I’m through with you; how could anyone love you?”
“You’ll never get it, will you.”
“How could you be so stupid.”
“You’re a nobody, and you’ll always be a nobody.”
“I wish you were never born.”
“When are you ever going to amount to anything?”
“I hate you.”
“You’re a total waste of skin.”
“Can’t you ever do anything right?”
“You’re such a retard.”
“I give up; you’re hopeless.”

I read another one of those famous conversations between Sir Winston Churchill and Lady Astor, similar to the one I mentioned in the sermon last week.  At this occasion, Lady Astor marched up to Winston Churchill at a party and snapped, “Sir, you are drunk!”
To which Churchill retorted, “And Madam, you are ugly; but tomorrow morning I shall be sober.”

Life decaying words are spoken with voices that become so persistently loud in our heads, it becomes easy to believe them.  We end up living our lives under the spell of their poison.  Once that kind of destructive talk is out of our mouths, it’s impossible to stuff them back in and pretend we didn’t just say them.  What’s worse, foul and dirty talk may be permanently implanted in the listeners minds.  The people we speak them to will forever after hear those exact words over and over and over again, creating the kind of slow destruction and self-rejection Paul is describing.

One of psychiatrist, Scott Peck’s, books is titled, People Of The Lie.  One of his main points is that it’s not often the people who do some awful actions who are evil.  Instead, it’s the evil others in a person’s life who, with degenerate messages, have turned the person, who has to receive those words, into awful and terribly disturbed human beings.

In one story, Peck told about a patient who was constantly wrestling with psychological demons.  Peeling back the layers of the man’s pathology, Peck found out part of the beginnings of this patients disturbed life.

When the man was a boy, his father had committed suicide.  The boy was the one who found his father’s blood spattered body--the father had shot himself in the head with a handgun.

The next Christmas, the boy unwrapped one of the gifts from his mother.  There in the box was the handgun his father had used to kill himself.  “I just felt like you would be the one who could use it,” was the mother’s ghastly comment, as the boy stared at the unwrapped gift.  The boy didn’t know if by what his mother said, she meant he would also be just like his father; or, that she was telling him he should also commit suicide.  From there after, the boy was sent into a tail spin of psychological disintegration.

That’s why Paul says we should “say only what helps.”  Other Bibles translate this phrase with the word, “edifying.”  This also is a construction word.  It comes from the Greek word that means house, home, or family.  Except the form of the word used here means the act of building a house, building a home, building a family.  It can also mean bringing a building to completion.

Thus, the kind of talk that Paul says we as Christians should speak is only that which builds, as if you were building a home, building a family, bringing a person to a healthy and whole completeness.  We should be speaking to people with words that will help them move toward maturity and the completion that God intends.

Carol Channing, after having performed in almost 1800 productions of the Broadway musical, “Hello, Dolly,” was asked how she kept her performances fresh.  “If I start getting down,” she said, “I play the role to my father...I know he’s really not out in the audience.  He died 20 years ago.  It’s just the thought of his presence, of someone who knows and loves and encourages me, and who always had nothing but the best words for me.”

The challenge is that, with our words, we can help God close up this loophole in both ourselves and others.  Or, the scary flip side of this is that we can assist evil in opening up this loophole wider in ourselves or others, simply by the way we choose to talk.


The fifth loophole Paul says needs closing is the one that would cause grief to God.  The kind of grief Paul is describing is that which comes from pain, sorrow, or mental anguish.  It’s hard to think that God can experience these kinds of sad emotions.  But that’s the kind of pain described in Genesis, where it says:
God saw that human evil was out of control.  People thought evil, imagined evil--evil, evil, evil, from morning to night.  God was sorry that he had made the human race in the first place; it broke his heart.  God said, “I’ll get rid of my ruined creation, make a clean sweep:  people, animals, snakes and bugs, birds--the works.  I’m sorry I made them.”

As you can tell, it’s a sad kind of grief of God.  It should make us feel really small that God ever felt that way because of us.  It’s the kind of grief that God feels when human beings have thrown insult on top of insult at God, growing God’s pain into a total frustration--frustration that makes God feel like giving up on us.

Former heavyweight boxing champion, Joe Louis, wrote in his autobiography that Rocky Marciano thrashed him soundly in 1951.  In fact, when a doctor from the state athletic commission said, “Joe, you can’t fight for at least 3 months,” Joe replied, “Do you mind if I don’t fight no more at all?”

God also seems to get tired of being beaten up by the humans he created:  Beaten up by the uppercut of indifference; being sucker punched by two-faced hypocrisy; or, being round-housed by atrocities that human’s do to each other and then use God in support of their actions.  It’s a pained sadness that makes God not want to fight for us humans “no more at all.”

If the messages of foul and dirty talk have to do with people-to-people rejection, so I think this sadness of God has also to do with rejection: our rejection of God.

Here’s another way of understanding this pain of God.  First, recall Jesus’ baptism.  What did the voice of God say when Jesus came up out of the water?  “You are my Son, chosen and marked by my love, pride of my life” (Mark 1:11).  And then, in the gospel of John, Jesus tells the disciples that whatever he saw the Father God do towards him, he does towards us.  Every person Jesus talked to, every person Jesus touched, Jesus was trying to tell them the same thing God told him:  “You are my chosen, marked by my love, pride of my life.”

How many times, in how many ways did he say that?  “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son...”  And how often was that love, that wooing of people, of we the beloved, spurned?  Jesus looked across at Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives and said:
People, people...how often I’ve longed to gather your children, gather your children like a hen, her brood safe under her wings--but you refused and turned away!  (Luke 13:34)
Those are some of the saddest words in the entire New Testament.

This rejection is a two-edged sword, cutting at God’s heart.  One edge of the sword is the sad self-evaluation that we deserve no place in God's family.  That’s the self-rejection.  It’s the feeling that we are not worthwhile, or worthless in God’s eyes.  This feeling could come from all the messages I talked about in my point earlier about rotten talk.  It certainly doesn’t come from God.

The other edge of this cutting blade is that arrogance or self-rejection contradicts the wooing Voice that describes us as marked by God’s love and the pride of his life.  Being marked by God’s love expresses the core truth about who we are in God’s eyes.  But in so many ways we try to rebuff God, saying, “No we aren’t; we can’t be such an object of love or source of pride.”

What drives the knife home in God’s heart is that even though we refuse to claim the core truth that we are loved by God, claiming that we are somehow, and for some reason unlovable, what do we do?  We keep running around looking for someone or something that will convince us we are loved.  We go running helter-skelter, always anxious, always restless, always lustful, never fully satisfied, looking for a voice that will tell us we are the pride of their life.  God, through Jesus Christ, all along has been saying in so many ways, “You are loved, you are loved, you are loved.”  But we reply, “Nah, that can’t be true; it’s gotta be somewhere else from someone else.”  At that point, God is grieved.

The loophole and foothold evil is trying to create is the temptation to get us stuck in self-rejection or arrogance so that you never hear the Voice that tells you, you are loved and you are the pride of Jesus’ life.  Evil is trying to keep you from fully recognizing  that the core truth of your life is you are Christ’s pride, joy and love.  It’s time to close this loophole, and celebrate that fact and put an end to the grief and sadness of God.


The sixth and final loophole is being unforgiving.  You have all heard numerous sermons on forgiveness, and most of you have read Jesus’ teachings and Paul’s letters describing the height and depth and width and breadth of forgiveness.

In this final loophole that needs our closing, Paul says, “Be gentle with one another, sensitive.  Forgive one another as quickly and thoroughly as God in Christ forgave you.”  What more can I say than that?  Paul’s statement tells us that forgiveness comes from gentleness and sensitivity.  Paul is telling us that forgiveness is not something you sit around and study, but you get up and do it.  We are being told to think personally not only about all for which we have been forgiven, but also HOW we have been forgiven by God through Christ:  quickly and completely.  Once we’re done thinking about that, we are to turn and forgive others exactly in the same measure, and in the same way.  Fairly simple and straightforward.

But I know there is a person in your life you have the most trouble forgiving.  This person may be an obstinate, pigheaded ogre.  This person may be demanding, and can be very insensitive to you.  This person may have said, or keeps saying things that hurt you deeply.  In fact, you may keep hearing this person’s voice and their demeaning messages going round and round in your head.

And talk about unforgiving; this person may be totally unforgiving of you.  They are, in fact, your harshest critic, and they may be on your case all the time without respite.  They won’t let you forget your blunders from the past, and keep throwing them up in your face.  You wish this person would just go away, but whenever you try to put some distance between yourself and them, there they are.  This person may make you feel angry and depressed; and they make you feel about an inch tall.  In your darkest times, you may even wish this person would just die.  How can you forgive a person like that?

You know who that person is?  Besides hurtful others, this person I’m describing is the same  for everyone.  It is your self.  I’ll bet you all a dollar that the person you may have the hardest time forgiving is yourself.  Let’s take another look at Paul’s words, but let’s tweak them a bit:  “Be gentle with yourself, sensitive.  Forgive yourself as quickly and thoroughly as God in Christ forgave everyone else.”

To forgive others, to forgive ourselves means to participate in the amazing grace of God’s love.  If we can’t forgive ourselves, it may mean we haven’t fully understood God’s embrace of us.  If you leave this loophole open, evil will use it to slowly and totally immobilize your gifts, your ministry, and your purpose.  All that will be lost in the goo of self-criticism, self-hatred, and self-punishment.  You will never become the person God created you to be unless this loophole is closed for good and for God.


Little loopholes.  Little gaps in our spirits.  Small fissures in our faith.  They either let evil in, or maybe we use them to get out of what we know is the right thing, by God.  Either way, the result is giving evil a sure and certain foothold from which to operate.  With any loophole, evil will exert all the leverage it can against our spiritual life and Christian commitment.  Let’s take Paul’s words to heart and help each other, by God, close them up.