S:

Ephesians 4:29-32
29 Watch the way you talk. Let nothing foul or dirty come out of your mouth. Say only what helps, each word a gift.
30 Don’t grieve God. Don’t break his heart. His Holy Spirit, moving and breathing in you, is the most intimate part of your life, making you fit for himself. Don’t take such a gift for granted.
31 Make a clean break with all cutting, backbiting, profane talk. 32 Be gentle with one another, sensitive. Forgive one another as quickly and thoroughly as God in Christ forgave you.
(Message)

O:

Paul is continuing on in this passage we have been looking at, speaking about how we communicate, how the words we use not only communicate our message, but they also communicate our heart and our intent, and how we really think and feel about other people. While we may have accepted the gift that God has given each of us in the form of salvation, it is how we are using His gift by constantly asking Him to help us change who we are as individuals into the type of person He wants us to become. Part of this gift is the presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives, and to not use this gift for the purpose for which He intended is to make Him sad, and basically like throwing a Christmas gift in the garbage after you have opened it and looked at it.

A:

I sometimes wonder why God designed the human body with our brains so close to our tongues…if there was a little more distance between the two, it might save us from so much personal damage if it took a little more time for the thought to be turned into actual speech. One of those questions while we are having coffee in heaven.

When we get married, we are entering into a new relationship, one that we have never been asked to develop before. We have had friends, ever since we were small and all the way through early adulthood, depending on when we get married. However, we have never expected to develop the kind of relationship with those friends that we are being expected to develop with our spouse, and that is going to require a different way of communicating. The intimacy and reverence which God expects us to have, and wants us to develop with our spouse is brand new territory, and that is going to require not only a new way of thinking, but even moreso, a new way of talking. We can’t simply say the first thing that comes to mind like we used to do with our friends with whom we were never charged to develop an intimate and growing relationship. God requires and your spouse deserves a better form of communication from you than you have previously been accustomed to.

P:

Lord, please help me to respond in a way that will build my spouse up, and increase the depth of our communication as husband and wife. Amen.