A Personal Speech Ordinance

Psalm 63 says:
Because Your lovingkindness is better than life, My lips shall praise You. 4 Thus I will bless You while I live; I will lift up my hands in Your name. 5 My soul shall be satisfied as with marrow and fatness, And my mouth shall praise You with joyful lips.

When we have a heart full of adoration and appreciation for God and set our lips to bring praise and honor to Him, we not only please the heart of our Father, but it corrects the words that we speak, and we can participate in creating an atmosphere of grace, of civility, and of building people up instead of spreading an attitude of negativity.

Ephesians 4 sets the standard for our speech and other areas of our behavior:
29 Let no corrupt word proceed out of your mouth, but what is good for necessary edification, that it may impart grace to the hearers. 30 And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. 31 Let all bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor, and evil speaking be put away from you, with all malice. 32 And be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, just as God in Christ forgave you.

In Middleborough, Massachusetts, one of the members of the Downtown Business Council thought there was too much public profanity, and that council member, 63-year-old Mimi Duphily decided to do something about it.

Ms. Duphily is quoted as saying: "Kids were standing on the sidewalks, well, adults too, really, and yelling at someone like 100 feet down the block, using incredible profanity...It was gradually getting worse and worse."

Monday night, residents voted overwhelmingly - 183-50 - to pass an ordinance that imposes a $20 fine for swearing in public.   The town had tried to deal with the issue before, but it was problematic:
Duphily said, "We used to have a law against swearing but it wasn't enforced because that meant it was criminal...But now, if you pay the ticket, then it's done and over with."

She says the ordinance targets aggressive behavior or verbal assault of someone who's a distance away from you. She and the Downtown Business Coalition began to complain about the use of profanity in Middleborough because it was affecting businesses in the area.

This can serve to remind us that the words of our mouths can have an effect on other people, and if we speak in public in an uncivil or inappropriate manner, it can affect many other people, as apparently was the case in Middleborough.    And, I believe that we have a coarsening in our culture, with words that are spoken in conversations, in public places, or heard in the media.

We have to watch ourselves as believers that we are speaking words that bring honor to God - the Bible prescribes that we speak words that build up, not tear down, that we are not to take part in what the Scriptures call "coarse jesting", and that we allow the Holy Spirit to guard our tongues.   And, taking to heart what Jesus said about our words flowing from what's in our hearts, we have to be very careful to make sure that our hearts are right before Him.    We can pass a personal ordinance to speak in a manner that pleases Him.