A podcast listener named Sam writes in to ask this, "Pastor John, I enjoyed your episode on cussing, which was episode 97, a very popular episode. It was an excellent biblical presentation. My question is how some Christians, even preachers, use what appear to be offensive words. My heart is broken when I hear words from the pulpit such as, and I'll read them, "shoot, crud, dang, crap, friggin, and others." How should we as Christians react to these words when we hear them in the pulpit?" Yeah, and it's a lot of worse, it's a lot worse than that.

And I just came from a situation where I heard plenty of it in a Christian context for reasons I'll try to address in a minute. But let's begin by preempting a legitimate pushback, because I'm gonna, I'm gonna side with Sam. I don't like this tendency. I think it's not good, not biblical, and has sinful roots.

But there is a legitimate pushback, and let me address it. Paul used scatological or garbage language, for example, I'm thinking of dung and refuse, to refer to his former legalistic life in Philippians 3.18. I count everything as refuse or as garbage or as dung. And I've heard some people try to justify using the S-word here.

I doubt that very much. We don't have any, we don't have any knowledge that would help us know the nature between the S-word, crap, dung, refuse. I mean, they get increasingly grotesque, right? And so there's no way exegetically to say for sure which of those Paul nailed, and therefore to try to argue with confidence that you could be as offensive as possible here, because Paul was, I doubt it very much.

He did call his adversaries who advocated that dung-like way of life, dogs, and there were probably reasons for that. That was chapter 3, verse 2 of Philippians. And in Galatians 5.21, he says, "I wish those who unsettle you would emasculate themselves, castrate themselves." And Jesus, of course, called the destructive teachers broods of vipers, and there are others.

So there is a whole group of words and sentences in the New Testament where Christ and the Apostles were very severe with adversaries of the Christian faith, or people who purported to teach the Christian faith and who were false teachers. So I will not say there's an absolute prohibition of using severe, cutting, aggravating, edgy language in some situations of conflict where huge and deadly things are at stake, and some Christians are just way too soft in their reaction to these, and we should rebuke them as well.

But there is a big difference between the kind of seriousness that Jesus and Paul had when they spoke these things. There was nothing cavalier, there was nothing jokey, there was nothing trendy, there was no effort to be cool. I mean, the spirit in which the words were used by Jesus and Paul were radically different than what I think most pastors are trying to conjure up when they use them.

Now, with that caution or preemptive strike against a criticism, let me go ahead and share Sam's concern about pastors and church leaders who seem to go out of their way to flaunt coarse, rude, dirty, questionable language. Let's just take one passage of the several we could go to and draw out two or three lessons from it, and I'm thinking of Ephesians 5, 3, 4, and 5, and the thing we should watch for in these three verses is how verse 5 is the ground of verse 3, manifestly, you'll see it, and then to ask, "Why is verse 4 inserted in there?" Because it just seems a break in the flow.

So here goes. "Sexual immorality," this is verse 3, chapter 5, Ephesians, "Sexual immorality and all impurity and all covetousness must not even be named among you as is proper among saints or holy ones." Now that's the end of verse 3. Now let me jump to verse 5. "For you may be sure of this, that everyone who is," and then he names those three again, "sexually immoral, impure, and who is covetous," that is an idolater, "has no inheritance in the kingdom of God." So verse 5 is manifestly a repetition of the three sins of verse 3, and then given as a reason for why we should avoid them, namely, you won't enter the kingdom of God if you follow them.

Between those two verses is this, "Let there be no filthiness or foolish talk nor crude joking which are out of place, but instead let there be thanksgiving." Now I paused long over this and thought, "Okay, this is interesting. I see the argument and the flow of thought perfectly from 3 to 5, and I wonder why inserted and then not picked up again in verse 5, Paul put in verse 4, "Let there be no filthiness or foolish talk or crude joking which are out of place, but instead let there be thanksgiving." And I would suggest that Paul is warning against not just the heart disposition, like covetousness, or outward behavior, like sexual immorality, but also the verbal expression of these as well.

In other words, the mouth is brought into consideration between verses 3 and 5 so that it would be clear it's not just what you do with your groin or your heart, but with your tongue, your mouth, as well. If it's wrong to do sexual things wrong, he's saying, I think it's wrong to be cavalier and coarse in verbalizing those very things.

There's a lot of things people are willing to take on their mouths that they would not take in their hands, and they wouldn't take into their lives. So recently I heard a young leader say to hundreds of Christians in a joking way about someone who had criticized him the day before, "Screw you!" And he laughed!

I mean, everybody laughed. Almost everybody. I didn't. And then realizing he'd gotten a good laugh, he did it again with another person. He said the same thing again and got another slightly less laugh. Now what's going on here? I think Paul would say that if you don't really believe someone should be screwed, you shouldn't say that.

Why do you let your mouth do what you would not allow at another physical level? What's the deal here? I think that's the point of putting verse 4 between verses 3 and verse 5. And I would apply the same thing to bathroom language that you would never take in your hand, or hell, or damn, which you would never actually apply to anybody.

You're taking them in a cavalier way; you're not taking seriously the very realities that you are speaking of. So the principle seems to be a pure heart and pure hands should be accompanied by a pure tongue. I think that's the point of verse 4. And here's the second thing to notice in that passage—the word "proper" and the word "out of place." Some things are not proper; some things are out of place.

Now isn't it interesting that Paul uses the category not just of right and wrong, good and bad, but of proper and improper, and out of place and in place. And that relates to the way he talks about love in 1 Corinthians 13 5, where he says love is not—in ESV it says "rude." In the old King James it said, "Love does not behave itself unseemly." Well, what that means is love does not consider the long accepted present cultural mores and practices and then arrogantly offend against them.

Love doesn't do that. Why doesn't love do that? Well, love is not stiff-necked and assertive. There's so much sense of "I can do what I want to do, I can say what I want to say," and there's behind it a kind of "me" assertion that "I can do this," and there's a pride underneath a lot of this language.

Sometimes there's a weakness that needs to be propped up by a little braggadocio or a little edginess. Or, most commonly, I think, there's a desire to be thought-worldly wise, which contradicts Paul's statement in 1 Corinthians 14, "Be babes in evil and in thinking be mature." What does it mean to be a "babe in evil"?

It means don't have a lot of experience with that, don't get good at that, don't know much about that, and a lot of young guys, they think exactly the opposite. They think, "I don't want to be a baby in evil. Good grief. I need to watch the movies, I need to listen to the shows, I need to use the language so I don't look like I'm a baby in evil." It's just the opposite of Paul's.

They want to look savvy and experienced in evil. "Oh, I don't do it, I just say it." Because they're so afraid of what—I forget who the original use of it was—but they're so afraid of cool-shaming, being shamed for not being cool. You're gonna look too prudish, you're gonna look like goody-two-shoes, you're gonna look like you're afraid.

So, "Oh God, please don't let me be labeled as puritanical anything but puritanical, anything but legalistic, oh God." And so there's a lot of pride behind this usage. So, for these two reasons, I would discourage pastors from common, ordinary, habitual use of questionable language. Number one, purity of mouth should be in step with the purity of the hands and the purity of the heart, and number two, love does not behave itself unseemly.

It seeks to be proper and in place rather than out of place. It seeks to honor commonly accepted standards because it is humble and not self-asserting. Thank you, Pastor John. This episode is built off of episode number 97 on cussing, and it's one of almost 700 episodes we now have in our archive.

To find that archive or to ask Pastor John a question of your own, or for really anything you need to know about this podcast, go to DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn. Well, how should we address friends who undergo a sex change and want to be called by a name that does not reflect their biological gender?

What do we do? It's a question Jonathan Edwards never addressed, but John Piper will tomorrow. I'm your host Tony Reinke. I'll see you then.