What About Soft Cussing?
00:00:00.000 | [Music]
00:00:05.000 | A podcast listener named Sam writes in to ask this, "Pastor John, I enjoyed your
00:00:09.400 | episode on cussing, which was episode 97, a very popular episode. It was an
00:00:13.940 | excellent biblical presentation. My question is how some Christians, even
00:00:18.440 | preachers, use what appear to be offensive words. My heart is broken when
00:00:22.320 | I hear words from the pulpit such as, and I'll read them, "shoot, crud, dang, crap,
00:00:28.560 | friggin, and others." How should we as Christians react to these words when we
00:00:34.280 | hear them in the pulpit?" Yeah, and it's a lot of worse, it's a lot worse than that.
00:00:40.080 | And I just came from a situation where I heard plenty of it in a Christian
00:00:45.120 | context for reasons I'll try to address in a minute. But let's begin by
00:00:51.560 | preempting a legitimate pushback, because I'm gonna, I'm gonna side with Sam. I
00:00:57.720 | don't like this tendency. I think it's not good, not biblical, and has
00:01:02.840 | sinful roots. But there is a legitimate pushback, and let me address it. Paul used
00:01:09.120 | scatological or garbage language, for example, I'm thinking of dung and refuse,
00:01:15.600 | to refer to his former legalistic life in Philippians 3.18. I count everything as
00:01:20.800 | refuse or as garbage or as dung. And I've heard some people try to justify using
00:01:27.240 | the S-word here. I doubt that very much. We don't have any, we don't have any
00:01:31.840 | knowledge that would help us know the nature between the S-word, crap, dung,
00:01:39.520 | refuse. I mean, they get increasingly grotesque, right? And so there's no
00:01:44.800 | way exegetically to say for sure which of those Paul nailed, and therefore to
00:01:52.320 | try to argue with confidence that you could be as offensive as
00:01:55.600 | possible here, because Paul was, I doubt it very much. He did call his adversaries
00:02:02.160 | who advocated that dung-like way of life, dogs, and there were probably reasons for
00:02:08.120 | that. That was chapter 3, verse 2 of Philippians. And in Galatians 5.21, he
00:02:12.040 | says, "I wish those who unsettle you would emasculate themselves, castrate
00:02:15.980 | themselves." And Jesus, of course, called the destructive teachers broods of
00:02:20.840 | vipers, and there are others. So there is a whole group of words and sentences in
00:02:29.080 | the New Testament where Christ and the Apostles were very severe with
00:02:34.520 | adversaries of the Christian faith, or people who purported to teach the
00:02:39.200 | Christian faith and who were false teachers. So I will not say there's an
00:02:44.680 | absolute prohibition of using severe, cutting, aggravating, edgy language in
00:02:52.240 | some situations of conflict where huge and deadly things are at stake, and
00:02:59.920 | some Christians are just way too soft in their reaction to these, and we should
00:03:06.440 | rebuke them as well. But there is a big difference between the kind of
00:03:12.280 | seriousness that Jesus and Paul had when they spoke these things. There was
00:03:18.440 | nothing cavalier, there was nothing jokey, there was nothing trendy, there was no
00:03:23.560 | effort to be cool. I mean, the spirit in which the words were used by Jesus and
00:03:28.520 | Paul were radically different than what I think most pastors are trying to
00:03:35.180 | conjure up when they use them. Now, with that caution or preemptive strike
00:03:40.720 | against a criticism, let me go ahead and share Sam's concern about pastors and
00:03:46.640 | church leaders who seem to go out of their way to flaunt coarse, rude, dirty,
00:03:50.360 | questionable language. Let's just take one passage of the several we could go
00:03:57.280 | to and draw out two or three lessons from it, and I'm thinking of Ephesians 5, 3, 4,
00:04:03.000 | and 5, and the thing we should watch for in these three verses is how verse 5
00:04:10.360 | is the ground of verse 3, manifestly, you'll see it, and then to ask, "Why is
00:04:17.320 | verse 4 inserted in there?" Because it just seems a break in the flow. So
00:04:24.440 | here goes. "Sexual immorality," this is verse 3, chapter 5, Ephesians, "Sexual
00:04:29.800 | immorality and all impurity and all covetousness must not even be named
00:04:36.200 | among you as is proper among saints or holy ones." Now that's the end of verse
00:04:43.360 | 3. Now let me jump to verse 5. "For you may be sure of this, that everyone who is,"
00:04:48.400 | and then he names those three again, "sexually immoral, impure, and who is
00:04:53.100 | covetous," that is an idolater, "has no inheritance in the kingdom of God." So
00:04:57.640 | verse 5 is manifestly a repetition of the three sins of verse 3, and then given
00:05:04.440 | as a reason for why we should avoid them, namely, you won't enter the kingdom of
00:05:07.600 | God if you follow them. Between those two verses is this, "Let there be no
00:05:14.120 | filthiness or foolish talk nor crude joking which are out of place, but
00:05:21.320 | instead let there be thanksgiving." Now I paused long over this and thought, "Okay,
00:05:29.640 | this is interesting. I see the argument and the flow of thought perfectly from
00:05:34.440 | 3 to 5, and I wonder why inserted and then not picked up again in verse 5, Paul
00:05:42.600 | put in verse 4, "Let there be no filthiness or foolish talk or crude
00:05:49.280 | joking which are out of place, but instead let there be thanksgiving." And I
00:05:53.880 | would suggest that Paul is warning against not just the heart disposition,
00:06:00.920 | like covetousness, or outward behavior, like sexual immorality, but also the
00:06:09.000 | verbal expression of these as well. In other words, the mouth is brought into
00:06:15.520 | consideration between verses 3 and 5 so that it would be clear it's not just
00:06:20.760 | what you do with your groin or your heart, but with your tongue, your mouth, as
00:06:26.160 | well. If it's wrong to do sexual things wrong, he's saying, I think it's wrong to
00:06:33.640 | be cavalier and coarse in verbalizing those very things. There's a lot of
00:06:39.440 | things people are willing to take on their mouths that they would not take in
00:06:44.080 | their hands, and they wouldn't take into their lives. So recently I heard a
00:06:51.160 | young leader say to hundreds of Christians in a
00:06:59.120 | joking way about someone who had criticized him the day before, "Screw you!"
00:07:04.360 | And he laughed! I mean, everybody laughed. Almost everybody. I didn't. And then
00:07:11.840 | realizing he'd gotten a good laugh, he did it again with another person. He said
00:07:17.120 | the same thing again and got another slightly less laugh. Now what's going on
00:07:24.960 | here? I think Paul would say that if you don't really believe someone should be
00:07:31.680 | screwed, you shouldn't say that. Why do you let your mouth do what you would not
00:07:39.640 | allow at another physical level? What's the deal here? I think that's the point
00:07:45.600 | of putting verse 4 between verses 3 and verse 5. And I would apply the same
00:07:50.920 | thing to bathroom language that you would never take in your hand, or hell,
00:07:56.720 | or damn, which you would never actually apply to anybody. You're taking them in a
00:08:05.480 | cavalier way; you're not taking seriously the very realities that you are speaking
00:08:11.840 | of. So the principle seems to be a pure heart and pure hands should be
00:08:19.920 | accompanied by a pure tongue. I think that's the point of verse 4. And here's
00:08:26.400 | the second thing to notice in that passage—the word "proper" and the word
00:08:31.520 | "out of place." Some things are not proper; some things are out of place. Now isn't
00:08:36.040 | it interesting that Paul uses the category not just of right and wrong,
00:08:39.760 | good and bad, but of proper and improper, and out of place and in place. And that
00:08:45.880 | relates to the way he talks about love in 1 Corinthians 13 5, where he says
00:08:51.480 | love is not—in ESV it says "rude." In the old King James it said, "Love does not
00:08:57.360 | behave itself unseemly." Well, what that means is love does not consider the long
00:09:05.960 | accepted present cultural mores and practices and then arrogantly offend
00:09:12.520 | against them. Love doesn't do that. Why doesn't love do that? Well, love is not
00:09:19.400 | stiff-necked and assertive. There's so much sense of "I can do what I want to do,
00:09:24.680 | I can say what I want to say," and there's behind it a kind of "me"
00:09:29.000 | assertion that "I can do this," and there's a pride underneath a lot of this
00:09:34.120 | language. Sometimes there's a weakness that needs to be propped up by a little
00:09:39.720 | braggadocio or a little edginess. Or, most commonly, I think, there's a desire to be
00:09:46.880 | thought-worldly wise, which contradicts Paul's statement in 1 Corinthians 14,
00:09:52.840 | "Be babes in evil and in thinking be mature." What does it mean to be a "babe in
00:09:58.160 | evil"? It means don't have a lot of experience with that, don't get good at
00:10:01.840 | that, don't know much about that, and a lot of young guys, they think exactly
00:10:06.240 | the opposite. They think, "I don't want to be a baby in evil. Good grief. I need to
00:10:10.520 | watch the movies, I need to listen to the shows, I need to use the
00:10:14.480 | language so I don't look like I'm a baby in evil." It's just the opposite of Paul's.
00:10:20.120 | They want to look savvy and experienced in evil. "Oh, I don't do it, I just say
00:10:25.920 | it." Because they're so afraid of what—I forget who the original use of it
00:10:33.720 | was—but they're so afraid of cool-shaming, being shamed for not being cool. You're
00:10:38.480 | gonna look too prudish, you're gonna look like goody-two-shoes, you're gonna look
00:10:43.720 | like you're afraid. So, "Oh God, please don't let me be labeled as puritanical
00:10:49.960 | anything but puritanical, anything but legalistic, oh God." And so there's a lot
00:10:54.800 | of pride behind this usage. So, for these two reasons, I would
00:11:02.520 | discourage pastors from common, ordinary, habitual use of questionable language.
00:11:08.760 | Number one, purity of mouth should be in step with the purity of the hands and
00:11:15.400 | the purity of the heart, and number two, love does not behave itself unseemly. It
00:11:21.200 | seeks to be proper and in place rather than out of place. It seeks to honor
00:11:26.720 | commonly accepted standards because it is humble and not self-asserting. Thank
00:11:33.880 | you, Pastor John. This episode is built off of episode number 97 on cussing, and
00:11:38.400 | it's one of almost 700 episodes we now have in our archive. To find that archive
00:11:43.160 | or to ask Pastor John a question of your own, or for really anything you need to
00:11:47.160 | know about this podcast, go to DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn.
00:11:52.760 | Well, how should we address friends who undergo a sex change and want to be
00:11:57.400 | called by a name that does not reflect their biological gender? What do we do?
00:12:01.920 | It's a question Jonathan Edwards never addressed, but John Piper will tomorrow.
00:12:06.200 | I'm your host Tony Reinke. I'll see you then.
00:12:10.320 | [BLANK_AUDIO]