Just turn on the news or take a stroll through your social media feed and you’ll find a whole lot of hate speech. Hate speech is abusive or threating speech or writings that express prejudice towards a particular group of people. The irony is that you’ll see many people preaching against one group, who they would describe as racist and hateful. However, their speech or writings are full of hate towards the group they are condemning, because they believe that their virtuousness justifies what they say or write.

Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen.

– Ephesians 4:29 NIRV

We know the power of spoken words, but written words are just as powerful. In yesterday’s post, we looked at an experiment conducted by Japanese scientist Masaru Emoto on the power of the spoken word. In another experiment Emoto tested the power of the written word. When frozen, water that is free from all impurities will form ice crystals and when examined under a microscope will look like beautiful snowflakes.  But water that is polluted when it freezes will not form these snowflake like ice crystals. Emoto poured water into various vials and labeled some with negative phrases like, “fear” and “I hate you” and others with positive phrases like, “peace” and “I love you”. Then he froze them and after just 24 hours the water in the vials that had negative phrases on them no longer crystalized under the microscope, what was seen were grey clumps. But, the water in the vials labeled with positive words produced perfectly hexagonal crystals.

The tongue has the power of life and death … Proverbs 18:21 NIV

Hateful words justified or not will never produce any good. Therefore, make your words count, use them only to build up and benefit others. And, make no mistake the words you listen to and the words you read will produce life or death. So, go on a negative word diet, don’t speak any negative or hateful words and don’t listen to them and just as important don’t write them and don’t read them. Only speak, listen to, write and read words that edify.