When Paul wrote to the church at Ephesus, he instructed Christians to “let no unwholesome word proceed from your mouth, but only such a word as is good for edification…” (Ep. 4:29).

The challenge of any generation is living in a culture that gives little thought to the impact of words. The old acronym GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) identifies far more about the heart than we might want to acknowledge.

For developing a strong spiritual health, how can we fulfill this passage? Numerous answers could be suggested, but consider one simple approach: One particular family set up a coin jar where each time they yelled, it cost money. Imagine the impact if inappropriate language, words spoken in anger/frustration, or spoken in haste took money out of our wallet that we could not get back. Maybe we would learn to “think before we speak.”

This is the true root of the problem. We too often allow our mouth to run ahead of our brain, when simply taking a moment to think first, could resolve a lot of issues that hinder us from following Paul’s instruction.