Your Words Can Heal or Destroy | The Power of Words

Why Your Words Carry More Power Than You Think—and How Jesus Can Heal What They’ve Broken

Some wounds do not come from what happened to us. They come from what someone said to us.

A sentence spoken in seconds can remain in someone’s heart for decades. The words of a parent, spouse, friend, teacher, or critic can shape how a person sees themselves long after the conversation is over.

But the same mouth that can crush a spirit can also become a source of healing and life.

In this powerful message from Proverbs 18:21 and Proverbs 15:4, you will discover why your words carry more weight than you realize, why controlling your tongue begins with confronting your heart, and how Jesus can transform the way you speak to the people closest to you.

This is not simply a message about becoming nicer or watching what you say. It is a call to examine what your words reveal about what you truly love, fear, worship, and desire.

You may be listening as someone who has wounded others with your words. You may be listening as someone still carrying words that wounded you. Most of us are both.

The good news is that Jesus came for the guilty and the wounded.

Words made the world. Words broke it. The Word came to heal it.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Your words are never neutral. They are either building someone up or breaking someone down.

The way you speak reveals what is happening inside your heart.

Anger, harshness, criticism, and contempt often come from threatened idols such as control, comfort, approval, or respect.

You cannot permanently change your words without allowing God to transform your heart.

Jesus forgives the destructive words you have spoken and heals the wounds caused by words spoken over you.

The Holy Spirit can turn the mouth you once used as a weapon into a source of grace, truth, encouragement, and life.

Before this week ends, choose one person and speak one sincere sentence of life over them.

The Word was broken so your words could heal.

SCRIPTURE

Proverbs 18:21
Proverbs 15:4
John 1:1
Isaiah 53:5
Ezekiel 36:26

Closing Application

• Your words are shaping the people around you, especially those closest to you.

  This week, choose one person and speak one true sentence of life over them. Tell your child you are proud of them. Tell your spouse what you value in them. Apologize to someone you have wounded. Encourage the person you usually criticize.

  Do not leave this as something you only agree with. Put it into practice.

  Before you speak, ask yourself: Will these words build or break? Will they bring life or death?

  You cannot change your tongue by willpower alone, but Jesus can change your heart. Bring your guilt, anger, fear, and wounds to him, and ask the Holy Spirit to turn your words into instruments of grace.

  The Word was broken so your words could heal.

  Go and speak life.

  Transcript: Pastor Rajiv Khatri

POWER OF WORDS

Proverbs 18:21, 15:4 | Ancient Wisdom, Modern Problems | June 28, 2026

MOVEMENT 1 — The Stakes

Every one of us learned this on the playground. You remember the words. "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me." And if somebody really got under your skin, you pulled out the big one. "I'm rubber, you're glue. Whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you."

We said it like a magic spell. We said it because we needed it to be true.

It was a lie.

Sticks and stones do break bones. And then the bones heal. Six weeks, eight weeks, the cast comes off, and you are fine. But the words somebody spoke over you when you were a kid? Those did not heal in six weeks. Some of you are carrying words from thirty years ago. Forty years ago. The name you got called. The thing your dad said the day he left. The teacher who told you that you would never amount to anything. Those words did not bounce off. They stuck. They stuck to you.

The rhyme had it backwards. Words can do what sticks and stones cannot. They reach a place inside you that no doctor can touch.

[ACHE: Delivery: quiet, honest. Name it as felt, not as a topic.]

And here is the part none of us gets to dodge. We have all been on both sides of that. Somebody broke you with words. And you have broken somebody with words.

[Read Proverbs 18:21]

Proverbs 18:21 tells us, "The tongue has the power of life and death, and those who love it will eat its fruit."

Life and death. The Bible puts your mouth in the same sentence as life and death.

Now in the Hebrew, the language this was first written in, it says something even stronger. It says life and death are "in the hand of the tongue." In the hand. Like your tongue is holding something. Like it picked up a tool.

Take a hammer. You can build a whole house with it. You can also swing it and bust a hole in the wall. Same hammer. It just depends on how you use it.

That is your mouth. Every time you open it, you are holding a hammer. And you are swinging it one of two ways. You are building somebody up, or you are breaking somebody down.

And here is what makes the tongue so dangerous. You cannot take it back.

You ever try to put toothpaste back in the tube? You squeezed out too much and you try to put some of it back in. You can push, you can scrape, you can work at it for an hour. It is not going back in. It is out.

That is your words. You can say sorry, and you should. You can ask forgiveness, and you must. But you cannot un-say the thing. Once it is out, it is in the room. It is in their memory. The toothpaste is out of the tube.

[Delivery: tender, slower.]

I have sat with people over the years in ministry. Grown men. Grown women. Fifty years old. And they start telling me about something their mother said to them when they were eight. And they are not telling it like an old story. They are crying like it happened this morning.

That is what words do. The wound does not close on its own. It just keeps bleeding, quietly, for forty years.

[APPLICATION 1 — direct, personal.]

And listen, this sermon isn’t a lesson on being polite. God speaks, and the whole world came into being. And he made you in his image, which means your words carry weight in his world too. Real weight.

Right now, today, your mouth is holding life and death. The thing you said to your kid this morning landed somewhere. That text message you fired off is doing something in the person who read it.

You have never once spoken a word that just sat there and did nothing.

[Delivery: slow down. Let the question hang. Do not answer it.]

So let me ask you. Think about the people closest to you. Your kids. Your spouse. Your friends. The people you live with. If you added it all up, every word from this past week, which way has your hammer been mostly swinging? Building or breaking?

For many of us, the answer scares us. You keep breaking the ones you love most with your words. You keep promising yourself you'll stop, but you can't. You think, 'Why can't I get my own mouth under control?'

There is an answer, and we’re going to get to it.

MOVEMENT 2 — The Diagnosis

[Read Proverbs 15:4]

Here is the second verse. Proverbs 15:4. "The soothing tongue is a tree of life, but a perverse tongue crushes the spirit."

Two tongues. One heals. One crushes. And that word "crushes" is heavy. In the Hebrew it is the word for breaking bones. A bent tongue does not just sting somebody. It fractures something inside them.

[Delivery: warm, brief. Do not linger in comfort before the cut.]

Now before we go after the tongue, hear this. A lot of the time, you do not tear people down because you are a monster. You do it because you wanted something good and you did not get it. You wanted respect. You wanted a little peace in your own house. Those aren’t evil things to want.

Here’s the problem. The human heart is always reaching for something to make us feel safe, important, happy, or in control. And when that thing becomes more important than God, the Bible calls it an idol.

So respect can become an idol. Control can become an idol. Comfort can become an idol. And when our idol gets threatened, our mouth often becomes a weapon. 

And watch how the idol gets to your mouth. If respect is my idol, and my wife disrespects me, I will use my words to punish her. If control is my idol, and my kids blow up my plans, I will use my words to put them back in their place. If comfort is my idol, and somebody interrupts my night, my tongue drips with contempt.

You see? Your tongue is not the root problem. Your tongue is showing you what is happening in your heart. The idol is the problem.

[Delivery: direct, firm, still pastoral.]

So let us stop calling it a temper. Let us stop calling it venting.

When your god, little ‘g’, gets threatened, you pick up the hammer of your tongue and you swing it to make somebody pay. That is not just your personality. That is your heart worshiping the wrong thing. And God has a word for that. Sin.

You took the same mouth you praise God with on Sunday, and you used it to cut down the people he handed you to love on Monday. And then you told yourself they made you do it. They did not. They just threatened your idol, and your mouth rose up to defend it.

Author C.S. Lewis said it like this. If there are rats in the cellar, the best time to see them is when you walk in suddenly and flip the light on fast. Now the rats didn’t show up because you opened the door quick. They were already living down there. The suddenness just caught them out in the open.

That is what the hard moments do to you. The traffic. The kid who won’t listen. The comment from your spouse that lands wrong. That moment did not put the anger in you. It just turned the light on and caught what was already living down there.

And look, my family will tell you, my words don't always build up. I'll give you an example. I open the fridge, it's disorganized, I can't find a thing, and out comes the attitude. Snappy comments. Big sigh so everyone can hear it. The whole performance. And my wife just looks at me and goes, "You don't even cook." And what am I supposed to say to that? She's right. I'm up in arms about a kitchen I don't even use. That's a heart problem, friends, not a fridge problem. And we’ve all got our version of it.

[Delivery: direct, naming real rooms]

Take your marriage. The person you promised to love is the one your tongue cuts the quickest. We get careless with the people closest to us. So this week, watch your tone before you watch your words. Your wife can survive being disagreed with. She cannot keep bleeding from being looked down on. And your husband hears enough all day about what he is not. Be the one voice that tells him what he is.

With your kids. Speak who they are over them, not just what they did wrong. The words you say over your kids become the voice in their own head for the rest of their lives. So what voice are you handing them? The voice of a parent who sees what God is making them? Or the voice of a critic who only sees what they are not yet?

And hear me, I don’t want anyone to get this all twisted up. A healing tongue, that builds up, is not always a soft tongue. It is always a tongue aimed at your good. Sometimes love has to say the hard thing. We will come back to that in a couple weeks.

But soft or hard, every word comes from the same place. Your heart. And that is where the real trouble is.

[Delivery: slowing down, lowering. Moving toward the valley.]

Because none of this gets fixed by just trying harder. You cannot straighten the tongue without straightening the heart. And you cannot reach down inside and straighten your own heart. You have tried. You apologized on Sunday and did the same thing by Friday. The idol factory is still running.

[THE VALLEY. Delivery: near-whisper. Slow. Do not perform it. Mean it.]

This is true for me too. Out of all my kids, the one most like me is my son Ramsey. And I spent years trying to keep him from every mistake I made. So every time he slipped, even something small, I came down on him hard. I told myself it was love. But the truth is, a fear in me turned into anger, and that anger came out of my mouth and landed on my son. I used words to build him up, yes. But too many times, I used them to tear him down. And he didn't even do the things I was so afraid of. The fear was mine. The harsh words were mine. And he carried them.

[Broadening line. Still quiet. Open it to the room.]

And I know I am not the only father in here who has done that. I am not the only parent who let their own fear come out as a sharp word over a child who deserved better.

So what do we do? If the problem is a heart we cannot reach, and a tongue we cannot tame, are we just stuck?

No. We are not stuck. We are finally in the one place where grace can reach us.

MOVEMENT 3 — The Healing

[GOSPEL PIVOT — Words made the world. Delivery: building, wonder.]

And to see that grace, I have to take you back. All the way back to the beginning.

The very first words ever spoken, were spoken by God.

The Bible opens with, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." And how did he do it? He said it. "And God said, let there be light. And there was light." He did not build the world with his hands first. He spoke it into existence. He said the word, and the light came running.

Words made the world.

Then turn the page. A garden. A snake. And the snake opens his mouth. He twists a few words, just a little. "Did God really say?" A woman listens. A man goes along with it. And the world God spoke into beauty gets spoken into ruin. Not by a weapon. By words.

Words broke it.

[Delivery: rising. Christ-as-Word beauty.]

So here is the question the whole Bible is asking. Who is going to fix what words broke? And the answer is the most beautiful sentence in all of Scripture.

John opens his Gospel like this. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." The voice that spoke the world into being is not just a sound. He is a person. And John says that person put on flesh and moved into the neighborhood.

Jesus is the Word. God's own voice, walking around in a body.

The Word came to heal the world.

Remember our verse? "The soothing tongue is a tree of life." That word "soothing" means healing. A tongue that makes people whole. Jesus shows up, and you watch his mouth do exactly that.

He says to a man covered in disease, "Be clean." And the man is clean. He says to a man who has not walked in years, "Get up and walk." And the man walks. He stands at a grave that already smells like death and he says, "Lazarus, come out." And a dead man walks out into the sun.

Proverbs shows us what a healing tongue looks like. Jesus shows us that healing tongue in the flesh. Every word out of his mouth gave life. He never once broke a soul he should have healed.

And then comes the part that should stop your heart.

The one mouth in all of history that only ever spoke life. And it got shut.

Roman soldiers arrested him. The religious leaders put him on trial. A governor named Pilate signed off on it. And the Bible says he "was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and like a sheep before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth." Jesus, who spoke galaxies into being, stood in front of the men who were about to kill him, and he said nothing. He could have spoken one word and ended the whole thing. He stayed silent.

Why? Why would the healing Word go quiet?

Because the death that our mouths earned had to land on somebody. Every cruel word. Every lie. Every sentence we ever used to break a person. It all earned a sentence of death. And the only one who could pay it was the one who had never spoken a single word of death in his life.

It wasn't only the soldiers. It wasn't only Pilate. It was our sin, including every word we used to wound, lie, accuse, and destroy, that brought Jesus to the cross. And he took it.

[Let is land before going to the wounded]

And it goes further than that. Some of you didn't come in here today mostly guilty. You came in wounded. Carrying words somebody spoke over you that never stopped bleeding.

Remember that wound that does not close on its own? Here is how it finally closes. "By his wounds we are healed." The Word was wounded so your wounds could heal. The Word was silenced so word-sinners could go free.

Some of you need me to slow down right here.

You have been counting the words you have to answer for. But there is another pile too. The words spoken over you. The words you never asked for. The name that stuck. The lie that said you were worthless. The voice in your head that still sounds like your father, your mother, your abuser, your critic.

Hear this. Jesus did not only come for the words you spoke. He came for the words that crushed you. He saw them. He knows where they landed. And on the cross, he carried the whole curse of sin.

You do not have to keep bleeding anymore. He saw it. He carried it. And he walked out of the grave with the final word over your life.

[Now turn to the answer for everyone. Build.]

So hear the good news, whether you walked in guilty or wounded or both. We said the real problem was a heart you cannot straighten. You do not have to straighten it. God gives you a new one.

When you put your trust in Jesus, you get joined to him. United to him. That means you belong to him now, and his life starts flowing into you. And his Spirit, the Spirit of God himself, moves in and goes to work on you from the inside out.

He does not just put a muzzle on your old mouth. He grows you a new one. He does not just manage the old heart. He replaces it. The stone heart comes out. A living heart goes in.

You have seen this with fruit trees down here. A grower takes a branch that cannot bear good fruit on its own and joins it to a strong, living tree. Nobody lectures the branch into making oranges. The branch bears fruit because the life of the tree flows into it.

That is you, joined to Christ. You are not going to lecture yourself into a new tongue. You get grafted into him. His life moves into you. And a healing tongue grows on a heart he made new. The fruit comes because of the tree you are joined to.

And that does not happen all at once. The same Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead now lives in you. He is not shocked by your temper. He knew what was down there, and he moved in anyway. So he works patiently. One sharp word you catch before it lands. One cruel sentence you swallow instead of speak. One apology that used to take a week and now takes an hour.

That is not you finally trying hard enough. That is the Spirit growing new fruit in you. Slowly. Actually. From the inside out.

That is grace: Jesus takes the mouth you once used as a weapon, and he begins turning it into a tree of life.

[REFRAIN DETONATION]

So hear the whole thing now.

Words made the world. Words broke it. The Word came to heal it.

[lead-in, Zinger]
You cannot tame your own tongue. So Jesus let his be silenced, and he gave you his heart instead.

[zinger, detonate, then stop]
The Word was broken so your words could heal.

[FULL STOP. Silence. Hold it.]

[REPENTANCE]

[ALTAR INVITATION]

I am not the only one in here who needs to do that. Some of you have a name in your head right now. Somebody you broke with your words.

Bring it to God. Come down here to the front and bring it to him. He already knows, and the cross already covered it.

And maybe the person you need to make it right with is sitting in this room. If God is moving you to go to them, go gently. If it feels too heavy, come find me or one of our elders first, and we will go with you. Nobody has to do this alone.

[CONCRETE CLOSING PRACTICE — One Sentence of Life. Delivery: warm, direct, doable. Stated before the landing.]

And when you walk out of here, do not let this stay a Sunday feeling. Here is one thing to do this week. Pick one person. Maybe somebody you have wounded. Maybe somebody who has never once heard a good word come out of your mouth. And before Tuesday is over, say one true sentence of life over them. Out loud. To their face. Not a text. Your voice. Tell your son you are proud of him. Tell your wife what you see in her. Tell the coworker you wrote off that you were wrong about them. One sentence. Out loud. This week. You can do that, not because you are nice, but because the Word who was silenced for you is alive in you.

[CLOSING LANDING — Delivery: quiet, settled, then stop.]

We started on the playground. Sticks and stones. Words will never hurt me.

We all know now that it was a lie. Words hurt. Some of you walked in here today still carrying the ones that broke you.

But you are not walking out with only those words anymore.

There is a better Word. A Word that was broken so you could be whole. A Word that took the silence so you could be set free. And that Word is alive, and he is making you new.

So go and speak life to those around you. Use your words to build up, not to destroy.

Words made the world. Words broke it. The Word came to heal it. And now, in him, your words can heal too.

Let us pray.