Toy Stories: Barbie — Modest vs. Manipulative - Thursday
Today’s Verse
Proverbs 31:26
She opens her mouth with wisdom, and the teaching of kindness is on her tongue. (ESV)
I recently saw a school assignment that a third-grade girl brought home to her parents. The activity was called “Magnet Inventions,” and the goal was to identify a problem and then devise an invention using magnets to solve it. On her assignment paper, the girl described the problem as, “My sister sings too much.” Then, below that sentence, she drew a series of pictures to describe the brilliant invention she’d come up with to solve this problem. The first one depicted her sister with her mouth wide open and a microphone in her hand. Then she drew another picture of her sister’s face — except in this one, her mouth was closed, and there were two mysterious objects drawn above and below her lips. She drew an arrow in the direction of the objects and wrote “magnit.” Well, sis… that’s one way to do it!
Maybe we all need some magnets to keep our mouths shut—but not necessarily because of our singing voices. The Bible is full of instruction on using wisdom with words and repeatedly warns about the dangers of our tongues. As James 3:8 tells us, “no human being can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison.” Cheery, right? On our own, we’re utterly powerless against our own mouths, hence why David prays in Psalm 141:3, “Set a guard, O Lord, over my mouth; keep watch over the door of my lips!”
This obviously isn’t exclusive to women, but as we continue our study of modesty within the context of biblical womanhood, we can’t ignore this mention of women’s speech in our verse today from Proverbs 31, where Solomon describes the ideal woman:
“She opens her mouth with wisdom…” — She discerns when to open her mouth, and when not to. When she does, what comes out is good, useful, and worthwhile. She’s not silent, but she’s not a yapper or a complainer, either.
“...the teaching of kindness is on her tongue.” — This has been interpreted in a few ways, but it suggests that her words consistently reflect grace, patience, and truth, even when they are instructive. There is no place for sass, gossip, bitterness, obscenity, flattery, or manipulation.
If we were just to focus on the dos and don’ts of our words, the picture would be incomplete, “for the mouth speaks what the heart is full of” (Matthew 12:34b, NIV). What comes in will eventually come out—so what we’re taking in, who we’re spending time with, and what we’re setting our mind on matters, too.
If all of this feels convicting yet overwhelmingly hard, I get it. Same here. But when we choose daily to walk by the Spirit, He guides us in what to say and when, and the more we practice using this wisdom, the more skilled we’ll become in well-arranged words through the power of Christ in us—no magnets required.
APPLICATION
Take some time to memorize Ephesians 4:29. You can also memorize the acrostic below, which is a great practical tool for choosing our words wisely.
Before you speak, THINK:
T – Is it true?
H – Is it helpful?
I – Is it inspiring?
N – Is it necessary?
K – Is it kind?
PRAYER
Pray this prayer from Psalms 19:14 (ESV):
Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.
