We Know Not the Stench of Our Own Breath

Have you ever walked into a room and immediately your nostrils filled with the odor of something strange and unpleasant? Have you ever remarked to a person already in that room of the smell, only to have them say that they could smell nothing? Our sense of smell becomes acclimated to our environment in such a way that we are not able to discern the odors around us. Only until we have left the room or house for a period of time and walked back in are we able to smell what is really there. On one of our annual camping trips a few years ago we struggled with constant winds, which made it difficult to enjoy the campfires that the kids love so much. During one of our trips into Helen, we walked into one of the shops and the clerk behind the desk immediately cried out, “You guys must be camping!” Even though we could not tell it ourselves, we smelled like smoke because of our close proximity to the campfire.

In the same way,  we often do not realize what is coming out of our own mouths because we are so used to it. In the Crossway book, The Power of Words and the Wonder of God, Sinclair Ferguson writes…

The tongue carries into the world the breath that issues from the heart.

Alas, we do not realize how powerful for evil the tongue is because we are so accustomed to its polluting influence. En route to give [an] address, I rode the hotel elevator with several others. On one floor the elevator stopped, the doors opened, and a woman entered the confined space. The doors closed, and I suspect everyone in the elevator almost instantaneously had the same thought, “She has been smoking!” In this confined “smoke-free” environment her breath could not be disguised.

So, says Jesus, the tongue projects the thoughts and intentions of the heart. It is from within, “out of the heart”, that the mouth speaks. But like the smoker, so accustomed to the odor, the atmosphere in which they live, the person with polluted speech has little or no sense of it – no sense that they exhale bad breath every time they speak. – P.49