If you want a guard for your lips, treat people as if Jesus died for them. He did, of course.
“Sticks and stones may break our bones, but words will break our hearts.” So said best-selling author Robert Fulghum. And David agrees, as he explains in Psalm 109. “For the mouth of the wicked and the mouth of the deceitful have opened against me; they have spoken against me with a lying tongue. They have also surrounded me with words of hatred, and fought against me without a cause” (vv 2-3). Some people can be so cruel. Using their tongues like sabers, they lash out, or perhaps surreptitiously sneak around and stab you in the back. Their words are “wicked…deceitful…lying…hatred, and…without a cause.” That pretty much covers it! Well, not quite. It isn’t just his enemies out to get him—and he had plenty. David continues, “In return for my love they are my accusers, but I give myself to prayer. Thus they have rewarded me evil for good, and hatred for my love” (vv 4-5). Finding refuge in prayer from such slander and malice is what the Lord Jesus told us to do: “bless those who curse you, and pray for those who spitefully use you” (Lk 6:28). But what follows in Psalm 109 (vv 6-20), is of a very different sentiment. This is an Imprecatory Psalm, where the writer calls down vengeance on his enemies. Note that David wasn’t taking matters into his own hands; he was following God’s directive: “Vengeance is Mine; I will repay” (Rom 12:19; Deut 32:35), and asking the Lord to take care of things for him. Second, although his enemies are spoken of in the plural, these judgments are in the singular. Some (maybe all) are to be applied to the son of perdition, Judas Iscariot (Acts 1:20). Read in that light, it certainly is insightful! But then David prays for himself (Ps 109:21-31), and that’s the subject of our next devotional.