Let me tell you a little about my childhood. My mom believed in soap, Zest soap to be exact. Mom believed, to borrow from the Zest advertising slogan, “you’re not fully clean unless you’re Zestfully clean”. We bathed with Zest 365 days a year. A little later in my life, mom showed me another creative use for Zest. I can remember one time as a 7- or 8-year-old coming home from school and innocently using a bad word. Faster than you can spell the word “Mississippi”, out came the Zest. With God as my witness, I didn’t have a clue what the word meant. I won’t tell you what the word was but it did start with the letter “F”. I heard the word used by a friend at school and so I boldly used the word at home. Little did I know that it would bring me my one and only time of having my mouth washed out with Zest. So that you won’t need to experiment, let me without hesitation state that Zest tastes horrible!!! Needless to say, I never used the “F” word again.
I’m writing today asking you to avoid a God “Zest” moment where He has to get your mouth Zestfully clean. Here’s the reason for the need of Zest. In listening to some leaders speak, words are being used that are distasteful to God. I’m not referring to profanity (although that would be another great blog post). The words that God finds nauseating are those that minimize and demean your ministry. When we use a word like “little” in our description of who we are or what we are doing, we are squeezing a great big God with great big plans and desires into a “little” package. It’s not a “little” ministry or a “little” activity or a “little” skit. It’s an opportunity for an enormous God to do enormous things. And yet, in our speech, we are devaluing in our eyes and the eyes of others what God wants to do.
Let’s avoid the soap by making our words Zestfully clean. Let’s magnify our God and His work with the words that we speak!
