You Are What You Speak: The Harvest of the Mouth Text: Proverbs 18:20
Introduction: The Edible World
We live in a world made of words. This is not poetry; it is the fundamental constitution of the cosmos. In the beginning, God spoke, and reality appeared. He did not grunt, He did not strain, He did not assemble. He spoke. And because we are made in the image of this speaking God, our words are not mere vibrations in the air. They are not puffs of wind. Our words have substance. They are creative. They build worlds and they tear them down. They are, as our text for today tells us, a kind of food. You will eat what you say.
This is a truth our modern world has forgotten, to its great peril. We treat words as if they were disposable packaging, meaningless wrappers for our subjective feelings. We think we can say what we want, when we want, how we want, with no consequences. We imagine our words are sterile, but the Bible teaches that they are seeds. And every seed, whether good or bad, produces a harvest. You cannot plant thistle seeds all week and expect to show up on Sunday with a basket of strawberries. It doesn't work that way. The universe is a moral fabric, and our words are woven directly into it.
The book of Proverbs is intensely practical. It is God's inspired wisdom for living skillfully in His world. It does not float in the ethereal clouds of abstraction; it gets right down to the gravel of our daily lives. And there is nothing more central to our daily lives than the words that come out of our mouths. Our relationships, our work, our worship, our witness, all of it is conducted through the medium of words. And Solomon, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, tells us that we are, in a very real sense, eating the consequences of our own speech. You are setting your own table, and you will be required to eat what you serve.
The Text
From the fruit of a man’s mouth his stomach will be satisfied;
With the produce of his lips he will be satisfied.
(Proverbs 18:20 LSB)
The Inescapable Harvest (v. 20)
Let us look at the verse before us:
"From the fruit of a man’s mouth his stomach will be satisfied; With the produce of his lips he will be satisfied." (Proverbs 18:20)
The parallelism here is classic Hebrew poetry, driving the point home with the force of a hammer striking the same nail twice. "Fruit of a man's mouth" and "produce of his lips" are one and the same. The image is agricultural. Your mouth is a field. Your lips are the soil. Your words are the seeds you are constantly sowing. And your life, your "stomach," is the place where you consume the resulting harvest.
The word "satisfied" here can be taken in two ways, and the proverb intends for us to feel the weight of both. If you sow words of kindness, wisdom, truth, and encouragement, you will be satisfied in a good way. Your life will be filled with the good fruit of peace, healthy relationships, and favor with God and man. You will eat a feast of blessing. As Proverbs 12:14 says, "From the fruit of his mouth a man is satisfied with good." When you speak graciously, you create an atmosphere of grace around you, and you get to breathe that air and eat that fruit. You build a pleasant house with your words, and then you get to live in it.
But the opposite is just as true. If you sow words of bitterness, slander, gossip, lies, and foolishness, you will also be "satisfied." But this will be the satisfaction of a man who has gorged himself on ashes and gravel. You will be filled to the brim with the bitter consequences of your own foolish speech. You will eat the rotten fruit of discord, strife, isolation, and judgment. When you use your words to tear others down, you are actually demolishing your own house, and you will be left to live in the rubble. As the verse immediately following this one says, "Death and life are in the power of the tongue, and those who love it will eat its fruit" (Proverbs 18:21). Notice the stark choice: death or life. And notice the agency: you will eat the fruit of the one you love.
This principle is written into the very fabric of God's world. It is the law of sowing and reaping applied to our speech. "Do not be deceived," Paul says, "God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, this he will also reap" (Galatians 6:7). We think this applies to money, or to our actions, but we often give our words a free pass. This is a grave mistake. Your words are some of the most potent seeds you will ever sow.
The Farm of the Heart
So where does this fruit come from? The lips are just the farm stand, but the seeds are cultivated somewhere deeper. Jesus gives us the answer with startling clarity. He says, "the things that proceed out of the mouth come from the heart... For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, slanders" (Matthew 15:18-19). He also says, "The good man out of the good treasure of his heart brings forth what is good; and the evil man out of the evil treasure brings forth what is evil; for his mouth speaks from that which fills his heart" (Luke 6:45).
Your speech is a diagnostic tool. It reveals the true condition of your heart. If your speech is consistently critical, bitter, or dishonest, the problem is not with your tongue. The problem is with your heart. The tongue is simply the bucket that draws water from the well of the heart. If the water is polluted, cleaning the bucket will do you no good. You have to deal with the source. You have to deal with the well.
This is why true change, true taming of the tongue, is not a matter of behavior modification. It is not about trying really hard to bite your lip or to say nicer things. That is just painting the pump handle when the well water is poisoned. True change comes from heart regeneration. It comes when the Holy Spirit performs a spiritual transplant, taking out the heart of stone and putting in a heart of flesh (Ezekiel 36:26). It is only when Christ is treasured in the heart that the mouth will produce the good fruit of life-giving words.
When your heart is right with God, your words will begin to align with His reality. They will become constructive, not destructive. They will be like the "apples of gold in settings of silver" Solomon speaks of (Proverbs 25:11). They will bring healing, not harm, because "there is one who speaks rashly like the thrusts of a sword, but the tongue of the wise is healing" (Proverbs 12:18). This is the kind of harvest that truly satisfies the soul.
Eating Your Words in the New Covenant
This proverb finds its ultimate fulfillment and its only solution in the person and work of Jesus Christ. How can a man whose heart is a polluted well ever hope to produce good fruit? How can we who have sown a lifetime of sinful words escape the bitter harvest we are due?
The answer is that Jesus Christ, the eternal Word made flesh, came and ate the bitter fruit that we deserved. On the cross, He bore the full weight of every idle, malicious, and blasphemous word we have ever spoken. He was "satisfied" with the wrath of God that our lips had earned. He took our harvest of death so that we could receive His harvest of life.
And in doing so, He gives us a new heart, a new nature. He gives us the Holy Spirit, who begins the work of cleaning out the well. And He gives us a new vocabulary. The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Galatians 5:22-23). When the Spirit is at work in our hearts, this is the fruit that begins to grow, and this is the fruit that will inevitably show up in our speech.
Our satisfaction, then, is not ultimately in our own words, but in Christ's. We are satisfied by His declaration that "It is finished." We are satisfied by His word of pardon and justification. And as we feast on Him, as we are satisfied by His grace, our own words are transformed. We no longer speak in order to justify ourselves, or to build our own little kingdoms, or to tear others down to make ourselves feel bigger. We speak from a position of profound satisfaction in Christ.
Our words become a "sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that give thanks to His name" (Hebrews 13:15). We speak words of life to others because the Word of Life has been spoken to us. We offer a harvest of praise because we have been made part of His glorious harvest. We are satisfied with the fruit of our lips because our lips are now instruments of grace, testifying to the one who satisfied the justice of God on our behalf. Therefore, let us tend the gardens of our hearts with all diligence, so that the fruit of our mouths might be a feast of life, both for ourselves and for all who hear us, to the glory of God the Father.