by Bill Robinson<\/p>\n
A servant girl looked at Peter across a courtyard fire and said what everyone standing there already knew. Your accent betrays you (Matthew 26:73). He was a Galilean. He could deny it all night, and his vowels would keep telling the truth.<\/p>\n
So, he reached for something stronger. Matthew says he began to invoke a curse and to swear (26:74).<\/p>\n
Read that carefully, because it is not what we usually assume. Peter was not reaching for gutter language. He was swearing an oath. The verbs are the vocabulary of formal self-imprecation, calling down a curse to guarantee a statement, the ancient way of saying “May God do so to me and more if I am lying.” Peter took the God he had confessed as Christ and made Him the guarantor of a lie.<\/p>\n
Now notice who this is. Not a soldier. Not a bystander warming his hands. This is one of the Twelve, the man who had said out loud at Caesarea Philippi that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God. Three chapters later, his mouth is swearing he never met Him.<\/p>\n
That is the reader I am writing to, and I include myself in it. Not the world. Not the officials at the podium or the strangers in the hallway. This is for those of us who have confessed the Christ and then opened our mouths in a way that contradicted the confession.<\/p>\n
Matthew leaves the object of the curse unstated. Some read it as Peter cursing himself, which is how most translations render it. Others take him to be cursing Jesus. I hold the first reading, and I want you to know it is a reading and not a certainty.<\/p>\n
James wrote one sentence that settles the question of whether this is a small matter.<\/p>\n
“If anyone thinks he is religious and does not bridle his tongue but deceives his heart, this person’s religion is worthless<\/em>” (James 1:26).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Take the words as they stand. Thinks, in Greek dokei<\/em>, means seems or supposes, and it is aimed at a man’s self-assessment. Religious, threskos<\/em>, describes the outwardly observant person, the one who shows up and keeps the forms. James is not writing about the pagan. He is writing about the churchgoer who has taken his own spiritual temperature and liked the reading.<\/p>\n
And the verdict is worthless. Empty. Of no use.<\/p>\n
I want to be careful not to say more than James said. He did not pronounce on anyone’s eternal standing, and I will not supply a verdict he withheld. But he did say that a professing man with an unbridled tongue is deceiving his own heart, and that whatever religion he thinks he has is not accomplishing anything. That is heavy enough without my help.<\/p>\n
The bridle is worth a moment. You do not bridle a dead horse. The image assumes power, motion, and usefulness, and it says the whole animal goes where the small thing in its mouth directs. James returns to that picture in chapter three with the bit and the rudder. He is not asking us to have nothing to say. He is asking who is holding the reins.<\/p>\n
The Name carried to Nothing<\/h2>\n
Start where God started, because He put this near the top of the list.<\/p>\n
“You shall not take the name of the LORD your God in vain<\/em>” (Exodus 20:7; repeated at Deuteronomy 5:11). The Hebrew verb is nasa’<\/em>, to lift up, to carry, to bear. The noun is shav<\/em>, emptiness, worthlessness, falsehood. You shall not carry the name of the LORD your God to emptiness.<\/p>\n
Let me be careful here, because this commandment gets stretched further than the text allows, and a stretched argument snaps under pressure.<\/p>\n
Direct statement:<\/strong> The command forbids bearing God’s name in emptiness or falsehood.<\/p>\n
Interpretation:<\/strong> Its first reference is covenantal and legal. Israel swore by the Name, and Leviticus 19:12 makes the link explicit: do not swear falsely by God’s name and profane it. To attach the living God to a lie is to make His character a tool. This is precisely Peter’s sin at the fire. Jesus takes up the same ground in Matthew 5:33-37, where the remedy is not better oath formulas but a yes that means yes.<\/p>\n
Necessary inference:<\/strong> If God forbids attaching His name to what is empty, then emptying His name casually is not exempt because it is casual. The commandment carries no clause excusing the startled, the stuck in traffic, or the mildly impressed.<\/p>\n
So when the name Israel would not pronounce becomes filler between two ordinary words, something has happened that God has an opinion about. When the name of Jesus, the name at which every knee will bow (Philippians 2:10), becomes the syllable that escapes on a stubbed toe, we have not committed a small verbal infraction. We have taken the most valuable name in existence and spent it on nothing.<\/p>\n
And the cross. Paul said he would boast in nothing except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ (Galatians 6:14). That is the measure of the thing we are handling. Hebrews 10:29 warns of a person who profanes the blood of the covenant and treats it as common, though I should say plainly that the passage addresses deliberate and settled rejection after knowing the truth, not a careless exclamation. I am not equating the two. I am pointing at the principle underneath: it is possible to take what is holy and handle it as though it were ordinary.<\/p>\n
Sunday and Tuesday<\/h2>\n
Here is the charge, and I would rather you did not walk around it.<\/p>\n
You carry the Name. That is what Christian means. A man wears a wedding ring while doing what married men must not do, and the ring stops being jewelry and becomes testimony against him.<\/p>\n
Paul put it harder than I would dare to. Writing to the man who has the law, who calls himself by it, who teaches others and boasts in God, Paul asks whether his life matches his instruction, and then quotes Isaiah at him: the name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you (Romans 2:24; the argument runs from Romans 2:17).<\/p>\n
Interpretation:<\/strong> Paul’s immediate target is the Jew who possesses the law and dishonors God by breaking it, and the quotation is drawn from a prophetic complaint about Israel’s testimony among the nations.<\/p>\n
Necessary inference:<\/strong> The principle is not confined to Israel. Anyone who bears God’s name publicly and contradicts it publicly hands unbelievers a reason to think less of God. That is the man in the pew who has taken the name of Christ.<\/p>\n
Sit with what that means. You do not only empty the Name yourself on Tuesday. You hand it to other people to empty. The man on the crew who knows where you go on Sunday is running a small experiment on Christianity, and your mouth is the data he is collecting. He is not weighing your argument for the resurrection. He is weighing whether the God you claim has made any measurable difference in what comes out of you when the ladder slips.<\/p>\n
That is the actual stake. Not manners. Not respectability. The reputation of God among people who will never read a page of theology and are reading you instead.<\/p>\n
How we picked up the accent<\/h2>\n
None of us invented this dialect.<\/p>\n
That matters, because understanding transmission is different from assigning blame, and blame is not what this section is for.<\/p>\n
Listen to the ordinary soundtrack of a week. One word does an enormous amount of work in it. It is the adjective for a bad meal and a beautiful sunset. It is the verb for betrayal and for repair. It is the intensifier for grief and for joy.<\/p>\n
Currency loses value when it is printed without limit. Say a word means outrageous, use it for a hurricane, and it carries weight. Use it for a hurricane, a hangnail, a homework assignment, and a home run, and by Thursday you need a wheelbarrow of words to buy a single thought. The speaker feels emphatic. The listener hears noise. The Greeks had a word for speech that carried no sense to the hearer. Barbaros<\/em>, our barbarian, began as mimicry, because to a Greek ear foreign speech sounded like bar-bar-bar, sound without meaning.<\/p>\n
Let me say what I am not claiming. I am not claiming that people who talk this way are unintelligent, and I am not claiming a thin vocabulary causes it. I have heard the argument that a fluent swearer tends to be verbally fluent generally, and I cannot rule it out. My claim is narrower, and it is about communication. When one word absorbs every emotion, it stops transmitting any of them, and the speaker loses a tool he will need later, at a graveside or a hospital bed, when he has something true to say, and nothing left that still carries weight.<\/p>\n
Words arrive by exposure. Six hours of anything a day is a language course. A believer who has spent a decade inside that soundtrack did not choose the accent in a single act of rebellion. He absorbed it, the way anyone absorbs the speech of the place he lives, and he cannot hear it, because you cannot miss a color you have never mixed. Peter did not decide to sound Galilean. He just was.<\/p>\n
None of which excuses it. It explains it, and explanation is where repentance gets traction, because a man who understands how the channel was cut has some idea where to start filling it in.<\/p>\n
Rotten, and God says so<\/h2>\n
The New Testament does not leave this to inference. It has vocabulary for our vocabulary.<\/p>\n
“Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths<\/em>” (Ephesians 4:29). The word behind “corrupting” is sapros<\/em>. Look where else it lands. Jesus uses it for the diseased tree that cannot bear good fruit (Matthew 7:17-18), and for the fish the fishermen throw away (Matthew 13:48). Rotten. Spoiled. Fit for the bin.<\/p>\n
Sit with that image, because Paul chose it. A rotten word is not merely impolite. It is a fish left three days in a warm car. You can argue that it is only a fish. Everyone in the vehicle is still rolling down the windows.<\/p>\n
Paul stacks three more terms in Ephesians 5:4. Aischrot\u0113s<\/em>, obscenity. M\u014drologia<\/em>, literally fool-talk, from m\u014dros<\/em> and logos<\/em>, the empty chatter of a man with nothing worth saying. And eutrapelia<\/em>, which is the interesting one. That word carried a positive range in Greek usage, naming quick wit and ready repartee, and Aristotle counted that sort of wit among the virtues. Paul uses it negatively. Whether he had the philosophers in view I cannot say, and I will not claim he did. What can be said is that Paul took a word naming a skill the surrounding culture admired, the fast and dirty line that wins the room, and filed it with things that must not even be named among saints. Not because God dislikes laughter. Because a wit that works only by defiling something has run out of material.<\/p>\n
Colossians 3:8 adds aischrologia<\/em>, filthy and abusive speech, and notice the company it keeps: anger, wrath, malice, slander. Foul speech is not a separate category in Paul’s mind. It travels with contempt. It is the exhaust of a heart running hot.<\/p>\n
Scripture has heard this before<\/h2>\n
We tend to imagine our era invented coarseness. It did not.<\/p>\n
Rabshakeh at the wall. Assyria’s field commander stands outside Jerusalem and shouts at the men on the city wall. Hezekiah’s officials beg him to switch to Aramaic so the common people will not understand. He refuses, deliberately, and answers in Hebrew with a line about men eating their own waste and drinking their own urine (II Kings 18:26-28; Isaiah 36:11-12). He knew what he was doing. Crude speech at full volume, in the language everyone understands, is a demoralizing weapon. It says: your God cannot protect you, and I will prove it by soiling your ears while your children listen.<\/p>\n
A textual footnote, offered carefully. In the transmitted Hebrew text, those two words are marked to be read aloud with gentler substitutes. Euphemistic substitution of this kind is a recognized feature of the reading tradition. I would not press motives onto men whose reasoning we do not have, and the marking tradition was fixed long after the text was written. Still, the fact itself is suggestive. Someone along the way judged that a public reading did not need to reproduce those particular sounds.<\/p>\n
Saul at the dinner table. His anger flares at Jonathan, and out comes a slur that runs through his son to insult his own wife (I Samuel 20:30). Two verses later, he throws a spear at him. Any parent should feel that sequence. The mouth went first. The spear followed. I am not claiming Scripture teaches a law of verbal escalation. I am pointing at one household where the words and the weapon came from the same anger, and asking whether you have ever felt the first without yet reaching for the second. Words in a home are not weather. They are architecture. A father can spend fifteen years building a house and burn it down in a sentence.<\/p>\n
Shimei on the ridge. He walks along the hillside cursing David, throwing stones and dirt (II Samuel 16:5-13). Abishai offers to end the problem. David refuses. There is the other half of the lesson. The godly answer to a filthy mouth is not a louder filthy mouth.<\/p>\n
Isaiah in the temple. He sees the Lord high and lifted up, and he cries out that he is undone, a man of unclean lips, dwelling among a people of unclean lips (Isaiah 6:5). Read in context, that is a confession of the whole man before holiness, with the lips standing for the person, and pointedly for the calling he is about to receive, since God is about to send him out to speak. Then a seraph takes a coal from the altar, touches it to his mouth, and declares his guilt taken away and his sin atoned for (Isaiah 6:6-7).<\/p>\n
I will come back to that coal.<\/p>\n
The mouth is a gauge, not the engine<\/h2>\n
If this article stopped at word lists, it would produce cleaner speech and no cleaner people, and Jesus has already ruled on that.<\/p>\n
“Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks<\/em>” (Matthew 12:34). What comes out of a person defiles him, and He lists what comes out of the heart (Matthew 15:18-19). “A good man brings good out of the good treasure of his heart<\/em>” (Luke 6:45).<\/p>\nThe mouth does not cause the condition. It reports it. A thermometer never gave anyone a fever, and smashing it never cured one. James works the same ground with a spring and a fig tree: fresh water and salt do not pour from the same opening, and a fig tree does not grow olives (James 3:11-12). If both are coming out of you, the problem is upstream. There is a well somewhere downhill from a hog pen, and the water is telling the truth about the geography.
\nJames also names the specific horror of it. With the tongue we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse people made in the likeness of God (James 3:9). Both barrels of one weapon. The mouth that sings on Sunday sprays paint on God’s portrait on Monday, and the portrait is your coworker, your child, the driver in the next lane.\nDo not miss the weight Jesus puts on this. On the day of judgment, people will give account for every careless word (Matthew 12:36). Argon<\/em>: idle, unemployed, the word doing no work. Not only the vicious words. The lazy ones. That verse should make all of us quieter.<\/p>\n
Now let me argue with myself<\/h2>\n
If I preach one side of this, I will convince the convinced and lose everyone who has actually thought about it. Here are the strongest objections I know, stated the way a thoughtful person would state them.<\/p>\n
“Words are arbitrary. Sounds are not sinful. Yesterday’s vulgarity is today’s Tuesday.”<\/p>\n
True in part. Meaning is conventional. It is also communal, and that is where the argument fails. You do not get to assign private meaning to public money. Currency is arbitrary too, and counterfeiting is still theft, because value lives in the shared agreement rather than in the paper. When you say the word, your hearers receive what it means in this community, in this decade. You cannot say I meant it innocently while handing someone a bill everyone in the room knows is marked.<\/p>\n
“Scripture itself is earthy. Paul counts his credentials as skubala<\/em>, refuse, and some scholars judge that term genuinely vulgar (Philippians 3:8). He wishes the circumcision party would go all the way and emasculate themselves (Galatians 5:12). Elijah taunts Baal’s prophets with a line many translators read as a suggestion that their god is relieving himself (I Kings 18:27). Ezekiel 23 is not a passage you hand to a fifth grader.”<\/p>\n
Fair, and it should be conceded where it is right. The Bible is not prudish. It names bodies, blood, waste, and sexual sin without blushing, because it deals in reality. So my argument is not that Christians should be delicate. Notice what those examples share. Each one is deliberate, aimed, and doing theological work. Paul is degrading his own r\u00e9sum\u00e9, not a person. Elijah is exposing a dead god at Carmel. Ezekiel is prosecuting a covenant. None of it is a verbal tic, and none of it is contempt hurled at a human being made in God’s image. Paul’s problem in Ephesians is not earthiness. It is rot, contempt, and emptiness.<\/p>\n
“The third commandment concerns oaths and covenant fidelity, not saying ‘oh my God’ when the toast burns. You are stretching it.”<\/p>\n
The first half is correct, and I said so above. Here is why the principle still reaches. The command protects the Name from being made weightless, and casual use is the very machinery by which a name becomes weightless. If you would not use the name of someone you love as a grunt of irritation, the argument is already made.<\/p>\n
“This is respectability religion. You are polishing the outside of the cup.”<\/p>\n
This is the objection I take most seriously, because Jesus said it first, and He said it to religious people (Matthew 23:25-26). A Christian can keep a spotless vocabulary and still dismantle a reputation over coffee. Gossip goes down like a delicacy (Proverbs 18:8), and it is served in churches by people who have never uttered a four-letter word. If Ephesians 4:29 only convicts you of profanity, you have read half a verse.<\/p>\n
But notice that the door swings both ways, and I will not let it be an exit. The verse that convicts the gossip is the same verse that convicts the swearer. Speech that builds up, that fits the moment, that gives grace to those who hear. Neither man gets to point at the other and call it a defense. James did not write that a man who bridles his tongue in one particular has a religion worth something. He wrote about the tongue.<\/p>\n
Hold all four objections at once and the conclusion does not weaken. It sharpens. The issue was never a list of forbidden syllables. It is whether your mouth is a spring of fresh water or a drain.<\/p>\n
What God is like, and why that settles it<\/h2>\n
Underneath this is a claim about God that we pass over too quickly.<\/p>\n
God speaks. That is nearly the first thing Genesis tells us about Him. He said, and there was. He is not a silent force. He is a speaking God whose word makes things exist, and He made us in His image, which is why of all the creatures on this planet only one composes sentences.<\/p>\n
He also gave us His name. He did not have to. At the bush He told Moses what to call Him (Exodus 3:14), and He proclaimed His own character aloud: merciful and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love (Exodus 34:6). A name is self-disclosure. When God hands you His name, He is handing you something of Himself and trusting you with it.<\/p>\n
Then He did it more completely. The Word became flesh (John 1:14). God’s final speech to us is a Person, and that Person stood silent while a mob said everything vile a mob can say, and opened His mouth on the cross to ask forgiveness for the men holding the hammer.<\/p>\n
That is the God we are talking about. We do not guard our speech in order to be respectable people whom nice neighbors approve of. We guard it because the God who speaks worlds into being has put His name on us and His Son’s words in our mouths. Reverence is the only sane response to that, and everything practical below runs on it.<\/p>\n
Practically, then, change\u00a0the intake.<\/h2>\n
Nobody drifts into a clean mouth. Words arrive by exposure and leave by attrition. Paul quoted a line from a Greek playwright because it was true even on pagan lips: bad company ruins good morals (I Corinthians 15:33). Philippians 4:8 is not a poster. It is an intake valve. Whatever is true, honorable, pure, lovely, think on these things.<\/p>\n
Pray the psalm that fits. Set a guard, O LORD, over my mouth (Psalm 141:3). Ask for it before the meeting rather than after. And Psalm 19:14, which asks that the words of the mouth and the meditation of the heart both be acceptable, because David already knew those two are one problem.<\/p>\nBuild the pause. A river cuts its channel by running the same way ten thousand times. Habit is a channel. You break it by putting something in the gap: a breath, a different word, a silence. Silence is underrated. When words are many, transgression is not lacking (Proverbs 10:19).
\nGet better words. A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in a setting of silver (Proverbs 25:11). Silver filigree, gold fruit, a craftsman’s work. That is what a sentence can be. The alternative is a piano with one key, struck harder and harder in hope that volume will do what melody used to. When something is genuinely appalling, say appalling. Say monstrous, ruinous, indefensible. When something is glorious, say glorious. Say staggering, magnificent, unrepeatable. Those words still have their edge because we have not spent them on sandwiches.\nParents, this one is yours. Your children are not learning a rule from you. They are learning an accent. They will speak the language of the house, and they will speak it loudest when they are angry, because that is when all of us revert to the mother tongue. If the word comes out of you in the kitchen in a good mood, do not be surprised when it comes back from the hallway in a bad one. And if you have already done damage, do the thing that preaches louder than any correction. Apologize to your child, by name, for the specific words, and ask them to hold you to it. Saul never did that. He threw a spear instead.<\/p>\n
Let the church be honest. Give a brother permission to tell you when your speech has slipped. Most of us cannot hear our own accent. That is the whole point of the servant girl in the courtyard.<\/p>\n
The coal<\/h2>\n
Isaiah stood in the presence of holiness and confessed that he was a man of unclean lips. Notice what happened next, because it is the only hope in this article.<\/p>\n
He did not clean himself. A seraph flew to him with a burning coal from the altar, touched his mouth, and told him his guilt was taken away and his sin atoned for. Fire from the place of sacrifice was applied to the man at the point of his calling, so that the mouth God was about to send could carry God’s words.<\/p>\n
We are not left to willpower. There is an altar, and there is blood, and the Lord who forgives the tongue can retrain it. Zephaniah looked ahead to a day when God would give the peoples a pure speech, so that all of them might call on the name of the LORD and serve Him together (Zephaniah 3:9). That promise concerns the nations turning from idols to true worship.<\/p>\n
Application, and I mark it as such: a mouth trained to spend that Name on nothing is not a mouth ready for the worship it was made for.<\/p>\n
Remember how the courtyard ended. Peter went out and wept bitterly, and that was not the end of him. The Lord who heard every word of that denial met him on a beach, fed him breakfast, and asked him three times whether he loved Him. Then He gave him a job that required his mouth.<\/p>\n
So here is the one thing I would ask.<\/p>\n
Confess your mouth. Not in general, not as a personality quirk, not as the joke you make about yourself. Name the specific words, name the last time, name the person who heard them, and take it to the altar. Then start speaking like someone who belongs to the God who spoke light into a dark place.<\/p>\n
You have an accent. Everyone can hear it. Let it betray you in the right direction.<\/p>\n
“Let the words of my mouth . . . be acceptable in your sight, O LORD<\/em>” (Psalm 19:14).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
by Bill Robinson A word to those of us who wear the Name A servant girl looked at Peter across a courtyard fire and said what everyone standing there already knew. Your accent betrays you (Matthew 26:73). He was a Galilean. He could deny it all night, and his vowels would keep telling the truth.…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_seo_schema_type":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[27],"tags":[492,1558],"class_list":["post-96953","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-article","tag-profanity","tag-speech"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":31874,"url":"https:\/\/www.lavistachurchofchrist.org\/cms\/do-you-support-conscientious-objection\/","url_meta":{"origin":96953,"position":0},"title":"Do you support conscientious objection?","author":"Jeffrey Hamilton","date":"February 19, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"Question: Do you or your church support selective conscientious objection and conscientious objection? Answer: Registering for the draft is a government law that does not violate any teaching of God. \"Let every soul be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and the authorities\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Answer"","block_context":{"text":"Answer","link":"https:\/\/www.lavistachurchofchrist.org\/cms\/category\/answer\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1296,"url":"https:\/\/www.lavistachurchofchrist.org\/cms\/why-are-boy-girl-relationships-not-advisable-at-a-young-age\/","url_meta":{"origin":96953,"position":1},"title":"Why are boy-girl relationships not advisable at a young age?","author":"Jeffrey Hamilton","date":"April 3, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"Question: Why are boy-girl relationships not advisable at a young age Answer: Youth is a time of impatient desires. They want the things available to adults, but adulthood seems so far away. The typical teenage boy enters puberty around the age of 11. 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Answer: We were taught to pray, \"Give us this day our daily bread\" (Matthew 6:11), but God still commands us\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Answer"","block_context":{"text":"Answer","link":"https:\/\/www.lavistachurchofchrist.org\/cms\/category\/answer\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":61889,"url":"https:\/\/www.lavistachurchofchrist.org\/cms\/the-book-of-my-life\/","url_meta":{"origin":96953,"position":4},"title":"The Book of My Life","author":"Jeffrey Hamilton","date":"September 23, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Jeffrey W. Hamilton Text: Job 19:23-27 \u00a0 I.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Each week the paper publishes its list of top selling books \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0A.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Sometimes the books are biographies, fictional stories, or fiction placed in historical settings. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0B.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0They hope that others will also purchase the books, if for no other reason than curiosity. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0C.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Many author\u2019s\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Audio"","block_context":{"text":"Audio","link":"https:\/\/www.lavistachurchofchrist.org\/cms\/category\/audio\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6988,"url":"https:\/\/www.lavistachurchofchrist.org\/cms\/are-there-passages-that-refer-to-the-lords-supper\/","url_meta":{"origin":96953,"position":5},"title":"Are there passages that refer to THE Lord’s Supper?","author":"Jeffrey Hamilton","date":"August 2, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"Question: We have been studying the Lord's supper issues and one of our main concerns is about a second offering in which only a few partake, for the reasons you listed in your article (not doing it together). We have been questioning the idea of everyone taking it a second\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Answer"","block_context":{"text":"Answer","link":"https:\/\/www.lavistachurchofchrist.org\/cms\/category\/answer\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lavistachurchofchrist.org\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96953","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lavistachurchofchrist.org\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lavistachurchofchrist.org\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lavistachurchofchrist.org\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lavistachurchofchrist.org\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=96953"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.lavistachurchofchrist.org\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96953\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":96956,"href":"https:\/\/www.lavistachurchofchrist.org\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96953\/revisions\/96956"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lavistachurchofchrist.org\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=96953"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lavistachurchofchrist.org\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=96953"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lavistachurchofchrist.org\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=96953"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}