I was amused by my son when his mother told him that the item he was chewing on “doesn’t go in your mouth.” His reply was “does it go in my ear?” I don’t know if he is old enough to have developed a smart mouth or if he was just curious, but it got me to thinking about how often we are told what not to do but not what to do. I see this often times in lessons designed for young people. They tend to focus on the big “Don’t”s of adolescent. As important as these are, this focus can leave kids with the impression that Christianity is a faith based on what you don’t do rather than a faith of action. The truth is a person can never do any of the “Don’t”s but still be lost. True Christian living is as much about the thing good works and action we do as it is about what we avoid. A faith that has no action is dead.
Let’s say you travel back in time six hundred years or so. Luckily, you happen across a fellow that speaks English. Upon hearing your tale, he describes you as nice, smart, and handsome. Wouldn’t you feel good? You shouldn’t. As Sol Steinmetz in his book, Semantics Antics , explains; Nice originally meant someone who was foolish, ignorant, senseless, or absurd (middle English 1300). Smart for the first 300 years of its use meant causing pain, sharp, cutting, or severe, a sense that survives in the idiom "smart as a whip.” Handsome wasn’t complimentary. When coined around 1425, it just meant easily handled; it didn’t have its current positive connotation until 1590. You might think he said you were a kind, intelligent, good looking bloke, when in reality he said you were a foolish pain easily dealt with. Words have an annoying habit of changing meaning over time in the same language and it becomes even more compli...
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