The Vanity of Words

Multitude of Words

“In the multitude of dreams and many words there is also vanity.” Ecclesiastes 5:7

I often wonder why we are so long-winded, using 20 words when 7 or 8 would be perfectly comprehensible. I am just as bad as anyone else. Is it that we like the sound of our own words? Perhaps we are not confident that others understand us so we go off into long repetition and explanations? Or perhaps we just get carried away in the plethora of our own thoughts? Perhaps the writer of Ecclesiastes is right – it’s vanity?

Like so many of you, I have sat through my share of long boring sermons where the preacher doesn’t just make his point, he repeats it half a dozen times and in half a dozen ways. I have heard prophecies that do the same thing, repeating everything at least three times – as if you didn’t hear it first time.

Knowing that I am just as bad at this as anybody else, I urge us all to have more confidence in our words. If God really does give us the words to speak then they will not fall to the ground. If they are just our own words then we will all hear the thud as the “lead balloon” crashes to the ground.

I mean, God didn’t say, “Let there be light because . . . .” Did He?