The exhaustion you feel is not because you were surprised, it’s because of repetition.
Adding to the indecency of the White House UFC fight, Josh Hokit attempted to land a hackneyed racist trope against Michelle Obama, and black women by extension. Just like that his cage became an echo chamber. What circulated afterward revealed a familiar pattern, one that many women, especially black women sense internally before they name it.
Because when someone repeatedly dehumanizes, mocks, or spreads falsehoods about another person, the spiritual issue isn’t whether the target deserves it—it’s what the behavior says about the condition of the speaker’s heart, character, or consciousness.
In other words, the question is not, “What did he say?”
The real question is, “What is being revealed?”
Allow me to go to Scripture and throw its full weight around. You’re about to see the uncomfortable precision of what I just stated, and how we dodge this viciousness.
Cultural Overflow
In Matthew 12:34, Jesus offers a statement that cuts through the cultural noise with surgical precision:
“Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.”
Seems pretty straight forward, until the Greek intensifies what English flattens:
ἐκ γὰρ τοῦ περισσεύματος τῆς καρδίας τὸ στόμα λαλεῖ
ek gar tou perisseumatos tēs kardias to stoma lalei
The key term, περίσσευμα (perisseuma), means overflow, a surplus, excess… it’s what spills out because something has already filled the vessel. Jesus is not describing random speech. He is describing inevitable speech. In the framework of the Greek, words are not random sparks. They are an overflow from a saturated interior word bank.
This means speech is not the origin. It is the evidence of what lays abundantly on the heart.
Jesus’ teaching is not a one-off. It is anchored in the Hebrew Bible’s understanding of the heart (lēv), where the heart is not emotion but the governing center of life. “Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life,” cautions Proverbs 4:23.
Prophetic Exposure
The heart, in biblical anthropology, is the seat of imagination, desire, cognition, and moral direction. It is the inner architecture of personhood. This is why Jeremiah in chapter 17:10 can say: “I the LORD search the heart…” because in Scripture, the heart is not hidden from consequence, even when it is hidden from human observers. Isaiah makes the same distinction in 29:13: “This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.” Because while lips can perform, it is the heart that produces. And Jesus collapses the distance between them.
For context, when Jesus says “out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks,” He is responding to accusations that He is empowered by demonic forces. His rebuttal is not gentle correction; what it is, is prophetic exposure: “You brood of vipers, how can you speak good when you are evil?”
This is Second Temple Jewish prophetic rhetoric, where speech is treated as moral evidence. Jesus is not merely offended. He is diagnosing the formation of their accusations. The logic of the passage is consistent:
Internal condition → overflow → speech
Formation → saturation → expression
Therefore, the words we speak are not spontaneous. They are symptomatic of the deep reservoirs of our hearts.
Let’s Apply
With this in mind, let’s restart this article. What should have remained a sporting event became cultural commentary.
A public figure, Michelle Obama, is reduced through a malevolent claim that she is not what she is. For many women, especially black women, this is familiar repetition in different packaging. Because black women in American public life have long been subjected to a dual distortion: hyper-visibility paired with intentional misrecognition.
Historically, since slavery, black women’s bodies have been subjected to narratives that strip them of gendered protection. Often framed and regarded merely as bodies–laboring, but not feminine, physically strong, socially available for work, but outside the careful protections historically afforded to white womanhood.
This produced what scholars describe as the masculinization of Black women: a cultural distortion that reads Black women as inherently stronger, less feminine, more durable, therefore more expendable, less protectable, and therefore more subject to ridicule or violence. That historical imagination did not disappear. It is ever present. And It shows up. It shows up in media stereotypes, political caricature, and public commentary that questions femininity, distorts identity, and even treats Black women’s presence in power as abnormal. So when a public comment reduces a black woman to a false gender claim, it does not land in a vacuum. It lands in celebration of its racist origins.
I hope that you see Matthew 12:34 as more than a personal ethic. It is a theory of formation.
Speech is what emerges when imagination, culture, theology, fear, and desire have been repeatedly trained into a person.
James K.A. Smith reminds us that human beings are “liturgical” creatures and what we love is shaped by what we repeatedly participate in. Dallas Willard similarly argues that character is formed through sustained patterns of attention and desire.
So speech is not just expression. It is the rehearsed heart made audible.
This is also why Kristin Kobes Du Mez, in Jesus and John Wayne, argues that segments of American evangelical culture have often fused Christian identity with a muscular, combative vision of masculinity, where dominance is mistaken for strength, control is mistaken for authority, and verbalized vitriol, to add to her words, is mistaken for patriotism, free speech, or legitimate political discourse. Whether one accepts every aspect of that thesis is secondary. The broader observation remains: cultural systems form instincts, and instincts eventually become speech.
A View Through God’s Lens
Yet Scripture resists simplistic conclusions. “The LORD does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7).
We can analyze patterns without pretending to fully access interior moral reality because we know that discernment is not divine omniscience. This matters especially in a time when cultural commentary has become character judgment.
Matthew 12:34 does not allow us to stop at outrage or analysis. It presses us deeper. When speech consistently dehumanizes, distorts, or diminishes, Scripture invites us to consider what kind of formation makes that speech feel natural. In this case, several layers become visible:
- Cultural narratives about Black femininity and strength
- Gender ideologies that reward dominance as virtue
- Social media ecosystems that incentivize extremity
- The persistence of racialized and gendered distortion in public imagination
None of these require us to demonize individuals. But they do require us to recognize the formation. Because overflow is rarely stems from a lone individual. It is often systemic in origin and personal in expression.
When They Go Low
An aside to my female readers, especially those carrying both public scrutiny and private fatigue, the temptation and the danger is internalizing what is being projected. But Matthew 12:34 refutes this. If speech reveals overflow, then speech is not identity. It is output. Therefore, we are not what is said about us. We are not even what is repeatedly said about us. We are what God is forming within us. And the formation is just getting started.
The gospel does not merely diagnose overflow. It promises re-formation of the source. If the heart can be filled, then the heart can be re-filled. If formation is real, then transformation is possible. This means, the most important question is not only what has been spoken, but what is being formed. Because eventually, what fills the heart will find the mouth. And that can be a warning, or it can disburse hope. Depending on what is being poured in.
We will continue to hear leaky hearts. And when we hear speech that distorts or diminishes, we do not ignore it.
We discern it, but we do not let it define reality. We return instead to the deeper work Jesus names in Matthew 12:34: The work of the heart. The work of formation. And the work of overflow. Because in the end, the mouth is not the source. It is the spillway.
And God is still working at the level of what fills the vessel. The vessels of the men that occupy the cage are full of invective malevolence and rancor. But it has less to do with our strength and more to do with their weakness. Don’t diminish yourself because of a reverberating gong. Stand in your power, even when it makes them uncomfortable, because you can’t change their hearts. You’re only responsible for what’s in yours.
