Read Psalms 141:3  King David was a mighty man who fought many wars.  In our verse today, he uses two military word pictures to explain how we should control our talking.  Sometimes we say the wrong thing and are careless about our words.  We may say something that is rude and hurt someone’s feelings before we realize what we have said.  David says that we should set a watch before our mouth.  That is like setting an armed guard before the door of the castle.  David says that we should have some kind of a guard that checks out everything that we say before it goes out of our mouth.  That may sound complicated, but we just need to remember to be careful about what we say before we say it.  It is hard to take back rude words once we have already said them.  Just like in a castle, once a careless guard has let a spy sneak into the castle, it is hard to find the spy and then to get capture him.  The castle is already in trouble and the spy is already in.  The guard has to do a good job keeping the spy out before he gets in.  The second military word picture is that of the gate to the castle.  Our mouth is like the gate to the castle.  Sometimes when we get ready to say something smart, we should just not say it.  We want our friends to think that we are clever and say funny things, but we may not realize that the funny things that we say may hurt someone’s feelings.  Just like the guard has to keep the gate shut, we should keep our mouth shut before we say something that we will be sorry for later.  We should think before we say the wrong thing and we should think before we say a hurtful thing.  Just like the watchman and the castle gate, we must always be on our guard.  Guard your mouth!