Today’s Podcast
Today’s Bible reading plan:
Read it in a year – Isaiah 62-66
see the whole year’s plan [here](http://www.bible-reading.com/bible-plan.pdf)
Today’s Devotional
Matthew 12:33-37
Jesus: Good trees produce good fruits; bad trees produce bad fruits. You can always tell a tree by its fruits. You children of snakes, you who are evil—how could you possibly say anything good? For the mouth simply shapes the heart’s impulses into words. And so the good man (who is filled with goodness) speaks good words, while the evil man (who is filled with evil) speaks evil words. I tell you this: on the day of judgment, people will be called to account for every careless word they have ever said. The righteous will be acquitted by their own words, and you evildoers will be condemned by your own words.
What do Jesus’ words mean for us today?
I’m not much of a gardner. Everything I try to grow seems to wither and die. If I had to depend on what I could grow to feed myself and my family, we’d all starve. In fact, some have told me that I can kill artificial plants! So I really don’t care much for the first part of Jesus’ analogy here. I suppose if I lived on a farm or lived in an area where life absolutely depended on living on what you grew yourself, I’d probably learn how to make green things live a lot better than I do now. But for the last fifty years, you just wouldn’t want me to take care of your garden or flowers or yard unless you liked looking at dead things. I’m just really good at killing plants.
But I do understand what Jesus talks about in these words. Especially as He goes on to talk about what comes out of our mouth. I understand that good fruit doesn’t come out of good plants. I can attest to that as I’ve tried my hand at growing tomatoes and cucumbers a couple of times. And you know what? Good tomatoes and cucumbers never grew from the bad plants I managed to grow. My friends and neighbors could have bumper crops, but my scawny little vines would just produce…nothing.
So it is with the words we speak. When we are dried up and rotten inside, we can’t get good words out that will bless and edify others. For us to really help lift others with our words, we need to be right on the inside. That’s what Jesus is telling these blowhard religious leaders. They can’t help the people they are supposed to be leading because they are rotten on the inside. Nothing good can come from them until they clean up their act from the inside out.
When I first started working as a fairly young teenager, my father gave me some good advice. He said, “If you want to get a good report from you boss, make your boss look good. Unless your boss gets good reports, he won’t know what a good report looks like and won’t be able to give you one.” I didn’t think much about that at the time because when you’re a teenager parents don’t know anything. But as I matured, I found my dad’s sage advice to be very true.
Good words come from good people. So from a business perspective, a good report can only come from someone who is also getting a good report. If you work for someone who is getting a bad report, how can he or she give you a good report? After all, if you’re working for him, aren’t you part of the cause for his bad report? Aren’t you part of the reason the work isn’t getting done to his boss’ satisfaction?
How much truer this philosophy runs in the spiritual realm. When evil runs around inside your head and your heart continuously, guess what spills out of your mouth? You can’t help but let it out. You can’t hold back the atrocious vocabular that spews out of you. You can’t help but cut and hurt and defame with the words you use. It’s who you are when you let evil run around in your head and your heart.
But when you let Christ into your life and let Him clean you up from the inside out, your vocabulary changes. You begin to see people in a different light and your speech takes on new characteristics. You begin to bless instead of curse. You begin to praise instead of demean. You begin to extol instead of admonish. Good comes from within you as you share His love to those around you and begin to edify others instead of destroying them with your words.
How will we be judged? Jesus says we will be called to account for our words. I don’t want to be careless in letting words slip that will inadvertantly cause pain or demean or degrade someone else. I don’t want to be guilty of being careless with my tongue, an instrument that James says is so powerful. Sometimes it’s best to just keep my mouth shut rather than let a careless word slip out that might hurt or tarnish the character of another of God’s creation. Perhaps it’s best to let Him sort out who is careless, good, or bad. Perhaps it’s best to just always live by the rule my grandmother lived by for as long as I can remember. “If you can’t say something good about someone, don’t say anything at all.”
People judge us by our words. Do they see you harvesting a crop of love or hate?
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