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Listen to the Word, January 6, 2020

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Today’s Podcast

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Thanks for joining me today for “A Little Walk with God.” I’m your host Richard Agee.

The new year is here. We’ve had almost a week to figure out what we expect from it. So far it looks like the same old politics and news and violence between nations. We’ve already had mass murders in our country and others. We’ve had an attack in Iraq that killed an Iranian general. We’ve escalated tensions in the Middle East again. We’ve riled the public and politicians against each other as to the actions taken in retaliation of the assault on our embassy. Was it too harsh? Was it too late or too early? Should there have been more talk? What’s next? 

Yes, this year has started out much like the last. Lots of words by lots of people and most of what is said is meaningless. The Teacher in Ecclesiastes had it right thinking about what goes on the world. “There is nothing new under the sun, and it’s all meaningless.”

We could be pretty pessimistic about the future if we chose. We could look at the new year the way I’ve described it above and give up on the world. It would be so easy to just let things go and not worry about anything because we know where everything will eventually end up. Armageddon will eventually become a reality and the world will end. Some will find salvation in believing in Jesus as their Lord and Savior. Many will be eternally lost because they refuse to believe the evidence that he is God and came to save us. 

But I don’t think that is what God expects us to do in 2020. I don’t think the year is as bleak as it appears in the news reports or as horrid as some want us to believe. We are bombarded by words that the world uses to create a picture of despair and hopelessness. However, 2000 years ago a man named John penned a description of one whom he identified as “the Word.” Not words to sway a crowd, but the originator of all there is. The one present at the beginning of creation. The one credited with giving us the ability today to put thoughts together to sway men and women. It is through his creative act that we have the ability to reason and think and communicate, unlike the rest of the animal kingdom. 

John described “the Word,” the personification of truth and grace. He came from heaven, lived among us for some 33 years, taught us what God was like, died as a sacrifice for our sins, rose from the dead, and sits as our intercessor with the Father. As we listen to the deluge of words that come through the multimedia jungle, remember the real Word. The one who brings peace to troubled hearts. The one who heals broken relationships. The one who mends shattered lives. The one who forgives and frees from guilt. The one who welcomes the outcast and brings hope to the hopeless. 

2020 will come with its share of good and bad events in life, just like every year before and after it. The question for each of us is whether we will face it with the hope that Jesus brings or try to move along without him. I can tell you from experience, the bad that comes is so much easier to handle when he is by your side. So, replace the words that the world sends your way with “the Word,” the truth, the light, the life, the way, the hope, the joy, all you could really want because he is God and knows you better than you know yourself. Give yourself to him fully and completely this year and you will find the world’s words cannot hurt you or put you in a state despair or keep you from the joy and peace he has to offer. It’s the legacy he leaves for those who follow him.

Welcome to 2020. A great year to listen to the Word. 

    You can find me at richardagee.com. I also invite you to join us at San Antonio First Church of the Nazarene on West Avenue in San Antonio to hear more Bible-based teaching. You can find out more about my church at SAF.church. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed it, tell a friend. If you didn’t, send me an email and let me know how better to reach out to those around you. Until next week, may God richly bless you as you venture into His story each day. 

What crop do you harvest? (Matthew 12:33-37) March 18, 2016

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Today’s Podcast

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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?

The Voice Bible Copyright © 2012 Thomas Nelson, Inc. The Voice™ translation © 2012 Ecclesia Bible Society All rights reserved.
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