Speaking Sweet Words

"Pleasant words are like a honeycomb, sweetness to the soul and health to the bones."
Proverbs 16:24 (NKJV)

Have you ever eaten something that just did not taste right? Maybe you have even had the experience of baking something or preparing some type of food that once it was finished and you sampled what you had made something was not right. What you ate or what you made was supposed to taste a certain way but the experience did not match the expectation.  Often the problem is a missing ingredient or the wrong ingredient in the food you ate or made.  If the wrong thing is put into food it will not taste right and it can even make you sick.  One ingredient can make a big difference.

Proverbs 16:24 says that our words can be sweet to our soul and give health to our bones.  Some people get the spirit and the soul mixed up and fail to understand the significance of what Proverbs is saying here.  We are a three part being: spirit, soul, and body (1 Thessalonians 5:23).  Simply put, our spirit is the inner man, our soul is where our intellect and emotions are, and our body is the physical part.  Our spirit becomes a new creation in Christ at salvation but our soul and body still need some work.  The Bible tells us that our words can have an impact on us, our words are like ingredients in our life.

If we are continually saying the wrong things our life we not be the way we want it to be; a necessary ingredient is missing.  Proverbs tell us that the right kinds of words can be sweet to our soul and health to our bones.  People who are continually talking about the wrong things have problems in their thoughts and emotions, and people who are always talking about physical problems never seem to overcome them. By speaking God's Word, by saying what the Bible says about our life, we speak sweet words that can soothe our soul and strengthen our body.  Start speaking God's sweet words today and see what a difference they will make in your life!

Where Do You Live?

"Then Jesus said to those Jews who believed Him, "If you abide in My Word, you are My disciples indeed. 
And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."
John 8:31-32 (NKJV)

Everyone lives somewhere.  Some people live in apartments and some in houses. Some people live in the city and some people live out in the country.  But the fact is that everyone has some place that they call home, the place where they live.  Although a person may travel and visit another place for a while they still have something that they always come back to that they call their home.  There are some places you might visit, and even if you stay in that place for a long period of time, that place is not your home, it is not the place where you really live.

In John 8 Jesus was talking to people who believed in Him and agreed with His teaching.  Jesus told them that if they really wanted to be His disciples then there was something that they had to do.  Jesus said to be a disciple, to follow Him, a person had to "abide" in His Word.  The word "abide" in this verse means "to stay".  This means that no matter what else may be going on in your life, no matter what else you may be involved in, you always come back to God's Word and always go first to the Word for whatever questions or concerns you have in life; that is what it means to abide in the Word.

Jesus said being a disciple means to stay in is His Word.  Was Jesus talking about building a house out of Bibles, building something to look like a Bible, or wallpapering your home with Scriptures?  No, what Jesus meant is that the place we live our life, what we always come back to, is the Word.  A disciple of Jesus is someone who lives a life that is governed by the Word of God and no matter what they do in their life they will always come back to the Bible.  Are you a true disciple of Jesus?  The answer depends on where you live.

All That Glitters Is Not Gold

"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death."
Proverbs 14:12 & 16:25 (NKJV)

In his play "The Merchant Of Venice", Shakespeare used the phrase "All That Glitters Is Not Gold".  While he was not the first or the last to use that phrase many people know it because of him.  What Shakespeare and others were saying with this phrase was that just because something looks good does not mean that it is good.  One example of this is something that is commonly known as "Fool's Gold", which looks like gold but is actually the mineral pyrite.  Appearances can be deceiving and while something may look good, or look like gold, is it actually not and quite possibly something very bad.

Proverbs 14:12 and 16:25 both say the same thing, a way can seem right but it leads to death.  We think of death as an ending but usually when the Bible talks about death it means separation.  There are things that may look good to us but they will separate us from God and His plan for our life.  With relationships, our job, the choices we make, and the decisions we face, sometimes things look good, and they may even make sense to us, but it is a completely wrong thing to do or get involved in.  If we choose the wrong things we will miss out on God's best and the blessed life He wants us to have.

We need a way to be able to discern the good and the bad, to know what is right, and which way to go in life.  God has given us the help we need through the leading of the Holy Spirit; He will always help us to see the difference between what is really good and what just looks good.  We can learn to recognize the direction of the Holy Spirit by spending time reading the Bible, the Holy Spirit guided men to write it, and by talking to God in prayer and listening for the direction of the Holy Spirit.  We can expect the Holy Spirit to help us in life, to see what is really good and what only looks good. 

Which Seat Are You Sitting In?

"But God, who is rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us,
even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved),
and raised us up together, and made us sit together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus,"
Ephesians 2:4-6 (NKJV)

Have you ever had the situation of being on an airplane and you found out you were in the wrong seat?  Maybe you looked at your boarding pass and it said 25E and you sat down in seat 25F by mistake.  This is something that has happened to me and I have seen it happen several times to others.  While this situation is usually resolved quickly and easily I have seen people get somewhat upset when they are sitting in the wrong seat and someone asks them to move.  But if we are in the wrong seat we can miss some of the things that we would have received if we had been in the right seat.

The Bible helps us to understand our true position now that we are in Christ.  Once we have received Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior we are "in Him" and who we are in Christ is now our true identity.  No matter who or what we were before, no matter what we did or did not do right in the past, we now have a new identity in Christ.  In Ephesians we are told that we are seating together with Christ in heavenly places.  This means that spiritually speaking we were united with Jesus and identified with Him in His death and resurrection so that today we are seated with and in Him.

Sometimes believers do not understand who they are in Christ, where they are spiritually located.  If we will spend time reading and studying the Bible it will be easy for us to locate and identify ourselves as being seated in Christ.  Some Christians are sitting in the wrong seat, spiritually speaking.  They have seen or heard something that made them believe that they are something other than who they are in Christ.  For us to live a life in the blessings that God provided for us through Jesus, we need to know who we are in Him and that we are seating together with Jesus in heavenly places.