SPEAK LIFE
It’s Monday morning. You wake up to an email from your boss, who gives you an unexpected task in a seemingly unreasonable timeframe. You then realize you should begin your day in prayer before you do anything else. You put the phone down and spend some time alone with God, but as you pray, your mind floods with concerns – health issues within your family, work you need to do for your job, how you’re going to pay your bills this month, an argument you had with your spouse the night before, how your kids are doing academically, and the list of prayer requests goes on for quite a while. In your heart, you know you can and should give all your cares to God, so you take a deep breath and ask God to help you with your life.
Once you get up out of bed, you discover someone went to the bathroom in the middle of the night, but they couldn’t flush it properly because the toilet clogged. You now need to spend time, time you didn’t plan for, getting rid of this nasty, smelly mess. You then try to take a relaxing shower, only to slip on a bar of soap and hit your head when you fall. As the rest of your family gets up and starts to get ready for the day, one of your kids tells you they need $200 for sports requirements for the coming school year. Shortly after, your spouse leaves for work and calls to inform you that both the low tire pressure and oil change indicator both came on during their commute. You get back to your email and see that you have a $500 bill from the electric company, probably because of using the air conditioner a lot recently to counteract the heat. STRESS is quickly starting to get the best of you, and it’s not even 10am! Before lunch, your mother calls you and tells you she’s behind on her mortgage and she might lose her house.
Pop quiz. How do you respond to your mom? Do you offer her words of love and support, or do you lash out and chastise her for not paying her bills on time? How do you let the circumstances of your day affect what you say? Do you choose to speak words of life or death?
Although this exact scenario never happened to me, and may not describe anyone’s life to a tee, I hope the message is clear. Life can be messy, difficult, and very stressful at times but the real measure of how we’re doing in our Christian walk is how we choose to deal with these circumstances and interact with others, even when we’re having a hard day. The enemy of your soul would like nothing more than to steal your joy, kill your dreams, and destroy your peace. Don’t let him do this to you – fear is a liar.
In John 16:33, Jesus tells us, “…In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world”. We also read in Matthew 6:25, “Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Finally, in Proverbs 18:20, we see, “Words satisfy the soul as food satisfies the stomach; the right words on a person’s lips bring satisfaction.” Regardless of what life sends your way, focus on speaking life to others. Living this way will help you keep your joy, fulfill your dreams, live in peace, and most importantly, silence the voice of fear.
