Good morning!
Welcome to your morning coffee! May our Heavenly Father show us today how our words, our speech, or lack thereof, is impacting the ones we know and love. Father, we so quickly and so often and so easily lose sight of what sort of words we are speaking to those around us. Please give us your vision of our voices. For we are clean or unclean according to what comes out of us, not what goes into us. Help us to speak according to selfless love of others, and not out of selfish love for ourselves above others. Heavenly Father, In the name and according to the example of your son Jesus, and by the power of the Spirit, help us to speak according to your will today so that we might please you!
Your Morning Song: "Plans" by The Rend Collective Experiment
Your Morning Scripture: Proverbs 18:21-22
Death and life are in the power of the tongue,
and those who love it will eat its fruits.
He who finds a wife finds a good thing
and obtains favor from the Lord.
...
My wife and I have been married for nine years as of today (around 5pm). And as I consider our marriage, I am at peace with how deeply blessed I am to be married to such a wonderful, Godly woman. Just as with anyone else, our marriage is not perfect, but it is good. It is a source of stability and steadiness that God speaks to me through whatever struggling and suffering I might be facing.
But how? How is this wife I have found such a deep and wonder-full blessing to me and I to her?
The fruit of the tongue, our words, is death and life. And to love the tongue, to love the sound of our own voice, to love to talk, is a dangerous, messy choice that brings some good, but also destruction, pain, division, and ultimately death.
You want to what I love about my wife? She loves me more than she loves the sound of her own voice. She cares more about the impact of her words than she cares that she gets to say whatever she feels like saying.
I am deeply blessed to be in a marriage where both my wife and I have made a commitment to obey God in selflessly loving each other more than selfishly loving ourselves. We are not perfect at this. Never will be! But our selfish, careless, self-indulgent, harsh words are very, very few. Instead, we speak love to each other, with care, guarding each other's hearts with our choice of words, of attitudes, of tone, of selflessly seeking to bless the other.
And our striving, our hard work, our commitment in light of our imperfection makes the goodness of our marriage all the sweeter!
Jesus came and did what he did and is currently doing what he is doing so that my wife and I can, by the Spirit within us, love each other in this way.
Are not all relationships of any kind transformed by this kind of selfless love? Is there anyone you cannot sweetly and deeply bless by valuing their good over the sound and satisfaction of your own voice?
Let us love each other with the love of Jesus, selfless and self-sacrificing, in all things, even unto our very words!
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