The children of the king should use the language of the king, we should be encouraging and uplifting and fitting. We should be wise. God's word needs to be shared, especially today. I love going in your grace, you have your hand on me, and all that I do, love will keep me strong. Let's open our Bibles this morning, the book of Ecclesiastes chapter 10 verse 11. As we continue on, we mentioned, I think last week, that we are on the final stretch, or in the final stretch, that Solomon is headed home. By that meaning, he has spent years out on this long-sorted journey through the world using both his wealth and his power to try to find out if there's some life under the sun without a relationship with God. He has chronicled every step that he has taken. He has written some lengthy communications or summaries of his discoveries. He's been pretty honest about what he has hoped to find, or what he'd hoped to find also what he actually had found, and the frustration so often that went along with a life in the world without God. In chapter 12, where we will be in about three weeks' time, and we'll take the last chapter together as one, Solomon will have gone full circle. He'll return to the place that he started, the place where he had walked away from the Lord in the middle of his life to try to go another route, and only to come back. And I am sure from chapter 12 that we will one day meet Solomon in heaven, but man, he wasted a lot of years. However, God used those wasted years to teach us so that we wouldn't have to go down that same road. Well, in chapter 10 and 11, Solomon, as he heads home, begins to not so much do observational kind of teachings in terms of what's out there and what we don't need as much as kind of conclusionary. And he speaks specifically about the wise, and the wise by definition, those that know God and walk with God, and the foolish, those that try to live life on their own, don't really need God's input or God's help, aren't led by his spirit, won't obey his word, won't seek us, we'll have their own kind of agenda. So last week as we looked at the first 10 verses, we saw that Solomon said a little foolishness, even in the heart of someone who is known and held in reputation for wisdom and honor, can ruin that man's reputation, that just a little foolishness can ruin a good name, a good testimony. We'll take much from you because that's how foolishness works, trying to go it alone. He went on to say how much foolishness can't be hidden in the lives of those who set God aside, that it's going to come out. If you don't walk with God, it'll show. No matter how hard you try to clean up your act, you know, the fact that you're not listening to God or depending upon his strength will come out. And then he turned to foolish rulers, and he said, you know, there's rulers that just serve themselves, and then there are foolish, angry responses from those who are underneath their authority, and we should avoid those angry responses. And then he finished in the last part of eight, nine, and ten, the verses there and said, you know, there's a foolish way to go to work. If you don't plan, if you're not careful, if you just kind of throw your weight into something, you're going to work harder and get less out of it, and you might very well hurt yourself in the process. Well, this morning as we finish chapter 10, we're going to continue on with this foolish verses wise comparison that Solomon is making as he kind of heads to his conclusion. Next week he'll spend, or actually the last next two weeks, has a lot to say about being diligent and careful in the way that you live your life. But this morning was very pronounced Hebrew, a poetic language. He wants to make some comparison in particular about how our mouth works, both the mouth of the fool and the mouth of the wise. And he goes out of his way to talk about babblers who engage themselves and then lives that are indulgent, gossip and censure, the complaints about others, the place that we stand when we do that, and I think they're pretty convicting verses. They certainly can be if you want to do that. On the other hand, they're very encouraging as well. If you are a parent listening this morning, you probably remember your child's mouth phase. It's that time in their life when everything they discover first goes in their mouth, whether it's a stone or a toy or their fist, cockroach, doesn't matter. It's going down the throat, you know, saying, it's disgusting to us, not very disgusting to them. The good news is that phase usually passes very quickly. The bad news is trouble with our mouths does not. James spent 10 verses in chapter three, although he comes back to the same subject often to say to us, you know, the one thing that is obviously out of our control until the Lord takes control can be proved with our mouths so that he is able to say early on, if you don't stumble anyone with your mouth, you're a perfect man able to bridle the whole body, or if you will, if you have this under God's control, everything else is downhill because this is the hardest area, what you say, how you say it, the use of your tongue. James goes on to describe, you know, a horse can be with a little bit in its mouth because of the pain that it causes can be turned in any direction by the rider or a large ship by just having a little rudder can go wherever the pilots decides that it should go. And then he said, your tongue's pretty small and yet it boasts great things and it can set forests on fire and bring great destructions and it is driven by a world of iniquity. In other words, until God takes the helm, this tongue is going to be a pretty good revealer of the heart and also the ruiner of lives. So James said, no man can tame the tongue, it's an unruly evil, it's filled with deadly poison, we curse the man and bless God with it, it's water, salt and fresh all at the same time, it shouldn't be that way. So that's really what Solomon is going to speak to us about, that our mouths will either reflect that we're wise, in other words we're walking with God depending upon him or we're foolish, we've decided to just go it alone. Jesus in Matthew 15, I believe, said to the disciples, nothing that goes into your mouth will defile you. But that which comes out of your mouth will because that comes from the heart and he tells us very clearly that our heart can be revealed, at least the condition of our heart is by the way that we speak and what we say and how we say it. So this morning God's wisdom through Solomon the returning wayward king on our mouths and our behavior is at wiser as it foolish. Verse 11 says, a serpent may bite even when it is not charmed and the babbler is no different. The words of a wise man's mouth, they are gracious but the lips of a fool shall swallow him up. The words of his mouth begin with foolishness and the end of his talk is raving madness, a full, multiplies words. No man knows what is to be, who can tell him what will be after him, the labor of fools worries them, for they do not even know how to go to the city. My dad years ago, when I was younger, used to tell my sister and I, that the best way to save our face is to keep the bottom of its shut and then he'd kind of smirk. But I guess he's right, I mean speech is obviously the way that we communicate to each other more often than not. We certainly body language and facial expression compliment what we say but it usually starts with what we say. We even use sign language sometimes, not appropriately to tell others how we feel but for the most part it's speech. So there's something to be said as James warns us about bridling our life and our hearts, how do we communicate with our mouths, what do we say, how do we speak. And James was able to quickly say if you can find discipline there, you'll find discipline everywhere because look even with the best of your intentions and being very careful, words are quickly misunderstood. People are offended by what you say or how you say it. I talk for a living. I do a lot of talking. I'm not very good at that kind of stuff, even I think I'm insensitive to it but at the same time you see the fall out coming at you fairly quickly. I like text messaging but I should tell you if I talk to my phone half the time it doesn't say what I just said which is now my excuse for everything. And the other thing is emails don't send emotion. So you can write things down and think that you'll be heard but people, they don't understand it, they don't like it, it can be hurtful, maybe you didn't mean it that way but it happens that way. Well notice what a lot of speaking does and Solomon takes in verse 11 and in these verses that to heart and he says look. An unattended snake might bite without warning and he won't bite because he's been stirred or you stepped on him or you walked in on his nest, he'll just bite because he's a snake. That's just his nature. He's just going to, that's what he does, he doesn't have to warn you. The babbler does the same thing. The more words you speak, the more undisciplined you're loose ton, the more unattended a wicked heart, the more damage that's going to come out from your life. You'll have words that cut and bite and have an edge and destroy without concern, babbler, fool, not wise, they're all kind of the same comparison. They hurt others. There's a verse in Proverbs chapter 12 that Solomon wrote that says there is one who speaks like the piercings of a sword while the tongue of a wise man will bring health but then there's one that just cutting edge kind of language may even be somebody with a sharp tongue. Verbal terminators if you will or you have said something yourself and in a moment's time you go man I should have said that but by then it's too late, the damage has been done and people want to know what you said and why did you mean that, why did you say it that way? That's not what I read and the more you say the worse it is, it just seems to be better not to be the fool or just to be rambling on about every little thing. Notice in verse 12 we are told that the lips of a fool, the fella who doesn't consider the Lord and just talks away, he will eventually swallow himself up. It's one thing to hurt others and you're babbling but there's great harm that can come to you. You can lose your friends or your family or reputation, your credibility, a sharp tongue can invite a split lip from someone who didn't receive it very well. Notice the contrast here that a wise, the words of a wise man will bring grace while the fool begins talking nonsense, foolishness and then he ends up like a raving maniac. His conclusions far more bizarre than the premise that got him started to begin with. So far cry from what Solomon will say later in Proverbs that when you speak a word that is fit or proper for the occasion, it's kind of like putting an apple that is made of gold in a frame that is made of silver, it stands out, everyone notices it. But a fool, he just talks, doesn't have anything to say, his words are empty, they're devoid of any real content, they start off crazy and they get crazier as they continue. Profanity I think is a pretty good example of empty words, they're fillers, everyone seems to be good at them. I mentioned to our congregation this morning when we were meeting there, we did a funeral for a fella a few, seven, eight years ago, maybe longer, who was in a motorcycle gang and he had been shot and killed and his dad was a believer so he asked if he could do the funeral here and he said sure. But his brother was hardly a believer, in fact he was out on drugs, he was kind of a rough street guy and when he came up to speak about his brother I think he used the F word from this pulpit, I think 23 or 24 times in describing his brother, it's all he knew. So I had the unenviable task of having to follow him back up to the pulpit. So I brought a spray can and a towel and I go, let me just clean up what he left behind here and I did one of these, everyone kind of laughed and I guess it was, you know, kind of got by that kind of awkward situation in the church. But that's all he knew to say, he didn't have words, he didn't have an ability to speak, he just kept talking and the longer he talked the worse things tended to get. I had a fella maybe four or five years ago that came up to me after the servant, after the servant or after the service in the morning and he said, "Hey, pastor, that was a hell of a servant." I didn't know what to say of that. I didn't know how to respond. I think he meant it as a compliment but it was a little uncomfortable, my goodness. When Paul wrote to the Colossians in chapter four, he said that your speech should always be with grace that is seasoned with salt so that you might know how to answer every man. In other words, we as Christians, because we know the Lord and God guards our hearts and we've been changed, have to really be careful about how we go about speaking because we live in a world that just people shoot their mouths off. In fact, maybe more than ever before in my lifetime, now people all want to be heard. They all have something to say, everybody's got an opinion, maybe it's the talk radio, maybe it's the Facebook, Twitter, all that kind of stuff where people can just shoot off their mouth and then run away and hide, I don't know. But the children of the king should use the language of the king. We should be encouraging and uplifting and fitting. We should be wise. God's word needs to be shared, especially today. Unfortunately, so often we find the church talking like the world, that we are sent to reach, not sent to emulate. We are told in verse 14 that a fool will just continue talking. And then he makes this application, though no one knows what's coming next, and no one can really say what's coming later, the fool just keeps talking. So much so that his labor just weirdies everyone around them, and yet with all of that talking, he doesn't even know the way home. Solomon, in essence says of the babbler or the foolish speaking, babbling is always disproportionate to the need. In other words, by adding words to a problem, he just makes the problem worse. All he does is talk, his claim to fame is talking. I looked up on the internet this week, and I'll share it with you, and you know it's true because it was on the internet, that what the average daily words of a person is in our culture. Like how many words do you speak a day, or how much do you have to say? I just thought of average basis, and I looked at four or five different guesses, different studies that have done, and the average was basically that if you just averagely just speak like most people do, your words could fill a book with 50 pages of text a day. That means in a year you'd produce about 132 volumes that are all 400 pages long, or in your lifetime if you lived to be 70, 3,000 volumes with 1.5 million pages of just your talk, and then the Lord says he's going to bring every word into account, I'm thinking, "Oh no!" And that's the average for some of you, you have a whole lot more. But I don't know if that's good. The Babler says a lot, "The saints are warned not to do that." Proverbs chapter 10 says, "In the multitude of words, no sin is lacking, but with the restraint of our lips there is wisdom." A full vince's feelings we read, a wise man holds them back. Even the fool is counted wise when he holds his peace, you know, the old line, right? You want to be considered a fool, just keep your mouth shut unless you open your mouth and people get the clue. Sometimes the greatest wisdom is found in the brevity of what has been said. For example, the Lord's prayer or the disciples' prayer, you know it, is only in Greek 56 words long. And yet Jesus used it as the model for our prayer life, both in the church and in the world and in our relationship to him in terms of what his provision is, all in 56 words. The Gettysburg Address is 256 words in all. The Ten Commandments, the moral law of God that is presented to the convinced men of their sin is only 290 words long in Hebrew. The Declaration of Independence is only 300 words long. I don't know if you've seen the latest budget report for this country. It's like a bunch of those books about that thing. So more words, less content, the babbler just keeps talking. It happens when your brain and your mouth are not in sync and your heart is removed from a relationship with God. It's like turning on the faucet and forgetting to turn it up. Notice from verse 14 that the foolish speaker thinks that he knows the future, that he has an answer for everything. Solomon says, "Who knows what's coming next? Who knows what we'll be after him?" Well, this guy does. He's talking non-stop. God speaks in a small small voice. This guy will never hear the Lord because he never speaks talk, tops speaking. Notice the sarcastic Solomon. And by the way, I mentioned you a lot. I think sarcasm is a gift of the Spirit. I say that because I like being sarcastic. It's a guess, to me, the best way to communicate, but that's not true for everyone. But notice what Solomon says. The guy keeps talking. He'll wear you out with your talking. And when it gets right down to it, even though he tells you he knows everything, he doesn't even know the way at home. I love that way ago, Solomon. That's sarcastic, tongue in cheek. He doesn't know the way at home. He doesn't know the router elevator will take. See, this is a dumb guy. So I don't know if you've ever tried to talk to someone who talks all the time. We have people like that sometimes come in for counseling and they literally are very easy to counsel with because you just have to sit and do this. Oh, yeah, for an hour. And then they say, we'll get back to this next week. They will talk, not say anything, waste your time, waste their time. They don't have answers, but they think they have all the answers. The babbler, the fool. Solomon then turns in verse 16 from the foolish speaker to the foolish overseer. And he has something to say about the government, the overseer, and our reaction to it. He says in verse 16, "Woe to you, O land, when your king is a child. And when your king's feast in the morning, and blessed are you, O land, when your king is the son of nobles and your princes, they feast at the proper time. They feast for strength, not for drunkenness." And then he goes on and he says, "Because of laziness, the building will decay. And through idleness of hands, the house will leak. A feast to be made for laughter, wine makes us merry, money answers everything." Now, Solomon turns from the speaker to the overseer, and by the way, if you've been with us going through the book of Ecclesiastes, it seems like every chapter has something about leadership, the good, the wise, the foolish, and the not so, the good, the bad, the foolish, and the wise. And now he turns to the leader. And he has a lot to say about the foolish versus the wise. Notice the words that he chooses here in just these four verses. Feast and drunkenness and laziness and idleness and uses the word feast again and wine and making merry and money being the solver of all the problems. So Solomon now turns to what he has seen, what he now wants to warn us about, about people with too much time on their hands and too much or too many resources at their disposal. And rather than using them to serve others, they are using them to serve themselves. He calls them fools. "Woe to you, O land, when your king is childish, and the princes under him are self-serving." The word indulgence by definition means to eat or to drink too much. In verse 16 he describes under the woes, princes who are willing to have a party and get drunk in the morning, five o'clock somewhere kind of guys, right? And then there are those, verse 17, who use times of feasting or eating not to get drunk, to strengthen themselves for the proper use. They are disciplined and they are wise in the ways that they go. Some go drinking to get drunk, to excess. Others are controlling or being controlled in their fleshly desires by their obligation to serve others. When Isaiah wrote in chapter 5 to the children of Israel, he warned them about the way that things were going and he says, "Woe to you that rise up early in the morning and follow an intoxicating drink." And then you continue all night till the wine inflames you. And woe to you that then become wise in your own eyes, prudent in your own sight. You drink wine, you mix intoxicating drinks, you take bribes as justice, and you take the way the justice from a righteous man and the Lord was warning through Isaiah, this is the kind of stuff that was going on, certainly the stuff that Solomon in his day saw as well. Gluttony, drunkenness will ruin you. You know, the Roman government, which was in power when Jesus was here and the early church was here, by the time it collapsed, especially in the east, they had no enemies strong enough to overthrow them. They were literally kings of the world. However, they had no moral base from which to survive. And so the rottenness in the hearts of the people, the perversion, the Roman Empire collapsed. It wasn't defeated, it just fell apart. But when the king is immature and his offices are self-serving, the future for that land looks very bleak. Look, God has put people in power according to the Bible to serve people, to protect others, not to serve themselves. And age certainly is no guarantee of wisdom, but wise leaders serve. They aren't serve, they serve. The Bible tells us that immature and self-seeking leaders are sometimes used by God to punish a nation. And if you go back and read Isaiah chapter three, the Lord says to Jerusalem before the Babylonian captivity, I'm going to take Jerusalem from you, Judah. I'm going to take the stock and the store and the bread and the water and the mighty men of war. I'm going to take from you the captains and the judges and the prophets and the honorable men and the skillful artisans. I'm going to take them all the way for you and I'm going to give you in return a child to oversee you. I'm going to make your ruler a child who is just going to be insolent and going to take his own way and he's going to set neighbor against neighbor. That's your reward for just setting me aside. You're going to have little kids or people like little kids taking from you. It became a judgment of God. That's the warning here. We read in verse 18 of the incompetence of the leader that he's too busy serving himself and while he does in his laziness and in his idleness, those are the two operative words, things fall apart. The house begins to leak, the building begins to fall apart. You want things to fall apart. Here's what you have to do. Nothing. Just wait. Time will cause everything to rot. If you don't clean, if you don't paint, if you don't mow the lawn, if you don't pull the weeds, if you're lazy, idle, self-serving, if there's no willingness to serve to take care of others, the house goes to ruin. Here's the person that uses their office, their place for themselves. They don't hold it to serve others. We have ushers and they have badges on so people can recognize them, but a badge doesn't make an usher. An usher is someone who serves you, helps you, meets you where you are, sees if there's a problem, tries to anticipate what you might need. When I went to ministry school at Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa, Pastor Chuck used to say that there are people, sometimes they'd come in the church on Sundays and say, "Who are the elders here?" And Chuck would go, "Well, look around. The elders, they're eldering." In other words, you know, you do what you are given to do. You're not lazy, you're just serving. The fool is self-serving. The saint serves others and his life shows it. You've gone to Israel with us before. Most folks love when we go first to the Sea of Galilee up in the north. It's beautiful, it's placid, there's lots of the gospel that occurred in all the little hamlets and portions of the lake, and the place couldn't be prettier. You know, this is a vibrant lake up above. There are three headwaters to the Jordan Springs that flow into it and give its vitality. And then to the south, outflows the Jordan River, and it, depending on the rain amounts, it's sometimes raging, sometimes trickling, but it's always taking in and giving out. But at the end of the Jordan River is a dead sea, that's what it's called, dead, and it is dead. There's no outflow. It just takes. It doesn't give out. And the place around the dead sea looks like a moonscape. There's sinkholes and, you know, it's just awful looking. Now one day the Lord is going to come and water from his throne are going to go to heal. And then it's going to give life to others, but for now it's dead. So there's, you know, those who are indulgent, those who are incompetent, those who just don't care, don't help, don't serve. And then notice in verse 19 is the philosophy of the fool. Let's have a party. Let's have a drink. We can bribe our way to what we want. You know, eat what you want, drink what you want, take what you want. The saint dies to himself. The fool serves only himself. And Solomon sees that everywhere. And I think it's wise for us to take note of that because we're living at a time when politics and opinions and side taking have never been more pronounced. And yet you're the church. God has put you in this world at this time. How are you supposed to reach it, affect it, make a difference? Well, Solomon's last word to us maybe will give us some direction. He says in verse 22, us, do not curse the king even in your thoughts. And don't curse the rich in your bedroom. For a bird of the air may carry your voice and a bird in flight may tell the matters. Or if you will, the word may get out. Solomon was king by the way when he wrote don't curse the king. I guess that would be a little so of serving. But it does have an application because let's face it in our political life that we live today. Everyone has an opinion. Everyone likes to share it and the church, unfortunately, rather than carrying in their mouths the gospel, tends to look a lot like the world. And they engage, not there isn't things to be discussed, certainly there are and things that are important. But let's face it, life giving is Bible-driven, right? God's Word brings life. So slander and evil talk, usually begin with yourself. You have an opinion, you form it, you might privately share it with someone that you have confidence in, believe it's a safe person to lay it out before and you voice your things. But Solomon's word to you is it's probably not going to stay hidden. And if you can't say it publicly, maybe you shouldn't say it at all. Wise saints, we, as God's people, transparent, we should be encouraging and inspiring, hopefully people that talk to you or leave your presence just loving God and thinking about his goodness. We shouldn't be hidden agendas or too faced. We don't want to talk out of both sides of our mouth. But complaining and slandering seem to be the order of the day. And the church has to now find out what are we supposed to do in the midst of that? How would God have us to make an effect upon our generation? Easy to join in, quite a bit harder to be a light to those in darkness. When Solomon wrote Proverbs, chapters 6, he recorded in verses 16, 7, 18, 19, seven things that he said God hates. I don't know about you, but when you read through a Bible and you run into things like God loves these things or God hates these things, I would pay attention. Because if he's going out of his way to say, "I hate this," you might want to get to where you're hating him as well. Well, of the seven things that are in that list, three of them have to do with our mouths. One of them is the Lord hates a lying tongue, someone who doesn't tell the truth. Second of all, God hates a false witness, which is again a lying tongue, but now about someone's behavior or character, making things up, things that aren't true or swearing to things that didn't happen. The third one is he who sows discord, division amongst God's people, amongst the bread. Those who, with their mouths, bring division to a relationship can sever friendships, disrupt fellowships, foul people's relationships with one another simply by what they say. God hates that. Solomon says here, "You can start as a believer by not cursing the king, even in your thoughts." That's self-talk. That's where criticism starts. Check yourself before your mouth even opens. He takes you on this progression where he says, "You might curse the rich if you will. You don't like or have something wicked to say about." Don't even do it in your bedroom because a little birdie may come along and pretty soon everyone seems to hear it or have heard what you thought you were saying quietly. I don't know if you've ever spoken to somebody and they tell you something and then you want to say to them, "How do you know that?" And they say things like, "A little birdie told me it comes from this verse." Well, let me give you a suggestion when it comes to this kind of stuff that I've shared before, but I have it on a card in my office. I think it's worthwhile knowing five questions to ask someone who brings to you some information that you really don't need, wants to bring some gossip, wants to share some idea, wants to just shoot their mouth off of something. Here's the first question. Why are you telling me that? I found that that's very helpful. People say, "Hey, Bachelorette, tell you something." And they started talking, "Hey, wait a minute. Why are you telling me that? What is your purpose in laying out something that doesn't even concern me? What I need to know?" Second of all, where did you get that information? Who did you speak to? What is the source of your information? Who told you that? Now if they're not going to willing to tell you that, then you can stop and go, "I don't need to know then. I don't want to share any little secrets or little discussions." The third question I usually ask is, especially if it's negative about someone, have you gone to them to try to fix that? Clear it up, bring it to their attention, confront them with maybe sin, help them to get through some forgiveness issue. Have you gone directly to them to clear them up? My fourth question is usually, "Have you checked out the facts?" Be sure about what you're telling me. Are you sure? Is the information true? The fifth one usually stops them in their tracks. I usually say the last thing I say is, "Okay, may I quote you about that?" I'd like to go and tell the person, "You're my source of information." That usually brings an end to it. We're going to actually go over those five things again as we get a little further on in chapter 11 and 12, so you may be reminding you. Look, we have to live godly lives, and especially in this world today, in what we say, how we slander, how we just babble, what it does to our testimony, we should be very careful. We should be very careful. The fool lets his tongue run wild, the wise will seek victory over it and as a Christian, God has a hold on my heart. I actually have the capacity to do the right thing. Don't have to babble without content, babble destructively, multiply words, irrational kind of conclusions, overindulge, beat, show no discretion, go the way of the fool. Look, look, we're God's people, and this is an important area of growing. In fact, James said, you're real in this area. If this is an area that God has control of, I think it's in James chapter 3, verse 3, it says, "If anyone doesn't stumble in the word, he's a perfect man able to bridle the whole body." You can handle this, everything else is downhill, and let's face it, in this world today, people are freaking out, and you and I can have peace. And they don't know where to turn, but we do, and we can live our lives with joy. The world sees chaos, and we see God's plan, and so we trust him, and we can certainly show the world by our mouths and the things that we say who it is that we serve. Amen. All right, let's pray together. Father, thank you for your word to us this morning, convicting word, Lord, to be sure. Father, that you might take our words, our lips, our thoughts, and you might gather them to yourself so that what comes out of our mouth will honor you, and especially in this day of opinion sharing and harsh words and criticism on every channel on the television. May we speak life and life giving words to our neighbors, to those that we come in contact with, rather than an hour of political argument, may we spend 10 minutes of biblical witnessing so that we can pass along that which will last forever. Eternal life comes from your son. Maybe this morning you are caught up in the world's banter, and instead you find yourself sitting at home today isolated and angry, maybe fearful, but you don't need to be that way. God is good all the time, and he has a perfect plan for you, and there's a world out there to reach, and he wants to use your life, but you've got to surrender it to him. Let him be in charge of the heart from which the mouth speaks. I'd like to challenge you today, all of you, to spend the next week between now and next Sunday, measuring and being aware of every word that comes out of your mouth. Just remind yourself, a lot of Ecclesiastes, chapter 10, just tell yourself that stop for a minute before you speak, and see what effect and what God would like to accomplish with your words. If you find yourself caught up, look, the good thing is, Jesus has come to give life. If you don't have a relationship with him, there's no chance you're going to be reeling these things in. It's just natural at that point, but it's very sinful. God would like to deliver you from your sin. He sent his son to save, sinners like us, and if we'll just hear his voice, his invitation if you believe in me, you have life, turn to life, and go to him. He'll give you that life, and by his spirit, he'll begin to reel in the sin that so often pushes us around, and we can have victory over him. He'll be a link wherever you're watching, whatever platform today that you're watching, that you can click and find that page that talks about receiving the Lord and letting him in, and a phone number that he can call. May we this week be a voice of reason and of life. May the church shine as the world gets darker. And may his word, your word, Lord, be heard clearly, more clearly than ever before, and may much fruit come from the church, our generation, living through this time bearing your name. Well, thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider subscribing and rating our podcast. You can visit us on the web at morningstarcc.org and on our YouTube channel at Morningstar If you'd like to support this podcast, please look us up at patreon.com/morningstarcc. Again, that's patreon, P-A-T-R-E-O-N.com/morningstarcc. (upbeat music)
