So many words!

 I'm going to take a detour from the one-year Bible and I'm going to write about something in John chapter 8 that caught my attention this week. Jesus had just finished with the woman who was caught in adultery. He had just told her no one accuses her so neither does he. And he told her to go and sin no more. His next audience was filled with more Pharisees and more Jewish leaders who were beginning to press him and ask him who he was, who his father was and where he was from. These were things they were doing in order to trap him and seize him. However, in verse 20 the Bible says no one sees him because his hour had not yet come.

 But the Jews continued to press him and continued to push him, to try to make him trip up with his words. And that is where I found verse 26 and read it in an entirely different way. Verse 26 says" I have many things to speak and to judge concerning you, but he who sent me is true; and the things which I heard from him, these I speak to the world." When I read this I thought about times that I have been pushed and questioned and pressured about topics that I have tried to explain and discuss with people and they just do not hear what I am saying. Sometimes I want to say I have so many words to say to you, but I can't because they would not be god-pleasing words. I wonder if this is what Jesus was thinking? That he had so many things in his mind in his earthly mind, that he could say, however, he chose to take his disciplined mind and respond with - However, I speak the things from him - which means he only speaks the things of his father. 

I would love to have that kind of discipline when I am pushed and pressured by people who choose not to understand me or who choose to understand what I'm doing but disagree with it and want to make me fail. Oh yes, there are people who do have other agendas even for us as Christians. They do not want to see us succeed with spreading the gospel. They do not want us to succeed in being kind and gentle and loving and patient. They do not enjoy seeing the fruit of the spirit. Therefore, they will do things to try to undermine what the Holy Spirit has been growing in us and we must have that discipline to listen to the Holy Spirit and to listen to the words of Jesus. We must remember that our words and how we respond have deep meaning. How I choose to use my words matters. I may have authority to confront. I may have authority to put someone in their place. But is that what the father wants me to do in that moment?

 Therefore teach me o Lord your ways because they are higher than my ways. Tune my ears to hear what you are saying to me Lord so that I only say those things that you are saying. Help me be more like Jesus in using the language that accomplishes what you would have accomplished here on Earth as it is in heaven. 

This whole passage has stayed with me all week long and has convicted me and how I am responding to people. I have found that my words are very quick to be judgmental, irritable, prideful, and even selfish. Perhaps because I'm tired and I haven't spent as much time with a father as I should. When I was sharing this idea with a friend of mine, he pointed out to me that Jesus was able to be disciplined like this because he spent so much time in prayer. That encouraged me to get back on track with my prayer life and my reading of the scriptures. I would encourage all of us as our schedules get busy this time of year, to not withdraw from the Lord, but to press in to pray more ,to read more, to think more about him, and to listen more for what he wants to say to us and through us. May you be blessed this day.