Joy For All SeasonsSample

In the center of your face, located halfway between your mind and your heart, is an opening called your “mouth.” Inside that mouth is a one-pound muscle known as your “tongue.” Your tongue is located between your mind and your heart for a reason. Your mind and your heart have the unenviable power to control every word that your tongue creates. Your tongue may be the most powerful and influential muscle in your entire body … but it is controlled by your thought life … and by your emotional preferences. “Guard your heart above all else for from it flow the issues of life.” (Proverbs 4:23) My heart doesn’t want to be guarded but wants to regurgitate its ugly self all over the people in my world. The Bible doesn’t say to express your heart … it says to guard your heart. And then … if my heart weren’t enough to deal with … there is my mind. “For as a man thinks within himself so is he.” (Proverbs 23:7) I don’t know how this is possible but it is … if I think it … then I become it. “Examine me, O Lord, and try me; test my mind and my heart.” (Psalm 26:2) I must lay down my will on the examining table of the Great Physician and allow Him to do open heart surgery and a craniotomy on me. My tongue is not my problem, but it is the infection that lurks in my heart and the germs that have attached themselves to my mind. The Great Physician alone is able to heal the disease that I have allowed to fester in the deepest parts of me. As I am healed, I become more like Him. As I am healed, I begin to think like He thinks … I begin to feel what He feels … I begin to speak words that His tongue would speak. When the Great Physician is invited to treat my mental and emotional plague, He not only takes out the infection … but He miraculously makes me like Him. Joyful Thoughts to Ponder: Why does the Bible teach, “Death and life are in the power of the tongue”?