What Kind of Fountain is YOUR MOUTH?

How easy it is to praise the Lord for His goodness, and how easy for us, someone who has let down one of our loved ones, someone who has refused to love us in return, someone who has neglected to show us the honor we feel we deserve, someone who has made our work harder and our lives more difficult. God is worthy of our praise, and the person who has fallen short of our expectations is worthy of our mean and spiteful words, our bad mouthing and gossiping, our negativity, our cold shoulder and verbal revenge, right? God makes the answer plain and clear in the book of James in the Bible.

photo courtesy of morguefile.com

People are made in God’s image, and we have no right to bless Him and then turn around and curse people. Our mouths should not be a fountain of blessing and cursing, the Bible makes clear. Just how easy is it to refrain from speaking terribly of someone we believe deserves our negativity? Hard. Challenging. In some cases, it might seem downright impossible. But God does not call us to do something without also enabling us to do it. Our job is to get our flesh under control and choose by the love, grace, and power of God to walk in His ways rather than our own. Through faith in Christ, we can love and forgive rather than be a fountain of verbal vengeance, spite, bitterness, hatred, etc.

Is your mouth a fountain of love and forgiveness, of mercy and blessing? Or, like in my own case, is it time for a cleansing? 

Jas 3:9  Therewith bless we God, even the Father; and therewith curse we men, which are made after the similitude of God. 
Jas 3:10  Out of the same mouth proceedeth blessing and cursing. My brethren, these things ought not so to be. 
Jas 3:11  Doth a fountain send forth at the same place sweet water and bitter? 
Jas 3:12  Can the fig tree, my brethren, bear olive berries? either a vine, figs? so can no fountain both yield salt water and fresh. 

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