The Practice of Words

REFLECTION QUOTES

“There are two basic motivating forces: fear and love. When we are afraid, we pull back from life. When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer with passion, excitement, and acceptance.”

~John Lennon

“The people who heard Jesus’ disciples proclaiming the Good News were as impressed by what they saw as by what they heard. They saw lives that had been transformed– men and women who were ordinary in every way except for the fact that they seemed to have found the secret of living. They evinced a tranquility, simplicity, and cheerfulness that their hearers had nowhere else encountered…”

“The only power that can effect transformations of the order we have described is love…”

“God’s love is precisely what the first Christians did feel. They had experienced Jesus’ love and had become convinced that Jesus was God incarnate. Once that love reached them, it could not be stopped. Melting the barriers of fear, guilt, and self-centeredness, it poured through them like a torrential stream and heightened the love they had hitherto felt for others to the point where the difference in degree became a difference in kind. A new quality, Christian love, was born. Conventional love is evoked by lovable qualities in the beloved, but the love people encountered from Christ embraced sinners and outcasts, Samaritans and enemies. It gave, not prudentially in order to receive, but because giving was its nature.”

~Huston Smith, contemporary Religious Studies scholar

SERMON PASSAGE

Ephesians 4:25, 29-32 (ESV)

25 Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another.

29 Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear. 30 And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. 31 Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. 32 Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.

Proverbs 12:18 (ESV)

18 There is one whose rash words are like sword thrusts,

but the tongue of the wise brings healing.

Proverbs 18:24 (ESV)

24 Death and life are in the power of the tongue…

Matthew 12:34b-37 (ESV)

34 “For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks. 35 The good person out of his good treasure brings forth good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure brings forth evil. 36 I tell you, on the day of judgment people will give account for every careless word they speak, 37 for by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned.”