Borrowing God’s words

Do any of you think you are religious? If you do not control your tongue, your religion is worthless and you deceive yourself. What God the Father considers to be pure religion is this: to take care of orphans and widows in their suffering and to keep oneself from being corrupted by the world.   (verses 26,27)

Read James 1:16-27

Wouldn’t it be good if you got the chance to do ‘second takes on conversat10ns in your life? Wouldn’t it be good if you could pause a conversation, go back to some silly or hurtful or false remark that you made, and go through it a second time so that you could ‘get it right’?

Unfortunately, we often say things that we later regret and sometimes there’s little that we can do to put things right.’ Our tongue get the better of us, and before we know it we’ve said something that we can’t take back without making things even worse.

No matter how you may sometimes fail, God always speaks well of you. In Christ, God rejoices over you, in fact as Zephaniah says, he sings and is joyful over you (Zephaniah 3:17).

Listen to God’s song of joy. Borrow his words. And let the word of your tongue and the melody of your actions make a beautiful song of praise to God.

Father, let my words and actions blend together in a song of praise to you. Amen.

By Fraser Pearce, in “God’s Promises for each day” (LCA, Openbook Publishers (1999)

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