Daily Devotional for Saturday, March 16

Inconsistency of the Tongue

“Can the fig tree, my brethren, bear olive berries? either a vine, figs? so can no fountain both yield salt water and fresh,” James 3:12.

Warren Wiersbe used the following illustration: “A man at work one day, a professing Christian, got angry and turned loose with a series of oaths and profanities. Embarrassed, he turned to his coworker and said, ‘I don’t know why I said that. It really isn’t in me.’ His partner wisely replied, ‘It had to be in you, or it wouldn’t have come out of you.’ ” That is so true; what we say is, as a whole, the most accurate reflection of what we feel. Another example is that certain plants in gardens tend to cross- pollinate, and the results are mixed-up vegetables. One might slice open something that looks like a watermelon on the outside but a canteloupe on the inside or vice versa. Gardeners have to keep plants like that away from each other.

On the other hand, some tongues do a great job of masking what is really inside. We call those folks hypocrites. They are full of rotten bones, but the outside is full of slick words and lies. For the hypocrites, their words hide the truth. Neither of these extremes reflects what a Christian ought to be. For us, it should be, “What you see is what you get.”

If you claim to know Jesus, and your presentation to the world is just like that of the world, then is your profession real? James teaches that trees only produce one type of fruit, and by that, we know what kind of tree it is. On the other hand, if our words mask evil and sin within us, we are like that messed up watermelon in that we appear one way on the outside but another inside. Does your verbal fruit reflect what kind of tree you really are?

JUST A THOUGHT
It might be good to ask ourselves often,

“What would Jesus say in this situation if He was here?”

Wally Fry