Hey everybody,
good morning and welcome to Christ Community Chapel.
My name is Joe,
I'm one of the pastors here, and I'm glad that you have come.
A couple of things before we get started.
The first is Happy Father's Day to all you dads out there.
So glad that you're here.
Oh, good.
And good job.
Listen, we talk a lot about the world
needing men who will love and lead their families
and by being a dad and bringing your family here,
you're leading well, so kudos.
Thanks.
Oh, and don't miss the cereal bar that we have out in the atrium
after the service.
You got to stop by the cereal bar so we can appreciate you.
Second thing is that you can tell from all the decorations
in the church that kids camp starts on Monday.
If you're one of the 400 or so people that are volunteering your time
so we can pull off kids camp, thank you.
It would not surprise me if when we get to heaven,
we find out that the week of kids camp was the most important week
of our church calendar, because telling over 1000 kids about Jesus
and them having a blast while we do it, it's just priceless.
So thanks. Thanks for doing all that.
All right.
We are in the middle of our Old Testament series.
Every year we spend ten weeks somewhere in the Old Testament.
This year we were spending it in the book of Proverbs looking for wisdom.
We are calling this series More Wisdom, More Life.
And the proverb for today is Proverbs chapter 18, verse 21.
This is what it says death and life
are in the power of the tongue, and those who love it will eat its fruit.
Death and life
are in the power of the tongue.
There are a few things that you will encounter in your life
that are more powerful than words.
Let me just stop there.
Let that sink in.
Well, that's wild, because it doesn't seem like that should be true.
I'm stringing words together right now, and it doesn't seem
like they have much power.
Of course,
if if I don't make them more interesting
soon, they have the power to put you to sleep.
Maybe. But words have power.
50 years ago, 50.
I was in a gymnasium in Central Florida when my high school
basketball coach got frustrated with me during practice,
and he called me out in front of the whole team
and he said, Joe, you are a loser
and you will always be a loser.
Now, I don't know if those words fueled
my desperate desire to succeed in life.
I do know that five decades later, I still remember
where I was standing on the court when he said those words.
Words have power.
I say the word idiot means nothing.
I have you stand up and I call you an idiot.
In front of all these people has the power
to mold you for a decade.
Is probably nothing you will come in contact
with in this life that are more powerful than words.
The book of James James says that the tongue is like a like a fire
that can burn up anything and everything here.
Solomon says death and life are in the power of the tongue.
There's probably not a bigger
lie than the ditty I memorized when I was little.
Sticks and stones may break my bones.
But words will never hurt me.
The truth is sticks and stones may break my bones.
But they don't hold a candle.
To what words can do to my soul.
That's true.
Here are my three points I want to cover from this proverb.
First point where words come from.
Second point how words work.
And the third point is the words everyone needs to hear.
Where words come from, how words work, the words everyone needs to here first.
Where words come from.
In the Gospel of Luke.
Jesus is teaching and he says something that I think we all know
kind of intrinsically, but it's still very profound.
This is in Luke chapter six.
Jesus says, for no good tree bears bad fruit.
Nor again does a bad tree bear good fruit.
For each tree is known by its own fruit.
For figs are not gathered from thorn bushes, nor grapes picked from a bramble
bush.
The good person out of the good treasure of his heart, produces
good, and the evil person out of the evil treasure produces evil.
For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.
That's the profound phrase Jesus
says words come from somewhere,
and the words you speak come from your heart.
That your heart is like this bucket and your the.
The ladle can't bring up anything that's not already in the bucket.
You can't speak words that aren't somewhere in your heart.
If you speak hateful words, that means hate is in your heart somewhere.
I remember years and years ago I was driving with my oldest daughter.
She was like six and she was sitting in the back and somebody cut me off
and I didn't yell or anything, but I just said, what an idiot.
And then I heard my six year old from the back and a little squeaky
voice say, let's kill him, daddy, right?
I tell that story,
like at dinner parties, for just that reaction, because it seems like a like
a leap from me being a little frustrated to my murderous six year
old in the back.
But Jesus would say, it's not that great of a leap, right?
In the sermon on the Mount,
Jesus says, you have heard it said, you shall not commit murder.
But I say to you, if you're angry with your brother, if you say to your brother,
you fool, you're guilty, guilty
enough to go to the fires of hell.
Words come from somewhere.
My wife is one of the kindest, gentlest people
I know, and she is in charge in our family.
She's in charge of calling customer service when we are dissatisfied.
I lost that privilege.
I'll tell you how I lost it.
I was talking to a customer service guy and I was really getting frustrated.
He was not hearing me.
He was not budging.
So I decided to leverage you guys.
I was a senior pastor
and I said, listen, I'm in charge of an organization of 3000 people.
You ready to lose 3000 customers?
This guy goes, what's the name of your organization?
I was like,
he called my bluff.
You know, he can't say it's pastor of a church.
Anyway, so now my wife is in charge
and she gets much more accomplished than I ever did.
But I'll listen to her with customer service and she'll say stuff
like, well, it's it's been a couple of months.
I've sent several emails.
I call I've been on hold for 20 minutes.
I know you're busy.
I know, but but we just like you to fulfill what you said in the contract.
Okay? Okay.
Thank you.
Good. That would. That would be great. All right.
Thanks very much. Have a great day.
She hangs up and she looks at me like I gave him a piece of my mind.
Because there's nothing angry.
There's nothing hateful in my wife's heart.
It never comes out right.
Of course, that begs the question. What?
What kind of words do you speak?
They show what's in your heart.
The first thing is where words come from.
Jesus says they don't come from nowhere.
They come from what's deep down in your soul.
That's the first thing.
The second point is how words work.
Words have the power to shape reality.
Words have the power to actually shape reality.
God made it so.
Genesis chapter one God creates all that is.
He creates it with words.
He didn't have to.
It says, And God said, let there be light, and there was light.
God said, let the seed team with life,
and the sea explodes with life.
God created all that is with words.
When Jesus came and Jesus was healing what was broken in the world.
He did it with words.
He says, rise, take up your palate and walk.
And the lame man jumps up and walks.
He shouts, Lazarus, come forth!
Lazarus staggers out of the tomb.
Words have the power to shape reality.
We use words so much in our culture.
We throw them around
like they're nothing, with emails and text messages and Facebook posts.
And we say stuff like, well, you know,
I was just trying to make a point or I was just venting.
We don't realize
that words have such power.
Marriages thrive or die based on words.
Children are filled up or emptied out by words.
One of the things I get to do here at CC
is I host a podcast called Faith stories, where I just sit down
with people and interview them about how Jesus has changed their lives.
And I was a few weeks ago, I got to interview a woman named Brandi,
who's one of our Bible study leaders for our women's Bible study.
She's actually the table leader for my wife and my daughter, and they adore
Brandi. So I was really looking forward
to interviewing her because I didn't know her.
I just knew that my wife and daughter loved her.
When I was talking with her.
She told me this story that when she was 12,
she came home from school and her mom met her
and she said her, her brother and her dad and all their stuff were gone.
And she she said to her mom, what happened?
And her mom said, your dad and your brother are gone.
They're not coming back.
And this is your last night here, too.
I don't want to be your mom.
I have signed over guardianship to your friend's mom.
You start living with them tomorrow.
I have no idea
how those words impacted the soul of a 12 year old.
I can only imagine that words have the power to shape reality.
Contrast that my dad lived with
in an in-law suite attached to my house last 15 years of his life.
My dad was a minister for his entire adult life.
For 15 years.
Every time I preached, every time, sometime Sunday afternoon,
my dad would open the door to come into our side of the house
and he would say, Hey Joe, great job!
Loved your sermon.
Really good
words have the power to shape.
Rather go off like a bomb in a 12 year old soul, or to fall
like a gentle rain on dry ground
that is thirsting for water.
You are in large part a product of the words
that have been spoken to you, or the words you've been desperately
longing to hear and have never heard.
Because words shape things, words shape people.
That's how words work.
That brings me to my last point, which is the words that everyone needs to hear.
After 45 years of teaching and preaching the Bible, it's
would not be a surprise that I have a lot of favorite passages,
but if you've been coming any length of time, you
you probably suspect that my all time favorite passage is probably Luke chapter
15. In Luke chapter 15, Jesus is explaining
how God feels about us, and he tells three stories back to back to back.
And I love all three stories and they're all with the same point.
He tells the story of the the lost sheep, followed by the story of the lost coin,
followed by what we call the story of the prodigal son.
And in those stories, particularly the last story,
I find the words that I long to hear.
I think
the words that everyone needs to hear.
And let me give you the four phrases based on that story.
The way the story goes is that there's a
a younger
son who goes to his father and he says, I want my share of the inheritance
now, what he's saying to his father, and don't miss this.
He's saying to his father, you're I'm
better off with you dead than alive.
So I wish you were dead.
And I can't imagine how much that hurt the father.
What his face must have looked like when he heard those words from his son,
but he went ahead and gave the son his share of the inheritance.
The son went off to a distant land, and he wasted all of that.
And then he's destitute, and he has to come back.
So he's walking back and he thinks he knows how much he hurt his father.
So he thinks his father's heart is full of bitterness and anger.
And the first phrase that I love in that story
is it says, while he was a long way off, his father saw him
while he was a long way off.
His father meant that his father was looking for him.
And I longed for someone to say to me, I see you
because I'm looking for you.
The last week, Zach talked about playing ping pong with his nine year
old son, Graham. I play hide and seek with my grandkids.
Hide and seek is easier, especially with my two year
old grandson, Malachi, because he's such a terrible hider.
Like when I finished counting.
He loves to play hide and seek.
I finished counting and I say, ready or not, here I come.
He'll go, you can't find me.
And if I take too long to find him, he'll go.
You'll never find me.
I'm under the blanket
because he loves the hide.
But he only hides because he wants someone to look for him.
He wants somebody to find him.
There's a psychiatrist named Kurt Thompson
who said, we all come into this world
looking for someone who is looking for us.
We come into this world looking for someone who is looking for us.
And Jesus says, the one who is looking for you
is God.
That while I was a long while,
you were a long way off.
God saw you.
That's the first thing.
The second phrase that I want to hear is
attached to that same verse, because it says,
while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and he ran to him.
And it says he wrapped his arms around him and kissed him.
The son thought that his father's heart would be filled with anger and bitterness
because of the hurt that he had caused his father, and instead,
his father wraps his arms around him and says,
I love you, I love you.
There isn't a person
alive that doesn't need someone to say, I love you.
You know, when I was interviewing Brandi and she said that
about when she was 12 years old, it was so devastating.
I didn't even know where to go, what my next question should be.
And I ended up asking her, how did you come to know Jesus?
Because I needed to know how a broken 12 year old, a shattered 12 year
old, turned out to be a woman full of love and grace like Brandi.
And she said, when I was 18 years old, I went to church and I heard the preacher
say that God loved me.
And she stopped and said, God loves me.
And I have loved him ever since.
You need someone to say to you, I see you.
But even more than that, you need someone to say I love you.
And the next thing that happens in that story
is that the son, he knows that he has hurt the father deeply.
He thinks he's full of anger and bitterness.
So he's he's put together a speech that he's about to tell his dad,
and he says to his father, listen, I know I've sinned against heaven
and against you.
I'm no longer fit, worthy to be called your son.
But before he can do it, his dad, that's all.
He gets out
because his dad wraps his arms around him, kisses him, and begins
to bring him home.
And what he's saying is, I forgive you.
I forgive you.
When I was in my late 20s,
I was a youth pastor in Charlotte, North Carolina,
and my brother John came to live with us between his
for the summer, between his sophomore and junior year in college
and up, being the last summer of his life because he died that summer.
But when he was with us,
he was helping me with the youth group, and we were planning an event.
And this event was going to be this, a massive pillow
fight with the senior high and be like 40 or 50 senior high kids.
It was just going to be a free for all pillow fight.
My idea was that was going to film it from different angles,
and then the next week I would show it in slow,
different clips in slow motion of kids just getting rocked.
You know,
you know, some of those kids,
I mean, they probably have concussions, but they can't find me, so it's okay.
But we were planning this.
And then because we're brothers, we started messing around and then because
we're brothers had started to escalate and we got into a pillow fight.
The two of us, I'm 28, he's 20, and I say he's my little brother.
But he was like six, two, 300 pounds.
He was a big guy.
So we're going all out with this pillow fight.
And he called time out.
I don't know if his contact slipped or whatever, and I knew
he called time out, but I was wound up and I went ahead and swung full on
and hit him flush right in the face, defenseless.
And I'll never forget the look on his face.
He looked at me and his.
His face looked shocked and hurt,
and I remember realizing what I had done.
I was just mean.
It was just mean.
And I said, John, I'm so sorry, and I meant it.
And my brother gave me a great gift.
He forgave me.
If you have ever really hurt someone
and you know it's you, there is no greater gift
than for them to say I forgive you.
One of the things I have to I had to realize about Christianity
is that when I sin, it's not so much breaking the law of God
as it is breaking the heart of God.
That's what Jesus point is about this story is that what the young,
what the boy did, what the son did, was not so much breaking the rules
that his father, he broke his father's heart,
but the father forgave him.
When you realize
what you have done, there is no greater gift
than for someone to say, I forgive you.
And that's what God says I see you, I love you,
I forgive you, and finally come home, come home.
The story ends with the father bringing the son back,
restoring him, giving him a robe and a ring and sandals for his feet,
and throwing a party and saying, my son has come home.
There is something inside of all this that longs for a home to come to.
Saint Augustine said, we are all of us, restless
till we find our rest in thee, O God.
What he's saying is that we all long for the home that we lost
when we walked away from God, and God welcomes us back home.
Words have power.
You are largely a product
of the words that you have heard, spoken to you,
and the words that have never been spoken to you, that you long to hear.
And these are the words that God speaks to you.
And I was I was thinking, what would it be like
if we were able to take the words that people
have spoken to us?
The words like Brandy's mom spoke to her.
That I don't want to be your mom.
You are not love.
This is not your home, or you're not enough,
or you're a loser.
And replace them with the words that God speaks.
That's what Brandi did.
The words that God says, I see you.
I love you.
I forgive you.
And come home.
If those are the words in your heart,
if they filled your heart, what kind of words would come out of
your mouth, would flow out of your heart?
So what I'm thinking, what?
What would this place be like?
4000 people, all filled with the words of God, I see you,
I love you, I forgive you, come home would be like to come into this place.
I can tell you what it'd be like.
It'd be a place where somebody would come in and just feel like life was here.
Because words have the power to mold you.
They have molded you.
But words of God have the power to remake you.
And this is my thing.
Believe God's words about you.
Let those fill your heart and give you life.
That's what Jesus promises.
More wisdom,
more life because of Jesus.
Would you pray with me,
father in heaven, I am so grateful that
the words that you speak into us and over us,
that you are the one who says, I see you, I love you, I forgive you, come home.
I pray for every person here.
I pray that you would help us to empty out some of the damaging words
that have been spoken to us, that have molded us, and I pray
that we will be able to replace them with the words that you speak,
because the words that you speak are the truth and they give life.
You say, life and death are in the power of the tongue,
and you have spoken life to us through Jesus.
So thank you.
We pray this in Jesus name.
Amen.