2 Chronicles 33:14-34:33, Romans 16:10-27, Psalms 26:1-12, Proverbs 20:19
Today is the 3rd day of August welcome to the Daily Audio Bible I’m Brian it is a joy and an honor to be here with you for another step forward, another day together in God’s word as we make this journey. I said yesterday we were going to be concluding second Chronicles and Romans today. I misspoke. We are going to be concluding the letter to the Romans today, but we’ll be concluding second Chronicles in tomorrow’s reading. And, so, as we continue our journey through this week, by the end of this week we will be in completely new territory than we’ve been camped out in here for the last several weeks. So, we have a couple more steps in second Chronicles and one more step today to…to the conclusion of the letter to the Romans. And we’re reading from the Christian Standard Bible this week. Second Chronicles chapter 33 verse 14 through 34 verse 33.
Commentary:
Okay. So as we go into this new month, the voice of wisdom, and remember when we met her voice, right, back at the beginning, how she was at every crossroads calling out to everybody to listen to her, like at every decision, like at every fork in the road she’s there calling out. Well she’s calling out today, greeting us as we come into this new month and enter into this new week fully with…with things she’s reminded us of before. “The one who reveals secrets is a constant gossip. Avoid someone with the big mouth.” If we’ll remember the…the last time we came this way on this topic, we were told that gossip, these are tasty morsels but they go down into our innermost being and we just…we wondered about how much of that we want in our innermost being. There is a reason that our words and the way that we use our words is a recurring theme in the Bible. And that primary reason is because it matters. It matters how we use our words. Our…our Father, our heavenly…the most-high God…our Father the creator of all things, speaks and creates. And we know that, like we can accept that, but we need to understand we are created in his image and when we speak we create…now we…we can’t call things that don’t exist into being, like matter, but our words create the atmosphere of our lives. Our words tell the story of our lives. We create our lives through the things we say. And if that sounds like heady and esoteric, like just think about it. You walk in the door after a long day at work and the wrong thing gets said. The atmosphere chills, darkness descends, and it’s either silence or war, right? Like, the things we say create the atmosphere of our lives. And gossip is insidious. Like, it goes down to the depths of our being, it shapes…allows us to pick up offenses that don’t exist toward people that we may or may not even know. And then convictions get shaped out of thin air, like created out of nothing or created out of something very incomplete and partial. Lile when we really just slow down for second because we hardly ever do, but if we slow down a second and think about this, it’s scary how powerful our words can be. Its…it’s also glorious how powerful our words can be. It just depends on which words we’re stringing together and what motivates the words we are stringing together. And an environment of gossip is one we are repeatedly told to avoid. And I guess it’s easy enough to go like, “what’s the big deal? Like what’s the big deal? Why such…why such drama?” Because of the drama that it creates in this world and in our communities. It tears things down…like when have you ever been gossiped about and it was just a joy? It…it just brought you so much life? You just loved it that you found out the behind your back people have made judgments and assumptions about you and you never got to be a voice in that conversation? Did that just like lift you into the highest heavens? It was just…you’re just so full of joy and peace in life and goodness? Like that is not the result of gossip. Destruction is the result of gossip. Gossip drives us underground. It pushes us into isolation. It takes us where we should not go. And we should not be dispensaries of gossip. We should not be the ones with the big mouth as the proverb says today. And there are many, many reasons, but our faith tells us that we are supposed to confess our sins to each other and that we are to pray for each other so that we might be healed. We’ll find this in the letter from James when we get there. Gossip eliminates that possibility because there is no safety to do that. So, if we’re gonna dispense gossip, we should probably bite our tongue at least long enough for the Holy Spirit come and direct what we’re about to say. And if we’re listening to something and we realize, “hey, wait a second, wait a second, this is gossip and this is going inside of me and this is going to change the atmosphere…this can change the trajectory of my day. This can birth…this can shackle me. I can pick up offenses that I didn’t know I had because I didn’t have them before. These words are creating an offense that I don’t need.” Then we would be heading the voice of wisdom that is at every crossroads calling out, “this is the way you should go. Go this way. Not that way.”
Prayer:
Father there’s a lot of information that flies at us on a continual basis, faster really than we can process but so much of it goes inside and sits there and grows like weeds and we need Your help. We need to weed the garden. We need to clean things out. We need to get these offenses that aren’t real, these stories that are partial, this stuff out of the way. It’s creating things that only cloud our vision. And if we ever needed to see clear, if we ever needed eyes to see, it’s now. And so, come Holy Spirit help us to rid ourselves of these practices of dispensing and consuming gossip that we might see clearly what is really going on by the power of Your Holy Spirit. Come Jesus we pray. We ask in Your mighty and powerful name. Amen.
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And that’s it for today. I’m Brian and I love you and I’ll be waiting for you here tomorrow.