You know, part of faithfulness to us?
Well, Proverbs describes it this way.
Faithful are the wounds of a friend.
Sometimes faithfulness to us is not what we always picture.
Sometimes it's telling us and dealing with us very honestly and openly and truly.
And I've got something here this morning that I need to deal with.
You can stay where you're at. It's going to take me a few minutes,
or you can go back to your seats. You can be seated however you want to do it.
Totally up to you.
Before I share this, Julie saw something this morning
that I believe goes hand in hand with this, so I'm going to ask her to share that.
I saw a white wooden staircase coming down from heaven,
and there was nothing on it.
And then I saw a white dove fly down to the ground,
and then it turned and it flew back up to heaven,
and then it came back down again,
and then it turned and it flew, I would say, about a third of the way up,
and it was standing on the railing, just looking,
like it was just waiting for something.
Okay, so a staircase.
Please don't mute me when I'm just standing there.
A staircase, Jacob's ladder kind of thing.
It's an opening for us to be able to get into the heavenlies, etc.
The dove would be a type of the Holy Spirit,
and I believe what that is showing us is
what I'm about to present.
The Holy Spirit wants to witness to our hearts
and take us higher.
Get us up from where we're at.
So this is... I'm going to try to present it very gently,
but this is a form of a rebuke from Jesus.
And it came to me on Friday evening
during the praise and worship night here.
He started talking to me about it and laid some things out.
So I'm going to present that.
And...
You know, Band, I think... I think you don't have to stand up here.
I think we're there.
So if you want to be seated, that would be great, too.
So here was the question that...
a couple, three questions were posed to me.
God speaking, if I would empower or bring to pass
everything that the people, church people,
have said this last week,
what would have happened?
And it's like, well, that's a good question
because I don't know what they're saying.
But if everything you said or proclaimed would have...
God would have honored it and brought it to pass,
what would have happened?
And he's speaking to those who are still not guarding
our hearts and our speech correctly
because out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks.
So now I quote,
How long will you continue to choose death
through what you say?
How long will you continue to ignore and defy my spirit
who is jealous over you with a godly jealousy?
As long as you refuse to guard your heart and your lips,
I cannot flow through your words with power.
You will remain powerless.
I call you to rise up and step into what I, your God,
what I am offering to you.
End of quote.
That last phrase is why I'm thinking that what Julie saw
is this is a now moment.
And it's not just for us here.
It's for anybody watching online or whatever.
This is a now moment.
And he's offering us.
I call you to rise up and step into, well, step,
step into what I'm offering to you.
So choosing death through what we say,
my mind tends to go a specific direction on that.
And he didn't go that way.
He continued to talk about some things that I thought,
huh, well, that's interesting.
I just wrote him down.
So this is what I give to you.
Applications for what he is referring to
of choosing death rather than life.
And he's quoting Deuteronomy 30 there.
After you life and death and blessing and cursing,
choose life.
Well, by what we believe and what we say,
sometimes we're choosing death
and we don't even know we're choosing death.
And the main thing he dwelt on in choosing death
is how, or life, choosing death or life,
is how we speak about and our attitudes towards each other,
which I would never went down that vein.
But let me give you what he gave.
Speaking life or death,
in agreement with negative or swinging emotions.
When our emotions turn negative,
our emotions swing a direction they shouldn't go,
we don't want to be proclaiming and speaking
what we're feeling.
If God would empower that,
a lot of bad things would happen.
Because we're not, in those moments,
we're not speaking anything
that would agree with God or what God wants.
Number two, speaking fear.
Speaking fear over ourselves,
speaking fear over others,
coming from the perspective of fear
and speaking fear.
You're choosing death when you speak fear.
And I kind of sit on that a little bit
because Christians can, I don't know why,
but Christians tend to be very fearful.
As a whole, not everybody, but as a whole.
There's just a fearfulness that goes with Christians
and when we speak out of that,
we're speaking death.
Number three, speaking in agreement
with your physical body or old nature
when it's contrary to the word.
Speaking in agreement with your physical body,
that's your creature living in,
and or your old nature.
That's what the part that took the hit spiritually
in our physical body from sin
and from the fallen nature and so forth.
Speaking in agreement with our physical body,
all my leg hurts.
I don't know if I can even use it.
What the world are you calling into?
What if God would empower that and say,
yep, let's go with that?
And pretty soon your leg is useless.
Why would we even say that?
No, you can acknowledge the fact.
My leg hurts.
But once you're calling something,
well, I don't even know.
Well, if you don't know, who does know?
Who's in charge of this?
You or who?
We have to be careful.
And it's going to go with the message this morning,
so I suppose that's why he plugged it together.
We have to be careful with what comes out of our mouth
if we actually want the words of our mouth
to be faith words empowered by Almighty God.
We have to.
Or we'll literally be calling death over ourselves.
Not edifying with our speech.
And he dwelt on this for a while.
And he broke something down that I thought,
huh, that's interesting.
Never thought of it that way before either.
He said,
gossip is talking about people,
just talking about people and their lives
and what they're doing.
And did you hear and did you know?
And la, la, la, la, la, la.
Gossip.
Once gossip turns a little bit
and goes into judgment or conclusions,
we're now speaking death.
And it's not going to be just about
them we're planting seed
that's going to come back to us.
We're opening a door.
You know why?
Did you hear about so-and-so
and what they did on their vacation?
It's like, why would somebody do something like that?
See, all of a sudden,
this is taking a negative turn.
Well, I don't know.
What are they like?
Well, you know,
I don't know them real well,
but then why are you talking about them?
And what they did on their vacation,
how does it affect your life?
Or what they did wherever.
How does it affect you?
Why do we have to be talking about them?
Because gossip tends to turn negative
because the old nature likes negative.
And it goes into judgment and conclusions.
Once it goes into judgment and conclusions,
Jesus said it, Paul said it in Romans 2,
once we are judging someone,
we've opened the door to be judged.
We have no right to come to a conclusion on,
well, I think they did it this way
because you know, that's just kind of how they are.
And you know, they're just a sloppy people.
I mean, they do things sloppy
and they never finish it right.
And this, you have just opened a door of death to you.
You're into a coming to a conclusion.
Well, I kind of know what they're thinking.
No, you don't.
But if we let ourself go there,
we are opening up to judgment coming on us.
And then he took it from kind of like a,
just talking about, to, it starts turning negative about them.
Once you're done with the conversation,
you don't leave with a higher estimate or opinion of them.
You leave with questions or a lower one.
That opens the door, because that's a form of judgment.
We've come to the conclusion.
This is what they're like.
And we thought they were here, but they're here.
Jesus said, judge not, lest you be judged.
Paul said, we've got to be careful what we judge,
because it's tied to our own heart.
Let me just go on.
Then he took it to slander.
Not edifying in our speech.
Edifying in our speech is building people up.
By the time you're done talking with them,
people who heard it feel better about them than when you started.
I'll repeat that. Just make sure everybody got it.
Edifying is when you build someone up.
And once you're done talking about them,
people who heard what you had to say feel better about them.
They have a better sense of,
wow, I didn't know that that's really cool.
That's awesome.
Of the person than when you started.
That's edifying speech.
Gossip tends to float.
Gossip goes negative.
It tends to start causing judgment and conclusions of,
really, I never thought they were like that.
We thought they were here now because of what's been said.
Yeah, we've got them down here in our mind now.
Which goes to slander.
I never threw slander in with gossip before.
The utterance of false charges or misrepresentations
that damage the other person's reputation.
In other words, by the time you're done talking about them,
there's going to be things laid at their feet as fact,
or this is what I really feel.
This is what I see that are negative.
You're slandering them.
And you know what's real?
Most of the time it doesn't even affect us.
But if it is a situation or a person that does affect us,
have we ever gone to them and talked about it to them?
Because if we've never made that step,
then I can guarantee you you're opening a door to judgment
because you're judging them without even engaging with them.
The talk ends up causing divisions,
separates us, we're not as close as we were.
You know how you can tell when people have been talking about you?
You had this good relationship with someone
and then somebody talked to them about you.
And the next time you see them, you can just say,
Hi, Passover, yeah.
And it's like they take a separate two back
and they've got this fake smile on them.
See, that's separation.
There's something happening here and it's a division
and it causes factions.
God hates factions.
F-A-C-T-I-O-N-S.
Factions. God hates factions.
Factions turn out to become the us and you.
This is how we think this is us
and you are not in with us.
You're different.
This is our family.
We're going to huddle up here because you bother me.
And we've talked about you
and all of us have a negative opinion about you
even though we've never brought an issue up to you.
We've kind of figured this out and we know what you're like.
So we're going to kind of separate back
and be our own little group here in...
Hi, Passover.
Good to see you.
And it's like you just feel it coming off of them.
This is fake.
When we do that,
we are literally choosing death
with our mouth.
Because what we've done is we've gossiped, judged, and slandered.
I'll go back and quote what he said.
As long as you refuse to guard your heart and your lips,
I cannot flow through your words with power.
You will remain powerless.
We can't judge a person.
Come to conclusions about the person, about their character,
what they're like, about their motives.
If they're right in a situation, if they're wrong in a situation,
what they're like spiritually, what they're like emotionally.
We can't come to conclusions about people.
That's judging them.
Especially if we haven't talked to them to hear their heart.
Well, I don't see why anybody would make a decision like that.
Have you ever asked them why they'd make a decision?
Well, I'm not going to ask them. Well, then shut up.
None of your business.
I mean, if you don't love them enough,
obviously you're concerned about the decision they make.
You don't love them enough to go talk to them.
Why are you talking about them?
To who knows who?
Coming from the conclusion of, yeah, they're wrong.
They're off.
That opens the door to us.
And I've been saying that opens the door for us to be judged.
I'll just go to what Jesus said.
That opens the door to us having powerless speech.
Because it's not a switch you flip on and off.
I'll flip it on while I pray.
And then while we eat,
and we're going to talk about all these people at church,
I'll flip it off.
And when it's off,
there's no power connected to my speech at all.
But when I flip it on and I pray,
heaven and earth will move to support my speech.
God doesn't work like that.
God does not work like that.
He is even the same.
Everything flows the same through everything.
We work like that.
We can judge things.
We're commanded to judge things.
But we can't come to a conclusion about the person.
We get an attitude.
We start making pronouncements.
Stuff happens.
And the whole time what God is saying is,
yeah, you think you're talking out there,
but you're actually opening your life through your speech.
To death coming here.
You're choosing death.
You're not choosing life.
That's a heavy little word.
So I ask the questions again.
He asked, how long will you continue to choose death
through what you say?
How long will let's make the applications?
How long will you continue to gossip?
How long will you continue to slander?
How long will you continue to judge people?
How long will you continue to come to conclusions
talking about people that lowers others' estimation of them?
How long are you going to keep this up?
You're choosing death.
How long will you continue to ignore and defy my spirit?
See, he will try to stop us from doing these things.
And sometimes we're so set in our habits
and in our ways that we don't even hear him.
But he is trying to talk to us
because he is jealous over us with a godly jealousy.
He doesn't want us participating in the speech
and the activity of the kingdom of darkness
when we're children of light.
And his job is to sanctify us and bring us over
and he will work on us.
And one of the main separating characteristics
of us and everything God created
as far as we know from Scripture
is the power he endowed the human being with in their mouth.
Angels don't have that.
There is no place in Scripture that says
angels have the ability to cause things to happen,
come into being with their mouth.
We do. And we'll talk about that a bit this morning.
So Lord, I'm asking that by your spirit
all of us can hear this and reap something from this.
Some of us can reap a whole lot more
because we're going the wrong direction.
So by your spirit, work in us individually,
work in us as marriages, work in us as families,
walk us through what needs to be done
so that power can again flow through our words.
Because there's a consistency in agreement
with Scripture that flows through our words.
In Jesus' name.
And Lord, if any of us are sitting there
and saying, oh my, that was me.
Rather than leaving condemned, we just say, God forgive me.
I'm sorry.
It could be a possibility.
I didn't see it. I didn't understand what I was doing.
Or it could be, I knew exactly what I was doing
and now it's time I got to stop this.
So forgive me. I repent of it.
I'm asking you to wash me clean of this.
And Holy Spirit, retrain me.
How I think, how I talk, what's in my heart.
Take out the stuff that shouldn't be there.
And let's replace it with righteousness and holiness.
Help my speech to be edifying.
Help my choices to be choices of life and not death.
In Jesus' name. Amen.
Amen.