Reading your Bible for Today April 1

April 1: Matthew 12:34-35

Key Verse: Matthew 12:35
A good man out of the good treasure of his heart brings forth good things, and an evil man out of the evil treasure brings forth evil things.

Devotion:
Just as we are able to have a pretty good guess at where a person is from by the language or dialect that they speak, we are able to have a pretty good guess at where a person is spiritually when they open up their mouths too. The heart is the spring from where each of us brings up the words we speak; if we are going to draw from a spring which has bad water, then what comes out of our mouths is probably going to be bad. We may be able to disguise it a bit, but it will still be noticeably tainted...

Nothing short of a fully-fledged water purifying plant will be able to clean bad water, unless we place our faith and trust in the salt that God's grace will supply for us to throw into the water. We may not always expect what God gives us as being the right stuff, but He is the one who has the foreknowledge of what we need to straighten ourselves out and He will supply the perfect grace which will allow us to make our bad hearts clean.

When we try to build up our own purifying centre, we have to remember that we have built it within a bad environment and we will at some stage or another let something slip. The only way we can be sure of supplying anything clean from ourselves is to make sure we base ourselves on something clean to start with. Our lives are filled with the evil which we have picked up along life's journey; the sins, the lusts, the desires, all manner of corruption we have tried to make good from.

In order to show others we do live with the grace of God, we have to make sure we do listen to God in the beginning and that we do His will so He can guide us for others to see Him through us and not to have to put up with our own sinful hearts...

Points to Ponder:
Who in your group of friends do you think is trying hard to sort themselves out?

Have you invited them to church?