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Do you know people who just “spill their
guts” when they get around others? After a few minutes they have told you deep
dark secrets you didn’t even want to know! These people have poor boundaries.
They haven’t learned what pieces of information about their lives are for
public consumption and what should be kept for a small circle of close friends.
If you learn to listen well, people can’t
help but tell you their story. Even if they want to hide, they will tell you
what is going on in their lives. Even their silence tells you something about
them.
So why did I tell you this fact? Our verses
today contrast what a wise and a foolish person say. Jesus summarized this by
saying “Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.” (Matthew 12:34)
What is there comes out. What we have taken in spills out when pressure is
applied.
The righteous person has eaten lots of
wisdom. The wisdom has taken root and grown. The wisdom has matured the person,
and when they speak fruit comes out. Their life produces a crop of wisdom
fruit.
I love landscaping. You can cut off the new
growth from a shrub, plant it in the right soil, keep it moist and you will
have hundreds of little shrubs in no time. Or you take the seeds and plant them
and up come more shrubs. There is a whole science to this process, and when it
works it is fantastic! You break up the soil, add the right mixture of compost,
plant the shrub, mulch it to preserve the moisture and stop the weeds, and
after a few years the abundance of growth is explosive.
The shrubs do what God designed them to do.
They grow and produce their fruit. The same thing happens with us. When we put
in wisdom, out comes fruit. Wisdom trains the mouth. It puts a filter on what
gets said to whom.
Not so those who have ignored wisdom. Their
mouth puts forth perverse words and ideas. Their fruit is rotten and stinky. Their
words and ideas are twisted by their rejection of God’s wisdom. God says “turn
right” and they have chosen to “turn left.” So everything they say comes out a
bit crooked.
Are you taking in wisdom and allowing it to
take root and grow?