HEART

A HEART OF GENTLENESS

TALKING TO GOD
Ask God to help you keep your heart gentle. Talk to Him about times when you haven’t had a heart of gentleness, and ask for His forgiveness.

DIVING IN
Place a small amount of flour in one brown paper bag and rocks or gravel in another. Without their knowing what is inside, have another family member guess, then reach into one bag at a time and describe how the contents feel.

GOING DEEPER
Both bags look exactly the same on the outside, but the contents of one are soft, while the contents of the other are hard. People are like these bags — you can’t always tell what’s on the inside. You learn in 1 Samuel 16:7 that “man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart.” God knows you can use your outward appearance — how you act and what you say — to cover up what’s really inside, just like the bags covered their contents. You might act kind and gentle but have bad attitudes or mean thoughts. While God wants you to be gentle on the outside, He also wants your heart to be gentle. When your heart is full of gentleness, God can use you to bless others.

TALKING TO EACH OTHER
– Who is someone you know with a gentle heart? What do you like about this person?
– Who is someone you know with a hard heart? How does this person treat you?
– What causes your heart to become hard?
– What are some ways you can keep your heart soft?

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Speech

GENTLENESS IN SPEECH

TALKING TO GOD
Thank God for giving you the ability to be gentle with your words. Ask Him to help you choose your words carefully so they are not hurtful.

DIVING IN
List five words that describe your best friend. Now list five words that describe someone you don’t get along with very well. Say each of the 10 words out loud and consider how you’d feel if each of those words were used to describe you.

GOING DEEPER
Words are powerful. “The tongue has the power of life and death” (Proverbs 18:21). Wow! What you say — and how you say it — really does matter. Words can hurt, or they can heal. When you respond to hurtful words with more hurtful words, you only make things worse. If you answer with gentleness, you can soothe angry or bitter feelings and restore broken relationships. Our gentle words show people that they have value, whether you agree or disagree with them. Proverbs 12:18 says, “Reckless words pierce like a sword, but the tongue of the wise brings healing.”

TALKING TO EACH OTHER
– How have others hurt you with their words?
– How have you hurt others with your words?
– What gentle words have been given to you, and how did they help you?
– Who is one person you can use gentle words with, even if this person doesn’t deserve them?

“Death and life are housed in the tongue.”

Let’s talk about death for a moment; it is not a topic that many of us like to discuss because it brings with it loss, pain, grief, loneliness, depression, and even ugliness. Yet we as believers do not understand that many of the scenarios we are facing daily are a result of the thoughts we are releasing through our words.

God created us to be life giving and creative, but at the fall of man in the Garden of Eden, death entered, and since then creation is going through the process of death. We cannot create anything out of chaos if we don’t have the source of life, which is the life of Christ flowing in and through us. I urge you, please don’t be disillusioned by what you see prospering in the world, my friends, because if it doesn’t have its source in Christ, it will not last, and, of course, the end result will be death.

When all you can see in lack, sickness, poverty, and shortage, how is it possible to speak anything else? That is why the Apostle Paul urges us to fight the good fight of faith. Once we understand that our words are full of power, we will be on the road that starts a progressive journey to the purposeful life.

Our life source will continue to flow once we stay connected to the vine (Jesus Christ).

We must transform the mental images by getting the life-giving word on the inside of us, and then we will be able to believe God is able; and as we speak those power-infused words of God, beyond a shadow of a doubt, we will be able to see manifestations of that spoken word. The world tells us that we must see to believe, but God’s way establishes that believing is seeing.

Power Thoughts: My mouth is the vessel for God’s power words and the avenue by which I will create life.

“Power of the spoken word.”

Once our thinking is straightened out, our speaking becomes the avenues by which the blessings will be able to manifest in the natural. The blessings of God are already ours; in fact, the Apostle Paul teaches us that all the blessings of God are fulfilled in Christ who is our yes and amen. (2 Cor. 1:20AMP)

But in order for the blessings to manifest, we must activate it by our words. In the first chapter of Genesis, we see the principle of the power of the spoken word. The Spirit of God was brooding over the face of the waters, and this word “brood” according to the Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary is, “to sit on or hatch eggs, and also to be in deep thought or ponder.” And this is what the spirit of God was doing before God the Father spoke anything into being.

The thoughts must be aligned with the Word before we can be effective in our speaking. When this principle is fully understood by the believer, then we will be able to create beauty out of ugliness, strength out of weakness, and order out of chaos.

The mind that is renewed with the Word of God gives way to the manifestation of the power of God through the effective, spoken Word of God. What we need to realize is that our mouth is not the power, but it is the vessel through which the power flows.

The Word of God is like the fuse box that contains all the power necessary to bring light to every dark area of our lives. Our mind becomes the power lines through which the Word of God flows, but the vessel to manifest the blessings in our lives is through our mouth. In other words, our mouth is the switch by which the power of God’s Word when spoken by us releases the blessings in our lives.

Power Thought: I have the power in me to create by the words I choose to speak.