Getting Mouthy with God

By Rev. Dr. Scott Seidler, Senior Pastor

May the words and the meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer.—Psalm 19:14

What cannot be missed on a perfectly starry night is the awesomeness which is a perfectly starry night.  Unaffected by light pollution from planet earth, taking in the heavens takes many, Christian or not, to a place where hearts wonder about eternal things.  “The heavens declare the glory of God.”  This first verse of Psalm 19 is matched and mirrored by the last verse.  “May the words of my mouth…”

Light pollution obscures what the heavens tell us, how the stars speak.  Worse, the pollution of our hearts, the sin within each of us, obscures our human speech.  Thankfully, God speaks a heavenly Word that changes hearts and corrects our speech.  Through his death and bodily resurrection Jesus Christ makes our words pleasant—centered on Him who is the very glory of God himself.

Spend some time reading Psalm 19.  With its help, discern that pollution hidden deep inside us.  Then, pray our Rock and Redeemer, Jesus Christ, would forgive and empower us so that our hearts and mouths act in perfect harmony and expressing the glory of God in Jesus Christ.

Holy Discontent Revisited

Mark 7:1-8

By Rev. Dr. Scott Seidler, Senior Pastor

Those words, “holy discontent”, need to be a ready phrase in every Christian’s vocabulary.  The sentiment expresses a very real, soul-felt friction—a disconnect between what is and what should be. 

A Christian couple knows the self-giving gold standard of Christian marriage, but can hardly muster between them a civil conversation after the kids go to bed.

A high school junior tastes the first winds of freedom that come with an extended curfew, but learns first-hand the temptations which linger when school parties go long.

What is and what should be—that differential is where the measure of one’s Christianity is determined.  God invites us to a holy discontent until that differential is obliterated.

Jesus, through the prophet Isaiah, observed, “People honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.”  With this observation comes the invitation, again, to uninterrupted holy discontent.

Until the difference between our hearts and our lips is but a breath, we are at odds with the God of Heaven and Earth.  Christ will ultimately deliver us from this God-forsaken difference in the resurrection at the end of days.  Nevertheless, the end of our earthly days—the purpose for which we still live—is in service to holy discontent until what is and what should be are one and the same.