February 2023 Revealing Light Newsletter

Jesus said “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love” (John 15:9). “...love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another” (John 13:34).

God is love and begins the chain of love that we continue to live in and share. “We love because God first loved us” (1 John 4:19). Without the love of God, the things we say or do “in the name of Jesus” would just be noise in this world (1 Cor 13:1-3).

As we love, it’s important to remember how God first loved us, how He showed us His love through Jesus Christ, and how we love by living in the love of God.

What does God’s love look like? God’s love is revealed in that “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13). God gave us Himself as Jesus Christ
(John 1:1-5; 10-14), to restore us back to Himself (2 Cor 5:18; Col 1:19-20) since our sins separated us from God (Eph 2:12). He did this by paying the price for our sins: death (Rom 6:23). Because Jesus Christ paid our penalty, He graciously gave us eternal life with God.

We have life through Christ. We abide in -- dwell, remain, live in -- His love as the Father has loved Him and the world (John 3:16-21). I hope you know God's love and that this is the kind of love we continue to live in and share by His love, grace, and mercy through Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior.
- Daryl Struemph

The scripture that I would like to analyze is in Mark 7 : 21-23.
“For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness: All these evil things come from within, and defile the man.”
Proverbs 16:24 “Pleasant words are a honeycomb, sweet to the soul and healing to the bones.”
Proverbs 12:25 “Anxiety weighs down the heart of a man, but a good word cheers it up.”
Proverbs 18:21 “The power of the tongue is life and death—those who love to talk will eat what it produces.”

It’s time to make war with your thoughts. Somebody said, “Don’t spend money when you are not buying anything, don’t say things that don’t mean anything, and don’t be sexual when you are not having sex.” Dressing is just one form of respect to others, but when you expand that to all sorts of behavior [like] being insensitive to people’s borders, it is like a boomerang.

A man who exposes himself to a woman, can go to jail nowadays, but why? Was what he did wrong to expose himself as God brought him to the world? It is so harmless! No; it’s not harmless! But nowadays women, and men expose themselves, nothing happens. Well, at the moment, some women and men, see and admire because she/he exposes, almost naked, and this behavior brings several results. Some do it because they think that she/he, is admired, appreciated, desired, etc. But pretty soon she/he may be sexually attacked or raped by somebody who misread what she/he means with her exposure. That could be one way of an
individual interpretation of her communication or her desire. But why has he or she been attacked, or raped - if what she exposed to others is so harmless!? No; it’s not!

Let’s take this, to how we talk. We know that we can hurt, attack or even make somebody feel very good [by] hearing us, because of the way we talk. (Many make thousands of dollars making other[s] laugh, or attacking the way they express themselves.) We can talk too much and thoughtlessly, carelessly, but soon we will say things that hurt, offend or please people the wrong way. By talking too much, people or ourselves might reveal things about us, or our family or others that we will regret because that person may let us know what they think about themselves or others. So sooner or later that person will hurt somebody just by talking. Even though they are not physically attacking, stealing, or killing anybody, he or she just was saying something. That can’t possibly harm anybody, can it? A high school a professor used to say that
this is harmless because those are just words! But we know that somebody’s life can be destroy with just a few words. A few chosen words could be deadly, and the serious thing is that we all can say them in a moment when we are not even thinking [about] what we are saying.

When we tend to talk a lot what happens is that we stop thinking. Usually, the speaking process take a series of steps such as: awareness, emotions, thoughts and then comes the speech. Normally we feel, then we think, and then we speak. But what if we skip the thought? Like when we just feel we need to bring it out! We feel something and we just say it! We discover something and we talk about it right away. Then we are overexposing and not thinking about what we are saying. It’s like saying things almost naked, without thinking, with no awareness, not giving a review. We just throw the emotions naked, or semi-naked, not even sure if we can harm somebody without thinking.

We can be giving off several things: emotions and awareness before they mature. You have a feeling and before you consider it, before you analyzed what the feeling is, or to who, why, we want to say, whether it is appropriate or inappropriate. But as soon as the feeling comes, we say it, and that is a form of nudity, whether we believe it or not. We are exposing things that are not ready to be exposed. Or they were never meant to be exposed.

That also happens many times with other circumstances, places or people, that are inappropriate for that place, people and circumstances. [These moments happen] just because we feel that we need to express them. But we may be doing it on the wrong time, on the wrong place and with the wrong people where they don’t belong. The same goes to things we write, draw, or express with body language or other forms of communication -- things that come from our desires.

Remember what our Lord says about things that contaminate the body. Those are not things that enter the body (meaning what we eat) but those that come out, meaning those things that are not thought, analyzed or wanted for God’s kingdom. Mark. 7: 17-20. “And when he had entered the house and left the people, his disciples asked him about the parable. And he said to them, “Then are you also without understanding? Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile him, since it enters not his heart but his stomach, and is expelled?” (Thus he declared all foods clean.) And he said, “What comes out of a person is what defiles him.”

Thanks for reading this desire and effort.
- Enrique Muruato