C3 Sunday Service at The Bowden’s

Thank y'all.

Bless you.

If you're in preschool, you go in there.

And if you go if you're in elementary school, you go upstairs.

And if you're youth welding, you stay here, or you go with you.

Well, go with you, go with you.

If you're a teenager in high school, go in junior high, go with Weldon.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay.

Welcome.

Greetings.

I'm very happy to see you and to be here with you today.

Sorry about it being a little chilly.

You never know.

I was terrified that it was going to be blazing sun shining on all of y'all today, and so that didn't happen.

I just wanted to start off real quickly by just the Bible says that we should give thanks.

We are quick to criticize and to complain, but we are hesitant or forgetful to just give thanks.

And I just wanted to give thanks today for a few things before we get into our study.

I'm thankful to be a part of a spiritual community that faithfully goes to visit homeless people, people without families or friends in the hospital.

And they do it faithfully.

I'm thankful to be a part of a church that gathers on Thursday nights on my back porch.

And we pray for you and for the needs of our city and our nation and our world.

I'm thankful to be a part of a church that does that.

I'm thankful to be a part of a church where when I make a, actually it wasn't even a phone call, I just sent out a text to, I don't know, 10 or 11 men, and I guess eight or nine of them showed up a couple of Saturdays ago and removed a tree from one of our widow ladies' backyards.

I'm thankful to be a part of a church that does things to try to make an impact on the poorer areas of our city.

So easy to complain, to gripe, to throw stones, to blame.

It's different when somebody like Colin creates an opportunity for us to go into a poor area of our city and spend several hours loving on these children.

I'm thankful to be a part of a church that does that.

I'm thankful to be a part of a church where people invite their friends to come to church to taste and see that God is good.

And I'll tell you a little bit more about that in a little while.

But I'm thankful to be a part of a church that does that.

I'm thankful to be a part of a church that enjoys not just volunteers, but enjoys opening up their home for gatherings like this so that we can get to know each other and deepen our relationships with one another.

And I literally could go on and on and on.

But I just I just want to say thank you.

Uh that I can be a part of a church that does that kind of thing.

And uh I don't take that for granted, and uh I just bless you in the name of the Lord for doing that.

Um this is not what I had planned on teaching.

I had something else prepared for today, but I did a I did two weddings down in um Kelsey, where were we?

Yeah, in Bahia, that's where it was.

I did two weddings literally within just three or four days of each other down at this wedding venue down in Bahia, and I'd never been there in 45 years of ministry, and then I did two weddings there within like five days.

And Kelsey is a wedding planner, and she did one, and it was lovely.

And then I the the three or four days later, I did another wedding down there, and the lady that did that one she did a great job too.

Um But I've been doing weddings for a long time.

In fact, I've married a whole slew of y'all.

And um the way that works is the bride is all nervous about me showing up.

And so she always wants me to be there an hour, an hour and a half early, just to make sure that I'm that I didn't forget.

And I've never forgotten a wedding.

Um, but anyway, so I show up about an hour early, and I make sure that I go in and find the bride and find the wedding coordinator.

I'm here, I'm here.

Well, then I have to go find a place to hide because they're all rushing around, you know, getting all the finishing touches done.

And normally what I do is I'll go and get in my car.

And I'll just sit there and I'll go over my wedding little ceremony, and then I'll I'll be working on the next thing that I'm gonna teach y'all.

And um, yeah, I've been doing that for forever.

Well, this second wedding that I was doing, um, I was in my car, the windows were down, and um, all of a sudden, uh somebody very significant in the wedding, I'll just leave it at that, came roaring out of the building and up to where the the parking lot was, and literally, my car's right here, and this lady was right where Brandon is, and she'd clearly gotten mad about something or somebody right before the wedding, and she bolted out, and oh, I don't know, four or five of her family members, the groom, the four or five of the they they all just were like little chickens, following right behind her, clearly trying to calm her down.

And I'm not trying to be mean or unkind, but it created such a picture for me, because she didn't know I was sitting there, and she was dog cussing.

Just start with the A's, and she went to the end of the list.

I mean, the from the from the people involved in the wedding to her husband, to her kids, to the bride and her family.

I think she included the president of the United States, in fact, the last several presidents of the United States, the dog catcher, the, you know, you name it, um, she was dog gussing them.

I don't mean she was just upset.

She was just, it was terrible.

And it left me with a uh just that image of someone in a family just spewing vileness upon the people that loved her, and I'm gonna give her more credit than she deserves that she would declare she that she loves.

And it it's haunted me since I watched it, since I experienced that.

And it just has reminded me, I can't get away from it, and it just reminded me of the destructive power of our words.

David said, or I'm sorry, David's son Solomon says in Proverbs chapter 12, Reckless words pierce like a sword, but the words of the wise are like healing bomb.

Proverbs 12 · chapter mention

I love that, not only do I love that verse, I love that image.

That literally our words have the power to kill.

But they also have the power to heal.

And do we recognize that our family, our mates, our parents, our children, our grandchildren, they go off every morning into the world of school or business or whatever they're doing, and they get beat up.

I mean, people are treating them bad, people are being mean, people are cussing, people are running them off the road, telling them to get out of the way, telling them they're less than, and they get all bloodied.

And they come home at the end of the day, and they need somebody to heal their wounds.

That's what they're looking for.

If you're wondering what your kids are coming up, now they might not say it.

In fact, they won't say it.

They won't say, Mom, I've been beat to death today.

I need somebody to heal me.

Your husband's not going to say it.

Your wife's not going to say it.

Nobody says that.

But that's what they're wanting.

They come home and they need somebody to heal their wounds.

And God has created us in such a way that we literally can do that.

I can do that in the life of my wife.

I can be her healer.

I can be an extension of the healing power of God Himself.

Proverbs 18 says, a few chapters later, that life and death are in the power of the tongue, and the wise benefit from that knowledge.

Life and death are in the power of the tongue, and the wise lady, the wise man, benefits from that knowledge.

They don't go, oh yeah, I get that.

They harness that and they they go, oh my gosh, every notice there's no neutral words.

According to the wisest man that ever lived, there's not a neutral word in the English language.

And I'm assuming in every other language too, I don't know about those.

But in the English language, every word that I speak is either a word that creates life or it's a word that creates death.

Started thinking about how when God decided to create this world that we know, when he wanted to create life, he spoke.

He spoke words to create life.

Not every time, but overwhelmingly, when Jesus walked on the earth and he wanted to impact people with life, how did he do it?

Yes, he used touch, yes, he used mud, yes, he used different things, but the his favorite way to create life was he would speak to people.

Your sins are forgiven, you're accepted, you're loved, you're precious, you're great, you matter.

He would speak words that communicated life.

And we also see the opposite.

In Genesis three, when Satan wanted to create death, what did he use?

Oh, you know the story.

Satan flew in like a big winged archangel with a flaming sword and started slashing Adam and Eve.

No.

He just started speaking words of doubt.

You're being robbed.

You're getting gypped.

You aren't getting the life that you deserve.

He used words, his very names, the names that the Bible calls him.

He's not just a lion, he's a roaring lion.

He's a deceiver.

How do you deceive with your mouth?

And he's a slanderer.

All of these words, he's an accuser, he's a liar.

Every one of those words that the Bible describes Satan as, they're words that communicate words.

King David got this.

Of all the people in the Bible that understood the difference in words that communicate life and the words that communicate death.

King David got that.

I think about his brothers when he was a teenager.

He comes because his daddy told him to take some food and supplies to his very brothers.

And David walks up to bring these supplies to his brothers.

The very first thing his brother said was, What are you doing here?

You little pipsqueak! Why aren't you home taking care of those few little pitiful sheep?

You just wanted to come here because you're lazy and you wanted to watch us fight.

But what he was set told was words of death.

I think of Goliath in the very same story.

David stands up in front of this giant, and the Bible says that Goliath hurled insults and scorn and derision at him.

Words of death.

I think of King Saul.

David committed his life to serving this man.

And here's what King Saul said of David.

People give me credit for killing thousands, but they're giving credit to David for killing ten thousands.

The next thing he's gonna do is take my throne from me.

He was lied about.

David never thought about doing that.

It never crossed his mind.

In fact, he spent years protecting Saul's throne.

But the very people that he tried to do good by lied about him, slandered him, criticized him.

And I could go on and on and on.

David lived near this farmer dude and spent months protecting Nab's farm from raiders and vicious animals.

And when David had a need for some supplies, Nabal said to David, Yeah, you know, I know it's real popular for slaves to run away from their masters.

Why have you done that?

You've not helped me at all.

You've done nothing for me.

Why should I do something for you?

Do you do you do you see yourself in these relationships?

Do you hear these very words?

You've never done anything for me.

You've never helped me.

You've never loved me.

You've never uh uh uh poured your life into me.

These very things, that falsely accusing us of things that we never did, forgetting or ignoring or minimizing our sacrifices and investments, whether it's with our family or with our work, being totally misunderstood.

David's wife, Michael.

She uh uh she's standing there watching David worship.

Oh, Lord, I thought Brenda was right there.

Brenda was standing up worshiping the Lord.

Hello.

David was worshiping the Lord.

And Michael, his wife, or yeah, I think it's called Michael, I think that's the way you say it.

She looks at David, and what she says is, Oh, how the king of Israel has honored himself today by going around half naked in full view of the slave girls, as any vulgar fellow would do.

Rather than David's own family being proud of him for his devotion to God, his love for God, his abandonment to God, the voices that he heard were, you're such a sorry example.

You're you they they turned the very good that David was doing into something bad.

David understood what Psalm or Proverbs 15 says.

A gentle tongue is a tree of life, but words of perverseness break our spirit.

I'm not gonna take a long time today.

I just wanted to challenge you with a couple of thoughts.

One of those thoughts is this.

I'm not trying to be mean, and I'm not trying to be um, well, I'll just leave it, and I'm not trying to be mean.

But I want you to hear me, because I'm telling you the truth.

Don't listen to words of death.

Don't listen to words that are perverse, that are harsh, that are mean, that are dishonest, that call you things that you know are not true.

I'm not suggesting that the answer is simple or easy, but I am telling you as a servant of the Most High God, God does not want you to listen to that kind of stuff.

David says in Psalm 107, I will not listen to people who delight in speaking curses.

I will not listen to it.

And I'm not telling you what you're supposed to do, but or I'm not telling you how to fix it.

But whether you need to walk away, run away, move away, hire somebody to knock somebody's head off, I don't know.

I'll do it if you can't afford somebody else, call me.

I'll do it for free.

But I'm telling you this.

We

Can't help isolated random idiots spewing venom.

That's unavoidable.

The world's full of them.

I mean, there's a new crop born every day.

But a daily, weekly, monthly, yearly diet of just having people speak to us like that lady spoke to her family, somebody's got to find some courage and stand up and say, that is wrong, that is a lie, and I will not listen to it anymore.

And until you can start talking reasonably and kindly, this is ending.

This is over, this conversation is done.

And I'm telling you, that is the way God wants you to respond.

This baloney of, oh, I'm going to be submissive and humble and take it, because that's that voice is not of God.

Don't listen.

Don't listen.

And I'm going to throw in just for good measure.

That includes the internet.

I don't understand why y'all listen to voices on the internet that speak mean, vicious, harsh, unloving comparison.

If you don't look like this, you don't live in this, you don't dress like this, you don't buy this, you don't go here for vacation to this place.

And they try to make you feel less than.

That's not of God.

And we have got to remove ourselves from those voices of comparison and anger and attacking and foolishness, and you're not enough.

And I could go on and on and on.

And we need to replace it with voices that speak the truth to us.

And sometimes those voices are difficult.

Difficult conversations are a part of the journey.

But these attacking death, vicious meanness, that's not of God, and God does not want us listening to that.

Psalm 34 says, Do you want a long and happy life?

Don't speak words that are evil and deceitful.

Proverbs 13 says that words will fill our lives with good things or with violence and death.

People who guard their lips preserve their lives and relationships, but people who speak rashly ruin their lives and their relationships.

What I take that to mean, guys, is simply this.

The way I speak to my wife and my daughter and my grandson and to Adam and to Rodney, the way I speak to people, it's going to determine the quality of my relationships and the longevity of my relationships.

If I talk to you with words of death often, it's going to affect the quality of my relationship with you.

And it's going to eventually determine the length of my relationship with you because you're going to hopefully have a brain and drop me like a bad habit.

And that's what you should do.

And sadly, words also have the power to determine how I see you and how I feel about you.

Is that I spend years talking in certain ways to people, and over time it begins to affect how I see you and how I feel about you.

And that is a warning, but it's also a what a glorious gift that I can revigorate and rejuvenate and restore my relationship with people where it's been bad simply by choosing to speak differently to them.

John Gottman, who Annie would know very well, John Gottman, who's sort of the one of the foremost authorities on relationships in the world, John Gottman says this the number one predictor of divorce are words of contempt.

Now you think about that.

And I will end with this.

The Apostle Paul in Ephesians chapter four, verse 15, he says five words.

And I think that the most powerful five words in the entire Bible related to relationships.

Paul says this in Ephesians 4, 15.

He says, speak the truth in love.

Speak the truth in love.

And I want to just challenge you.

He says speak.

What that means is that silence in relationships isn't golden.

Silence in relationships isn't golden.

We need to speak to one another.

My wife has spent 43 years working on me to teach me that.

To teach me that the greatest gift that I can give her is not pretty clothes, although she doesn't turn them down, or a bigger house, or a nicer car, or vacuuming the floor, or putting up the dishes, or mowing the grass.

The nicest gift that I can give her is to speak to her, to talk to her, to tell her about my day.

One of my heroes said it this way Unexpressed love is worthless.

Unexpress, but I love Kelsey.

She's one of my favorite people.

I love you.

But if you don't know it, if I've not communicated, if it's just kept in, you know, the old boy says, Well, I told my wife when we got married 30 years ago that I loved her, and if I ever change my mind, I'll let her know.

No, that dog won't hunt.

That dog will not hunt.

You got to tell her every day.

Unexpressed love is worthless.

And silence in relationships is deadly.

Words are God's way of feeding our souls, feeding our hearts.

It's the way we give life to those that we care about.

And so I would just appeal to you, first of all.

And I'm not trying to be mean, and I realize I live in a different world.

But this thing that we go home at night, we haven't seen each other all day, and I go in my room and uh uh watch one thing, and my wife goes in another room and gets on her laptop, and my kids go upstairs and get on their computers, and we go days and weeks and months, and we don't talk.

We don't talk.

We're under the same roof, but who cares?

We could also be in Rome and Seattle, and we would have as much connection.

We should be terrified of relational silence.

We must find ways and places and opportunities to talk, to share with each other our hopes, our fears, our dreams, our wounds, our failures, our needs.

We must create an atmosphere, a very intentional atmosphere where we talk to each other about what, where I feel safe to tell you what's going on in my life, but where I feel the responsibility to tell you what's going on in my life.

It is vital that we give praise to one another for what we do, what we don't do, how we look for the sacrifices that we make.

And you might say, well, I don't do that well.

Then do it poorly.

That's not my forte.

I don't feel comfortable.

I'm not good at that.

Then do it poorly.

But do it.

We've got to find ways and times and places where we will communicate to one another.

John Gottman says this the golden rule of relationships is to regularly catch your mate doing things right and acknowledge it, give thanks for it, and brag on them.

Now let me say that again.

That's where hearing twice.

The golden rule for relationships is to regularly catch your mate doing things right and acknowledge it, thank them for it, and brag on them.

Do you do that?

Do you regularly catch your mate, your children, your friends doing things right?

Well, they don't do anything right.

Who does that speak more of?

You or them?

That's like the infidels that say there's nothing good about Memphis.

Is that right?

There's nothing good about America.

There's nothing good about President Biden.

There's nothing good about our government.

There's nothing there.

Who does that speak more of when I can view things that clearly have value, but all I can see is the darkness, the badness.

We've got to learn to speak.

We've got to learn to speak the truth.

We've got to find the courage to tell each other the truth.

We've got to be willing to create small storms so that we avoid hurricanes.

What happens is we don't say anything, we don't say anything, we don't say anything, and then one day it blows up like Mount Vesuvius, and all there is is death and mayhem for miles.

That's not, that doesn't work.

That's no good.

We've got to learn to be honest and transparent, to not lie.

We've got to create an environment where people feel comfortable telling us the truth.

Just truthfully.

Now, my dad, the last 20 years of our my life, he was great.

But when I was growing up, if I was on fire, I wouldn't have told him.

You said what you were supposed to say, not what was the truth.

And that's no good.

That's no good.

It does irreparable damage when we are in an environment where I'm afraid to tell you when I'm hurting, when I'm in need, when I've got a problem.

And lastly, and I'm done, we need to speak the truth in love.

I've got to find a way to say tough things nicely.

And you might say, well, sometimes there's no way to say it except mean.

That's a lie.

And you know how I know it's a lie?

We find ways to say tough things nicely every day for money.

As long as money's involved, my boss, my customer, my client, my vendor, oh, it can be the toughest things in the world, but when it affects my paycheck, I'll find a creatively nice way to say it.

I can do that for that woman if I can do it for money.

Paul said, speak the truth in love.

And if we do that, we will experience life.

Real life, lasting life, in our relationships with one another.

And I'm not suggesting that it's easy.

I'm not suggesting we can learn this quickly.

I am suggesting that it's worth the time and the effort to do so.

Okay?

Alright, I'm gonna ask y'all to do something for me.

Well, first of all, we've got to take the Lord's Supper.

So let's take the Lord's Supper.

Um, let me see here.

Uh Turk, would you and your bride, Melanie, come over here and help me?

And Dale and Donna, y'all come help me too.

We're gonna take the Lord's Supper.

And we do this.

I need um, how are we gonna do this?

This ain't gonna work.

Huh.

All right.

Okay.

Now we can do it.

All right.

Let's see.

You take that, and Turk, you take this.

Oh, stand right there.

Okay.

All right.

Now I'm gonna send y'all right back over there.

Sorry.

Okay.

Got it?

You drop that, you won't go to heaven.

So you gotta, you gotta be careful, okay?

Just a joke, just a joke.

Don't get nervous.

Okay, all right, okay.

Uh Patty, you come here.

Or I'll tell you what, you go over there and stand by them.

Lord bless you.

And one of y'all, I don't care which one, somebody come over and help me.

Y'all stand right.

Thank you, brother.

Thank you, thank you.

Okay.

I'm gonna invite y'all to come up in just a moment and take bread and juice and eat and drink.

And we do that each week just to take a moment.

Just to remember what the Son of God came to this earth to do.

He came to give his life as a sacrifice so that we could experience God's forgiveness and we could experience adoption into his family.

And if that is your belief, if that is what you are trusting in for your eternal life, then I invite whether you well, I don't go to your church.

I didn't ask you if you come to my church or not.

You're invited to participate.

And then once you've done that, I want you to go back and sit down in your seat, uh, and then we're gonna have our baptismal service.

It won't take just a minute to do, but I want to invite y'all to stay for that, okay?

So, y'all, please come and eat and drink and remember and give thanks.

Dale, let them come to you.

Let them come to you.

Okay, there you go.

All right.