Another WHOA.

From my reading this morning:

So, for the sake of your tradition, you make void the word of God. You hypocrites! Isaiah prophesied rightly about you when he said:
This people honors me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me;
in vain do they worship me,
teaching human precepts as doctrines."
Matthew 15:6-9

And:

For out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a person...
Matthew 15:19-20a

WHOA. Again.

The passages in the Bible that list sins always grab me. Because the writer starts off with things we all agree are bad: murder, fornication, etc.

Then we get to the end of the list. False witness. Slander. I mean, I will admit that, even being a victim of recent false witness, that seems like a rather "minor" sin compared to murder and fornication. Right?

But I realized something this morning that had never quite caught my attention. Nothing deep. Nothing that required me to ask K what a word means in Greek, or anything. :)

Just this: Jesus was a victim of false witness and slander.

Okay, so that part is not so new.

But this is what hit me: Jesus takes special offense against false witness and slander.

He understands. He knows it. He knows what it is like. And He hates it.

And it grieves me to think that at some point in my life, I have uttered words carelessly.

Whoa.

LORD, let nothing out of my mouth today be anything less than loving and kind!

[Sidenote: I giggled to myself as I was writing this today, because I realized that Jesus' "woes" (i.e., "woe to you, [church]") were leading me to create my own series of "Whoas." Okay, so I am probably the only one that finds that amusing/ironic....)