I'm listening to David Suchet's audiobook 'The Bible in One Year. Currently the New Testament chunk for each day is from Matthew's gospel, and we've reacher chapter 15. I've selected a couple of paragraphs from the early part of the chapter;
Matthew Chapter 15
1 Then some Pharisees and teachers of the law came to Jesus from Jerusalem and asked, 2 “Why do your disciples break the tradition of the elders? They don’t wash their hands before they eat!”
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10 Jesus called the crowd to him and said, “Listen and understand. 11 What goes into someone’s mouth does not defile them, but what comes out of their mouth, that is what defiles them.”
12 Then the disciples came to him and asked, “Do you know that the Pharisees were offended when they heard this?”
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16 “Are you still so dull?” Jesus asked them. 17 “Don’t you see that whatever enters the mouth goes into the stomach and then out of the body? 18 But the things that come out of a person’s mouth come from the heart, and these defile them. 19 For out of the heart come evil thoughts—murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander. 20 These are what defile a person; but eating with unwashed hands does not defile them.”
and I'm feeling well and truly 'seen'...
The list of evil thoughts seems a bit over the top for me and my circumstances, although, come to think about it, I have been if not Shouting at the news on TV, Thinking Very Loudly at it in fairly intemperate language.
No, I think I need to pay more attention to my choice of words when provoked - to put it plainly, clean up my vocabulary. I think I may have found what I plan to give up for Lent, and I have a scant 2 weeks to get into training.
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I never swore, until Boris Johnson became prime minister. This government is responsible for a serious deterioration of my vocabulary (along with many other, much more awful, things)
ReplyDeleteThis government..... now I need to be Really Careful which words I use next.....
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