It’s our Talking month and last Sunday, we were further inspired to be deliberate about putting the word we have been learning to work, in his message, Pastor Kola emphasized the importance of not just hearing the word but doing the word if we are to gain anything from it, he shared from the parable Jesus gave in Matthew 7 where he likened those who did the word to those who built their house on the rock and it remained standing even when the storm, wind and rains beat upon it, in the same vein, those who merely heard, he compared to those who built on the sand and everything came crumbling at the slightest challenge. Reading from James 3, he taught on God’s definition of perfection being perfection in speech and specifically meaning getting to a point of never saying things that are offensive to the word of God, we learnt that God’s purpose for the tongue is to control the body and that the body will always go in the direction of the tongue just as an horse is controlled by bits in its mouth and a large ship by a small rudder, we were reminded that life and death are in the power of the tongue and that if it took confessing the lordship of Jesus with our mouth to be saved from hell, then we can with our words determine the kind of life that we live on the earth. We learnt from the example of Job and how his words put him in trouble as seen in Job 3:25-26, he lived in fear and disquietness and he often expressed his fear through his words thereby creating an entrance for the devil to afflict him, Pastor Kola charged us to refuse fear in our lives and to realise that not everything that comes to us as thoughts are to be spoken. We further learnt from Proverbs 22:6 where he explained that the Hebrew word translated “he should go” actually means “mouth or speech” and so the emphasis is to train up a child in the way he should speak and when he is old, he will not depart from it, many children have been trained in a certain direction yet they rebelled but as God has designed, their life will always go in the direction of their words and so the real training is in their speech, this lends credence to why the Spirit of God begins to train us to talk right once we get born again. Pastor Kola reiterated that our goal in life should be perfection based on speaking the right words, he mentioned that it is not enough to stop speaking the wrong words, we have to speak the right words because if we refuse to talk, others are talking and their words will affect us just as the words of the president will naturally affect the citizens, but as we speak, we take charge of our own lives, he taught that when we do the word in this way, no matter what happens around us, we remain standing. Pastor Kola rounded off the message by sharing that how we speak matters, he taught that there must be an attitude or faith and boldness when we speak as shown in Hebrews 13:6, we were charged by the word of God in this service and we exercised ourselves by speaking glorious words concerning our lives. Glory to God!