Clean Out Your Pipes

Week 2 - Day 9

Have you ever tasted water that runs through rusty pipes? You are expecting to be refreshed, but there is a taste and after-taste that makes the water less than pleasant to drink. The water is tainted by the vessel it is flowing through. It may be great water, but you would never know it because the channel it went through has polluted it.

In a similar way, truth that flows through unclean "pipes" is harder to receive. This happens when teaching or revelation comes through a life that is stuck in frustration, fear, bitterness, anger, a bad G*d concept, or personal hopelessness. These pipes are a person's life attitudes that affect the purity of the truth presented. The lack of hope and empowering grace are the main symptoms of pipes that need to be cleaned. It should be every person's desire to be a clean pipeline for G-d*.

How then can we keep our pipes untainted so that hope and grace are attached to everything we say? One of the ways is to laugh a lot. Laughter has an amazing way of taking the "spirit of heaviness" off our lives (Isaiah 61:3). Godly humor gives us a new perspective that helps us to see reality rather than the falsehood that supports our unhappiness. our inner trouble is greatly associated with they way we think, and humor can change the way we think. We need to understand that it is not the situation that creates our distress hearty, but it is the conclusions that we place on those situations. Humor adjusts the meaning of our circumstances so that they are not so overwhelming (and so that we can begin to focus on G*d's promises instead of the problem). So let's use regular laughter as a cleansing agent to our spiritual pipes. We (and others) will be glad we did.

Declaration: Hope, love, and grace are attached to everything I say (even when I have to say difficult things). I have pipes that are not tainted or plugged, but they are regularly cleansed through hearty laughter. The joy of the L*rd is not only strength to me, but to others through me.

*It is important to know that a "bad taste" concerning what we hear may result from our own unresolved issues and not just those of the speaker.