God bless!

       Let me start by saying today’s devotional is a doozy! The verse today is very in our face, it covers a topic that no matter how much of a “nice” person you are, we all are affected by it. We all at one point or another have gossiped or backbitten about someone. It’s an unfortunate natural occurrence in humanity. To be honest (if you allow me to) it is probably one of the biggest battles I personally have as a Pastor. Why? I’ll tell you why: When you hold an office such as a Pastor, it is expected of you to be perfect, but we all know that there is no perfect human being. If we ourselves are not perfect, why do we “expect” our spiritual leaders to be perfect (they are also human). To this I say: Stop expecting, just like you, we are in a process and the fact that we are pastors or leaders doesn’t mean we have any super powers but rather that God has allowed the call over our lives for accountability. Now don’t get me wrong this is not a “get out of jail” free card, there certainly is a higher expectancy from leaders and pastors but we all will fail you at one point or another. So what are we supposed to do when someone fails us? FORGIVE. Now forgiveness is a tricky subject for some of us because we have formed our own concept of this term such as thinking that if we never cross paths with the individual we have forgiven them, but have we really? Have we really forgiven if we don’t talk to the person? Have we forgiven if we have deleted them off of our social media, etc.? I’m not trying to make any of us uncomfortable here today nor am I trying to make any of you make non necessary phone calls for the sake of feeling “righteous” but rather what I’m trying to get to today is eliminating that jail cell of anger that is reflected through judgment in our lives. We judge because we are angry, we are angry because we are hurt, we are hurt because for the most part we don’t communicate and we don’t communicate because we are scared. So to sum it up we are scared because we don’t feel like we can attain what someone else has so we rather down play their success. We should never judge because we don’t have, we should acknowledge and move on with our lives. The interesting thing is that many times we are angry about something that someone has that is less than what we have. Example: we speak bad about someone’s house when we have a bigger house, How does that make sense? Or the opposite we speak bad about someone’s house that is bigger and better, will that change our current state? It’s time for all of us to be grateful for what we have and work harder to get something better! So today I finish by saying let’s all stop and think before we speak and as the saying goes “if we don’t have anything good to say then let’s not say anything at all”.

With all the love in the world,

Pastor Joell A. Perez

James 4:11 “Brothers and sisters, do not slander one another. Anyone who speaks against a brother or sister or judges them speaks against the law and judges it. When you judge the law, you are not keeping it, but sitting in judgment on it.”