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Foreign. Sower Nation. It is Thursday, January 15th, in the year of our Lord 2026. We're, we're halfway through the first month of the 26th year of the second millennium. How about that? So let's make it count. I'm John David Walt. This is your wake up call. I've been in Little Rock for most of this week and I've been working on the audible recording for the Exodus book. You'll remember our long trek through the wilderness some couple years back. Well, Harper Collins Zondervan has picked that book up as part of the Daily Seed series and it will be coming out this spring. So we just did the recording of it. So note that we'll keep you posted. And I'm now back in Gillette. We are having a preacher's workshop today on our lent resource, Jesus Asking. We're going to be working on sermons with preachers whose churches are doing this. Not too late to join us for that. Just reply to the email, let me know. I'll see if I can get you in. It'll, you're gonna, it'll be a quick turn. We're gonna probably start about 9 this morning. We got good, good stuff ahead today. We're all going to be hitting our respective fields. Let's consecrate ourselves before the Lord unto the Lord. Wake up sleeper. Rise from the dead and Christ will shine on you. Jesus, I belong to you. I lift up my heart to you. I set my mind on you. I fix my eyes on you. I offer my body to you as a living sacrifice. Jesus, we belong to you. And we're praying in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Well, we're today halfway right at halfway through the Proverbs chapter 15. You're reading that chapter today and we're going to be focusing in on the very first verse. Our entry today is entitled the Surprising foundation for the Spiritual Life. Our text is Proverbs, chapter 15, verse 1. Hear now the word of the Lord. A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger. The word of the Lord. Now consider this. Are you a gentle person? If not, the chances are you are a harsh person. I never gave much thought to gentleness. Many years ago, A wise friend, Dr. Marilyn Elliott, dear friend, gave me the gift of a book that I'm still reading. It's a book you've never known of from an author you've never heard of. It's hard to even locate a copy. The book is entitled Spirituality and the Gentle Life by Father Adrian von Kahm the late Father von Kahm, a Roman Catholic priest, gave his life to pioneering the science of how human beings are formed and transformed by by the Holy Spirit. In the book, he identifies what he calls the foundation of the spiritual life. It is gentleness. He calls gentleness the prerequisite condition for sustained spiritual growth and development. Hear him in his own words. Gentleness is an attitude of letting be combined with a patient abiding with myself or with the person, task or problem God calls me to be involved in. This attitude leads to peace and contentment. The gentle person is more free. He can take himself and the world as they are because he feels free to be himself and to let all things be with the same gentility. A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger. A convention of the past commonly referred to people as gentlemen or gentle ladies. Gentleness is a disposition or way of being. We see it in people who are at home with themselves, and people who are at home with themselves have a way of helping others be more at home with themselves. Gentleness does not mean softness. It is probably more clearly seen in the way one expresses firmness. Angry people carry harshness. How do I know? I used to be one. Gentle people carry peace. Truth be told, we are all a mix of both. A little further down in chapter 15 today we get A hot tempered person stirs up conflict, but the one who is patient calms a quarrel. Verse 8 Gentleness does not mean conflict avoidance, and it actually shows up in the way one engages conflict. The best way to tell if I am a gentle person is not so much to observe me in my own conflicts, but to watch me in the midst of conflicts between other people. Do I tend to contribute to a conflict by taking aside and escalating it, or do I tend to look for ways to diffuse the conflict? A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger. And finally, we should remember that gentleness is not a personality trait. It's not a particular type of person. A gentle person Gentleness is a fruit of the Holy Spirit, remember. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self control. We can't let ourselves off the hook by saying, well, that's just not my type of it's actually a part of our calling. It flows out of our identity in Jesus. Let's pray. Father, teach me your way of gentleness. Reveal your own gentle bearing toward me. Free me to become more gentle with myself, and so Treat other people. I pray in the name of Jesus. Amen. In our journal prompts. What do you think of as being who? Oh, who? Who do you think of as being a gentle person? And be careful not to mistake passivity for gentleness. What would it look like for me to become more gentle with myself and not so har. And how might I become mindful to invite the Holy Spirit to bring the fruit of gentleness into my everyday life? How do you think about that? So we nation. That's deep. And, you know, I think for me, the place where I really try to work at this all the time is how I'm treating myself. Am I being gentle with myself or am I being harsh with myself? And because the fact is we treat other people the same way we treat ourselves, it's just a fact. I'm convinced this is why the great command says, love your neighbor as you love yourself. It's. It's like the symbiotic reality and this connection to loving God and being loved by God. You see, you. You have to know that God loves you before you actually can love yourself. And then when you know God loves you and when you can love yourself, that will flow right out to everybody you're with. Can't stop it. You can try to fake it, and you can fool some of the people some of the time, but it's. If it's real, it's real. And it's coming from God and it's coming through you. But I find that gentleness is. It's a watchword. It's one of those ways, if I can be aware and attentive, I can interrupt my own impatience, my own harshness, my own kind of relentless, demanding nature over myself. Oftentimes, David, which. I'm so excited, guys. David. Walt, My son has come to work for Seedbed. And I'll have to tell you about it another time. But. But David, he. He'll call me out, he'll say, dad, you're getting in gamer mode. Okay? Gamer mode is like frenetic pace. Go, go, go, go. And I can. That. That becomes antithetical to gentleness. And I'm rush, rush, rush, rushing. And, you know, it reminds me of when David said to me one day we were on our way over to Tennessee and driving, and we're coming through. You know, we don't. We gotta drive a long way to get Chick Fil a from Gillette. So we're going through West Memphis, and he's got its Chick Fil a scoped out. And he sees that I'm about to take us through the drive through. And he's like, dad, let's, let's go in. And I'm like, david, I don't want to waste time stopping on a five hour drive to Tennessee to go inside and eat. We can eat on the way. That's okay. That's, that's gamer mode. That's not gentle. I'll never forget this. He said, well, dad, remember I said, I don't want to waste time. He said, dad, I don't think of taking my time as wasting my time. That's a gentle disposition right there. More of that for me, Lord. And anyway, I think you get what I'm talking about. And, and it's easy to be harsh with yourself about not being gentle. See, be gentle with yourself. Just become gently honest. You don't have to condemn yourself. You don't have to be harsh with yourself. Just that gentle sense of correction, just that adjustment. And it really comes down to remembering how Jesus is treating you, how God is with you. A lot of us grew up at times with parents who were harsh. It's okay, they were doing their best. They probably grew up the same way. But we're in the cycle breaking. Well, the Holy Spirit wants to break these cycles. And the Spirit wants to give us gentleness in a way that will enable us to release harshness. That's the presence of Jesus in us. That's how we're growing day by day. And as we're growing, what we're growing friends. That's what we're sowing. That's how this all works. It's a flow, it's fluid, it's organic, it's real. And it's bit by bit, day by day. It's not quick. So how about it? I think that makes sense to you. Journal some of that out today and we're gonna sing. You're just gonna have me today. And I thought we might lead us. I might lead us in. Well, even before I sing, there's something else I want to say today. Talking about a gentle answer turns away wrath and a harsh answer, you know, stirs up all kinds of mess. About a week or two, maybe 10 days ago, I made a comment on here that I want to apologize for and retract. I was talking about reading the Bible through in a year and I, you know, one of my sort of foibles, if you haven't noticed, is I can overstate my case to make a point. I just push it a little bit too far. And in that one, I Was kind of eschewing, kind of like downing the practice of rushing through the Bible, trying to get through it in a year, which I tried to come back around. I even knew I did it at the time because what I did was I started criticizing Terabeth Cobble, whom I admire, who. She's a rock star as far as I'm concerned. But. And I really wasn't criticizing her. I was critiquing her work. And I think I did that in an unfair way. And I began to imply that people who are following her work on the Bible recap aren't actually reading the Bible. They're listening to her. Give her take on the, the one year Bible readings. Now I think that's, that's, that was unfair. It was ungenerous. It was wrong. I want to take it back. I want to apologize to her and to so many people who read her and follow her. Okay, we. Are we clear? I'll tell you what happened to me. A couple of people who I really respect wrote me and they wrote me with the gentlest spirit. And it was. It was what I would call a kind rebuke, which I'm like, bring it on, you know, I'll receive it. And I appreciated it and so I've corrected myself and owned it. And let's move on now. Let's sing. Let's going to sing Spirit of the Living God. It's in our hymnal. I think that you probably know this. We're going to sing it through twice. It's just a chorus. I'm looking forward here. Spirit of the living God is 299 in our seedbed hymn that our great redeemers praise. We'll sing it through twice. Let's sing it as a prayer. Let's almost invite the potter to come down and form the clay reform the clay of our life.