What’s In Your Well

Ever notice how the words that slip out under pressure seem to come from nowhere? They don’t. They rise from a well you’ve been filling all along. We walk through how everyday inputs shape our reflexes when life squeezes us: the shows we watch, the conversations we hold, the music we sing, and the stories we believe about ourselves and others.

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And Setup
• 0:25 The Well And Bucket Metaphor
• 1:20 Scripture On The Heart’s Treasury
• 2:00 Stress Reveals What’s Inside
• 2:23 Choosing What We Pour In
• 3:22 Guarding Inputs And Influence
• 4:07 Planting Good Treasure Daily
• 4:53 Reflect, Bless, And Close

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:04

Good morning and welcome to Starting Right with Danny Mack. I'm going to be here every Monday to Friday to help you get a great five-minute start to your day. So grab your cup of coffee, sit back, relax, and let me help you start your day right. Good morning everybody, and welcome. It's good to have you here again today. There's a phrase that I've heard a couple times over the last little while that's sort of stuck in my brain and has rattled around in there a few times, and I just want to talk a little bit about it this morning. The phrase is what's down in the well will come up in the bucket. In other words, whatever is inside of you is going to eventually work its way out, either in what we do or what we say or how we act. I first heard it from somebody who wasn't even a Christian, but I know that this phrase speaks powerfully to how God and His Word works in our lives as well. Over in Luke chapter six and verse forty five, Jesus said, A good person produces good things from the treasury of a good heart, and an evil person produces evil things from the treasury of an evil heart. What you say flows from what is in your heart. Now we all know our heart is not that pumping organ inside of us, it's the depth of our being. It is who we are, it is what we are down in our very core. And that's the important part of us. It's what dictates how we act and react and say things in every area of our lives. It's what is down in our core, it's in our heart. Have you ever experienced where under a stressful situation something happens, you fall and hurt yourself, or something surprises you and you're not really prepared for it. And you react in a way that you know you shouldn't. You either react in anger or you say something that you would never say in any other situation. It just sort of comes out of you, and afterwards you're embarrassed by what you said or did. You wonder why you acted like you did and where it came from. Well, the truth of the matter is that somehow, somewhere, those things were planted deep inside of us. They were down in our well. And when our sort of crisis moment happened, out of that well the bucket drew some very ugly stuff sometimes that we don't like. Therefore, it is all the more important that we know what we are feeding into our well, what we're pouring into our soul, into our heart. And there are things that we need to make sure that we are pouring into it, and there are things that we need to make sure that we are not pouring into it. Of course, we need to pour into ourselves God's word. It needs to be poured in every day. It has to be our strength and our guidance and our wisdom. It feeds our heart with good things, the truths of God. We need to get those into us. We need to have conversations about God every day with our friends or our family. We need to talk about who God is and what God's done and the way he works in our lives. And we need to listen to and sing things that are honoring to God. Now you need to understand I'm not saying that we should never listen to anything else or talk to anybody who's not a Christian or read anything that's not the Bible. That's not what I'm saying. What I am saying though is that we need to be choosy. We need to choose carefully the words that we use in our conversations with people, particularly those who are not Christians. We need to make sure that we're not being pulled into their way of thinking and their way of acting, responding that we know is not the way God wants for us. We need to make sure that what we are watching and reading and listening to is not something that will bury down deep inside of us words and actions and responses that will cause us embarrassment if they were to explode out of us. And as Luke stated, the most important thing for us is to make sure that we're planting good treasure in our heart. Words of love and wisdom and encouragement and kindness. In most cases those things don't happen automatically. We have to plant them. We work at placing those truths and promises inside of our hearts and in our minds, and then they are readily available. We don't have to stop and think about it. Those words of encouragement are there because we've planted that love and encouragement inside of us. Do a little bit of self-examination this morning. Look at how you've interacted with your family and your friends this week, what you've said to your spouse, how you've treated your children, your neighbor, your brother, your sister, your co-worker. Have you been short and uptight with them? Have you been mean or cruel? Sometimes when we look back, we can recognize that we fell short of what we really want to express to them. And if there's negative stuff coming out of you, it's because we are planting negative stuff into us in some way, shape, or form, by what we are reading, watching, saying, or listening to. Somehow we are planting those negative things within us that are now coming out. Every day we plant inside of us and we add to that wealth from which we will draw in every situation. So fill yourself with God's word and his love and his promises, and be determined every day to have a good attitude about the people and the places and things around you. God will bless you, and God will use you to encourage people, people that need to know the peace and love of God. Choose to be a blessing to others, and you will be blessed. Have a great day, my friends. We will talk again tomorrow. Thank you for listening today. And I invite you to join me Monday to Friday right here on Starting Right with Danny Mack.