What Pollutes Your Peace

A clear stream turned cloudy, a village fell ill, and the fix came only when someone traced the water back to its hidden source. That simple story unlocks a deeper truth about the heart: what we allow at the spring shapes everything that flows out—our thoughts, our tone, our joy.
We walk through a vivid scene from a remote village, where a once-pure spring became contaminated and no one knew why. The search upstream revealed a startling cause, and once removed, the water ran fresh again. From there, we draw a straight line to everyday life: how quiet inputs—fear, anger, worry, and unforgiveness—silently pollute our inner life, strain our relationships, and even distort how we see God. With Psalm 51 as our guide, we explore a grounded, hopeful pattern for renewal: confession that is honest, a plea for a clean heart, a request for a steadfast spirit, and the return of joy that fuels obedience.
 If you’ve felt your patience thinning or your hope running low, this short message offers a clear path back to peace and strength.

Transcript

Welcome And Daily Focus

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Good morning. I am Denny Mack, and you're listening to Starting Right. Every weekday morning, I'm going to be here to share stories of life and hope from God's Word. So grab a cup of coffee, sit back and relax for the next five minutes as I help you start your day by starting right. Many of the people who live in remote parts of Africa have a constant battle to find clear, safe water to drink. In fact, there are a lot of ministries and help organizations who are out there drilling wells and helping these people to find water. There are, however, a few villages that are located next to clear streams and the where the drinking water is safe. I heard the story of one of these villages just recently. They had a stream that passed by their village that had cool, clear drinking water which originated from an underground spring. For many years they had been able to have the water they needed without any problems at all. And then something happened. Something went awry and their water somehow became contaminated. People started to get sick and they weren't able to find out the cause. So they brought some people in to try and help them, and they began to search through and trace back up the stream to where the spring was to find out what was contaminating the water. When they got to the spring itself, everything appeared fine until they examined down into the hole from which the spring was coming. What they discovered was that a pig and her piglets had fallen down into the spring itself and were now contaminating the water that went in the stream down past the village and eventually out into the river. They removed the dead pig and piglets from the spring, and soon the water was running fresh and clear again. That image of the fresh spring is one that really speaks to us about our walk with God. When we are being refreshed by the stream of God's word into our lives, we are constantly being renewed and refreshed and strengthened. But every once in a while something gets into that flow of God's truth into us and it contaminates us. It contaminates our mind against what is true, it contaminates our mind about what's right, and we start to doubt things, we start to get uptight about things. And the next thing you know, we're just we're full of fear, we're full of anger, we're full of worry. We're stressing out about so many things. We can even start taking it out on the people that are closest to us and that we love the most. We start to treat them in ways that we know we don't want to. We can even get to the point where we get mad at God because He's not stopping what we're going through, or because we think He's not hearing our prayers. In Psalm 51, verses 10 and 11, it says, Create in me a clean heart, O God. Renew a loyal spirit within me. Do not banish me from your presence, and don't take your Holy Spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of your salvation, and make me willing to obey you. We are usually smart enough to know when our hearts and our minds have become contaminated by things around us. We know when our attitudes are bad. We know when we're treating people like we shouldn't. Sometimes we've let anger get in. Sometimes we've let the worry get in and the fear. Sometimes there's unforgiveness. The real issue is not knowing it. The real issue is what are we going to do about it? And just like they did with those pigs, we gotta get them out of there. We have to get those things out of us and go back before God and say, Lord, okay, I'm sorry. I've been going the wrong way. God created me a clean heart. Renew a right spirit within me. Lord, restore to me the joy of your salvation. Lord, help me to do what's right. And God does the amazing thing of coming and loving and refreshing and encouraging us every day. Let's each one of us check ourselves for contamination. And if there's something within you that you know is just not right, take it to God. Let Him give you the strength and ability to remove it from your life so that He can flow back into you with the goodness that you want to have and the peace and the strength that we all need every day. Have a great day, my friends. We'll talk to you tomorrow. Thank you for listening today. And I invite you to join me Monday to Friday right here on Starting Right with Danny Mack.