The "Unfluences" of Life

     The tongue also is a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body. It corrupts the whole body, sets the whole course of one’s life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell. With the tongue we praise our Lord and Father, and with it we curse human beings, who have been made in God’s likeness. Out of the same mouth come praise and cursing. My brothers and sisters, this should not be. Can both fresh water and salt water flow from the same spring? James 3:6, 9-11

     Our influences, or "unfluences" as I like to call them, are all around us. The music we listen to, movies we watch, even the jokes we tell are all things that enter our hearts and help determine what comes out of our mouths.  James tells us that what comes out of our mouth determines who we are. It can praise the Lord God who knew us and all our faults before we were born, or it can corrupt our entire body and set the fires of hell to our lives and the lives of those around us. Because of this, we must be very careful what we allow ourselves to be influenced by.

     You may be looking at the word in the paragraph above thinking that I have misspelled the word influences. I wasn't. "Unfluences", as defined in the worldwide dictionary of "Andrew Fields", is anything that we see, hear, or experience that pollutes our mind and "undoes" what Jesus Christ has been working on in our lives. Examples of "unfluences" in today's media: songs with cuss words or sexual undertones (or in many cases overtones), movies with sexual content/extreme violence/language, or even crude jokes and racial or sexist slurs. Now, I can't deny that it is difficult to throw these out of our lives. Honestly, if we try to take out only movies and music that has anything to do with sex, there won't be too many films and songs left for us to listen too.

     But this is an important issue; important enough for Christ himself to bring it up in the Gospel of Matthew. In Matthew 15, Jesus tells the Pharisees that "what goes into someones mouth does not defile them, but what comes out of their mouth, that is what defiles them." Then later in the passage, he says that "the things that come out of a person's mouth comes from the heart, and these defile them." Jesus is warning us to not give in to "unfluences" and only feed our hearts with good things. What goes in the heart, comes out the mouth, and this can hurt our lives and the lives of others. I challenge everyone to look at things in our lives that are "unfluences", and get rid of them. Only allow our hearts to be influenced by things that will give God glory!

SOLI DEO GLORIA!!