What is the source of your life?
Questions.
Our lives are filled with questions each and every day. Some big, some small.
Questions like what should I eat for lunch? Or do I get a tea or a coffee? Other questions are bigger: will you marry me? Is this relationship healthy? Should I look for a different job? Should I go to church today? Do I even believe in God?
A big part of each day is asking questions and figuring out answers to those questions.
In the year 1856, a team came together to answer a question. An old question that had been asked for at least 3,000 years by several different countries and groups of people. And the question was this: What is the source of the Nile River?
The Nile River is the longest river in the world. At about 6,650 km long, it runs through eleven countries: the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Tanzania, Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia, Eritrea, South Sudan, Sudan, and Egypt.
And for years, people knew that it ended at the Mediterranean Sea. But most of the world did not know the source - where did the Nile begin?
The ancient Egyptians are the first group that we have proof of trying to figure out this answer. In the 3rd century B.C., the Egyptian Pharaoh Ptolemy II Philadelphus sent out an expedition to find the source. And while they discovered new information about the Nile, they didn’t find the source. Years later, the Roman Empire tried. The Roman Emperor Nero sent out a team in the year 60 AD, and while they didn’t find the start of the Nile River, they did come up with a witty phrase out of it. They would say that something impossible to do was “like searching for the start of the Nile River.”
So, in 1856, a group from 3 different continents (Africa, Europe, and Asia) set out to try to answer the question of the source of the Nile River. It was a two year journey full of sickness with malaria, hunger, members of the team deserting, and attacks by beetles. But, at the end of the journey, they ended up introducing the larger world to the source of the Nile River, what we now know as Lake Victoria. Obviously local people groups knew of it long before, but this expedition presented it to people around the world through published reports in newspapers and books.
The source of the Nile had been found!
But here’s the interesting thing, it still remained disputed and the results of that mission continue to be debated. Even just 30 years ago, in 1996, a team explored that same area and realized that there are other rivers and an additional lake that also seem to provide water to the Nile and that they could be considered as extending the source of the Nile even farther.
Which is to say - there is no one single source of the Nile River. The answer to the thousands of years old question about the source of the Nile is:
It’s complicated.
What about you? What is the source of your life?
Unlike the Nile, James 3 tells us that the source of our lives is not complicated to understand. James tells us that we can tell the source of our lives based on our mouths and how we speak. The way we speak reflects what our lives are rooted in.
Our words point to our source in life.
Let’s read James 3:9-12:
9 With the tongue we praise our Lord and Father, and with it we curse human beings, who have been made in God’s likeness. 10 Out of the same mouth come praise and cursing. My brothers and sisters, this should not be. 11 Can both fresh water and salt water flow from the same spring? 12 My brothers and sisters, can a fig tree bear olives, or a grapevine bear figs? Neither can a salt spring produce fresh water.
So our lives are not like the Nile River. James tells us here in these verses that we don’t have to doubt where our source is in life. We can see it from the lives we live and the words we speak. Our tongue and our speech reveal where our source is - either the world or God.
What is the source of YOUR life?
James says here that just like a fig tree cannot produce olives nor can a salt spring produce fresh water, our lives cannot be rooted in Jesus and at the same time have our speech full of hate, gossip, lies, and cursing other people.
Our speech points to our source. As the people of God, our speech - and our actions - will reflect Jesus.
Take some time to reflect on your speech and what your words point to. As much as we might like to convince ourselves otherwise, we can’t be duplicitous in our lives. We are either focused on Jesus and pointing towards Jesus with our lives - or we aren’t.
What are you focused on in life?
What do you want to be focused on?
When Jesus is the source of our lives, the fruit (and words) of our lives will reflect that.
