Matthew 12:34: For out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks.

I love this verse, and it came up in the message this weekend. It made me think of the Malcolm Gladwell book Blink.

In it, he describes how we undervalue snap judgments. My big takeaway, though, was the necessity to train yourself well in order to prepare yourself for the snap judgment. For example, a group of lawyers studied the paper trail and vouched for the veracity of an ancient Greek statue. A group of art experts saw the statue and knew it was fake right away. They couldn't exactly explain why, but they were right. They were right because they had a lifetime of experience looking at such statues. They were prepared to snap the right way. The art-fan lawyers trusted their reasoning, but hadn't absorbed viscerally the subject well enough to spot it.

So what? For out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks. We can't box off our faith. We can't leave it for Sunday. If we aren't striving to be who God made us all the time, we won't snap the right way when we are called upon. We need to be filling our heart with stuff we'd be proud to have leak out from time to time. If we're filling our heart with bile, we can't be surprised when our mouths reveal the worst in us.