What comes out of a toothpaste tube when you squeeze it?

If you said “toothpaste” you are wrong.

What comes out of toothpaste tube, is what that toothpaste tube is full of.

I learned this lesson at Glasgow Airport when I was a police officer. I was called to watch some customs officers search a man who had just come back from Spain on holiday. One of the customs officers noticed something strange, the man seemed to have a lot of toothpaste for someone coming home from holiday.

The Customs Officer took one of the toothpaste tube, took the lid off and squeezed. It wasn’t toothpaste that came out, it was a brownish coloured paste. Later testing confirmed this paste contained heroin.

Its not just pressure applied to toothpaste tubes that reveals their true content, pressure in life reveals the true content of our heart.

Jesus simply put it like this,

“For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of.” Luke 6:45

Jesus was saying that when our lives are put under pressure, when we are in a stressful situation or a situation where we don’t like what is happening, our words reveal the spiritual condition of our heart.

I was watching a medical drama the other night. The story line was a woman was dying, and they traced the likely cause to her heart, so they did a Heart CT scan, to reveal the physical condition of the heart. According to Jesus, her words at that point would reveal the spiritual condition of her heart.

It’s the same for you and I. How we react and respond under pressure reveals the truth about what is dominating our heart.

So, let me ask you an unavoidable question.

When you have been under pressure recently,

with your spouse,

or your children,

or at work,

or when someone cuts in front of you in the car,

or when someone tells you can’t do what you want to,

what came out of your mouth?

And what do those words reveal about the current spiritual health of your heart?