I want to invite you to take your Bibles if you have one and turn to the book of

Proverbs which is right after the book of Psalms which is right in the middle of the

Bible and turn to chapter 10. Proverbs chapter 10.

I ask Rick if I can take care of the text here even though he's in the bulletin because I only want to read one verse instead of 20 and I thought it would be better to just move right from the text into the message.

I'm only going to preach from half a verse this morning and still it's awfully hard to hold

it down to 20 or 25 minutes. because this is a great verse. Chapter 10,

verse 11, the mouth of the righteous is a fountain of life, but the mouth of the wicked conceals violence.

The mouth of the righteous is a fountain of life. That's the text. Now some things are right on the face of that text.

They're very, very obvious, four of them at least, that you would see and if you were preaching, you'd start with these four points.

So here's the obvious things. Number one, God likes life.

God is for life, and therefore he extols that which produces life.

The mouth of the righteous is a fountain of life.

That's the first obvious thing. The second obvious thing is that life comes

from the mouth. In some sense, life comes out of the mouth. The mouth of the righteous is a fountain of life. Here's the third obvious

thing. A life-giving mouth is like a fountain, not a factory.

I'll say a lot more about that in a minute.

But that's obvious, it's right here in the text.

The mouth of the righteous is a fountain of life.

The image is not one of labor, production, sweat, weariness.

The image is one of refreshment, ease, coolness, moisture, brightness,

just comes out.

It's like a fountain. And the fourth obvious thing is that the kind of mouth that is a fountain of life is a righteous mouth.

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