The Awesome Power of Spoken Words

John 6:63 “The Spirit is the Life-maker; the flesh does not benefit at all. The words I have spoken and told you are Spirit and Life.”

When the human spirit leaves the flesh and blood body of anyone we say that person has died and in a matter of a few hours his physical body will start to deteriorate. “For just as the body without the spirit is dead…..” (James 2:26a) However there are instances in which the human spirit does return to the human body, and the person remembers quite a number of things he experienced when he was out of his body. Normally, once the spirit departs, that person does not return to his deceased body, but there are times when this does happen and the person who returned can tell those interested what he experienced. The first such experience I read about was in a book written by Catherine Marshall, Peter Marshall’s wife. (Peter Marshall was the greatest pulpit orator I have ever been privileged to listen to and he was also the chaplain of the Senate for a few years before he died).

We know that God made us a tri-unity, like He is, for we are made in His image. He is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We are body, soul and spirit. We have a flesh and blood body which is under God’s sentence of death. (“For you are dust, and to dust you shall return”. Genesis 3:19b) Our soul is our mind and emotions and our spirit is the life-maker for our body and mind. Our flesh and blood body needs the circulation of the blood throughout our bodies and without that the body dies. The human heart is the bodily organ that does the circulating and therefore it symbolizes the human spirit, without which the body is dead.

The words we speak are made possible by our lungs forcing air they compress through our vocal cords, while the mind tells the vocal cords ,our mouth, tongue and lips what to say. In learning to pronounce the sounds of any word when we were small children, there were sounds we could not make at first. Usually a child will instead something he is able to say and it’s up to adults to figure out what he means. I have been told that one of Patrick Ussery’s youngest sisters when she was learning to talk could not say his name, Patrick. Instead she called him “Buddy”, and the name stuck. Anyone that learns to speak a language that is not his native tongue faces that same problem. Sounds exist it the language he is learning that do not exist in his native tongue. What threw me when I was learning to speak Portugese was their word “tren”. I would say “train” and my teacher would say “No.” Say “tren”. I spent an entire hour trying to learn to say that word like Brazilians say it. The word itself simply means “a thing.” But the result of spoken words can be “spirit and life”. If a person is asleep or unconscious, but you see that he is breathing, you say he is alive or that there is life in him. In the New Testament Greek language the word “pneuma” can mean spirit or it can also mean wind. Thus Jesus said to Nicodemus, “The spirit (or wind) blows where it (or He) wants to and you hear the sound of it (or Him), but you do not know where it is coming (from) and where it is going; thus it is (for) everyone who has been begotten of the Spirit (or Wind).” (John 3:8) In the Portugese language the word for an automobile tire is “pneu.” Thus when the Holy Spirit came on the 120 in the upper room in Jerusalem, God blew His Holy Breath or His Holy Spirit on them. That was the mighty rushing wind. So Jesus told Nicodemus, “Amen, amen, I tell you: unless anyone has been begotten of water and of the Wind (or the Spirit), he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.” (John 3:5) He went on to explain, “The one who has been begotten of the flesh is flesh, and the one who has been begotten of the Spirit (or Wind) is spirit (or Wind).” (John 3:6)

God speaks, Holy Spirit (or Holy Wind) comes forth from His mouth and things must take place. Through Isaiah God has said, “For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return there without watering the earth and making it bear and sprout, and furnishing seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so will My word be which goes forth from My mouth; it will not return to Me empty, without accomplishing what I want and without succeeding (in that) for which I sent it forth.” (Isaiah 55:10,11)

We are made in God’s image, but the human race has fallen into sin. It is as one New England primer school book put it in Colonial days: “In Adam’s fall, we sinned all.” The logic of this statement is that we were in the loins of our first parents when they sinned; therefore when they fell into sin, we fell into sin. To this day if parents cannot or do not get along with each other, their children suffer. Nevertheless when and if we are begotten anew by the Holy Spirit, or the Holy Wind of God, we, like Him. Can speak and things happen if we believe what we say we believe.

In the late 1930’s there was a radio program entitled “Fibber Magee and Molly.” It was supposedly a married couple and one of her well known lines was, “Taint funny, Magee.” To him things that were funny, were not at all funny to her. It is very hard to see ourselves as others see us, especially if we have a tendency to pull “tricks” on people. The apostle James got it right when he said, “If anyone does not cause (someone) to stumble by a word, this one is a complete man, able to bridle the whole body (as well).” (James 3:2b) Jesus said, “For by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned.” (Matthew 12:37) Therefore, “everyone must be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger.” (James 1:19b)

In the beginning, “God formed the man from the dust of the earth and He blew into his face a blast of life and the man became a living soul.” (Genesis 2:7 LXX) After the first couple sinned, they had to leave the Garden of Eden and lost the privilege of living where God’s presence manifested daily, but they in their inner being still had that “blast of life” from God.

Satan wants to be lord of this world for all eternity and he wants to use people as his agents to do this. But the devil has been a liar or deceiver and a murderer since the beginning. It utterly galls the devil that God has told him that He will utterly defeat and overthrow him by what looks like weak flesh and blood people whose bodies usually die within less that 100 years from the time they were born. The evil one always places his people in the midst of God’s people. The Old Testament Jews always had some pagan peoples in their midst because they would not fully obey the Lord, (Judges 2:1-5) and the church has “tares” in her midst. This is one of the devil’s tactics to prevent God’s promise from being fulfilled. But ultimately it will fail, when God pours out His Spirit (His “blast of life’) on all flesh. One taste of God’s awesome Presence, which Moses at Sinai refused to proceed on the journey with Israel without that Presence with them, once we get that Presence, without the tares in our midst, then the church will fulfill God’s agenda for her and will triumph over the devil.

Miracles, healings, feeding thousands with one person’s lunch, authority over the weather, the wind and waves is all very fine, and we all long for these manifestations of God’s awesome power among us. But we must not get the cart before the horse. We need to long for His Presence or His manifest Presence, for if we have that, the other things are very likely to follow. We must not be like children who only value their father for the nice presents he can buy them. If they only want to see him because his presence usually means special gifts for them, he will know that and it will break his heart. But if we long for our Father’s Presence and ardently want that whether we ever get healed, or get a full stomach, or get adequate clothing or not, then our Father will respond. Our Father knows what we need before we ask Him. (Matthew 6:8) He is well able to provide for those needs in ways we cannot comprehend and He often does that at the last minute. I believe the days are coming when we all will have to live that way whether or not we now have enough income for all our needs. We need to become like children in this. When I was a child, at some point I started getting an allowance of 25cents per week or maybe it was per month; I cannot now remember for sure. But if I needed a new pair of shoes or even a hair cut, my parents provided the money, over and above my allowance.

We all inherit weaknesses as well as strengths from our parents. My mother was the first-born child of her parents who lived on a farm in Indiana. My mother told me that if her mother saw a stranger walking down the road towards her house, she would quickly gather her children and herd them into an inner room, lock all the doors and tell her children to keep absolutely quiet. If there was a knock at the door, they waited in silence for maybe 10 minutes. Only when she verified that whoever had come was gone, did she let her children out to play. What bad experience may have been behind all that, I have no idea, but whatever it was a good deal of it rubbed off onto my mother. God knows all you inherit from your parents, but He wants all of us to become like little children who are loved by their parents and not have a worry in the world. Let His spoken words of love for us penetrate and permeate our whole inner being so that we may better speak His words of love, caring, healing, and kindness to those who are weary and heavy-laden. This way we will more and more be thrilled as we see His inspired words, spoken through us, being life, health and joy in the lives of those we can bless.