"Hold fast the word of life..."

“Let there be light!” (Gen. 1:3)
These are the first words spoken into human history. Within the initial three chapters of Genesis, the phrase “God said...” occurs 16 times. He creates, He commands, He blesses, He curses, He approves, He reproves, He gives, He takes away.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (John 1:1)
That verse names Jesus the Word of God. The One called the Light of the World (John 9:5); the One who will someday make creation new again (Rom. 8:19-23); the One who said, “Be clean,” to a leper, and the man was clean (Mat. 8:3); the One who rebuked a storm and it hushed (Mat. 8:26); the One who said to the dead man, “Lazarus, come forth,” and he came (John 11:43).

Words are powerful.

In her book, Defeated Enemies, Corrie ten Boom details how God used her to help clean up some specific carnage after WWII which related primarily to the disobedience of these verses in Deuteronomy:
“There shall not be found among you anyone who burns his son or his daughter as an offering, anyone who practices divination or tells fortunes or interprets omens, or a sorcerer or a charmer or a medium or a wizard or a necromancer, for whoever does these things is an abomination to the LORD. And because of these abominations the LORD your God is driving them out before you.” (Deut. 18:10-12)
The main tool of those mentioned above is words: the ritual of them, their order, their secrecy, their number— the average soothsayer's stock and trade turned on words. Remember, the witch of Endor “called” up Samuel for King Saul. This is what makes me leery of reading the likes of Macbeth or Harry Potter out loud, or of listening to “magic words” in naïve movies. We may have no idea what doors we are opening.
I confess I've spent more time contemplating the negative side of this concept than the positive: the fall-out from bad words is often more noticeable than a continual atmosphere of good words. But this last weeks it's been presented to me that though the weapon is the same for both us and our enemy, that duality does not mar the weapon itself.
I have a friend who has heard demoralizing things about herself all her life. She has also suffered from chronic ear-problems. The other day, a couple of people who have dished out many of those words took them back and effectively blessed her after they'd done it. That evening, for the first time ever, her ears coughed up two balls of wax.
Yesterday I went to see Juno and watched a pregnant teenager run out of an abortion clinic after a single protester outside tells her that her baby has fingernails. One word was the difference.
On my wall there are two letters from a friend who, though she is married, still remembers what it's like to be single. She tells me I am not forgotten— by her or by God— and that, in the words of a song she wrote while we were at school together, “you'll never have to pick a flower to know that He loves you.” They are on my wall and not in the bin under my bed for a reason.
My best friend tells a story from the streets of San Francisco about a transsexual prostitute, high as a kite, whom they met one night while ministering in the city. They gave her dinner and a rose, prayed for her, and moved on. Several months later they met her again. She bounded up, joyously announcing she had been totally off crack since that night, had a job in a coffee shop and was no longer walking the streets. Even more miraculous, she quoted— practically verbatim— what Elyssa's team had told her when they'd given her the rose: she is loved, she is beautiful and valuable, Jesus sees her that way, and He loves her.

This week I read a book written in 1865 about a family in the 1830s. I was almost startled by the care people took in speaking to each other. Good manners were so much expected that when someone departed from them into rudeness it was shocking. It could literally ruin one's reputation. One hundred and forty-three years later, we brush off gossip and slander as unimportant because supposedly everyone has been taught the dubious virtue of thick-skinnedness. We rarely hold people accountable for slights, words spoken in anger, or “personal” comments that have no business being spoken. When did we lose our understanding of the fitness of things? How much would it really cost us to speak good words to people? “Death and life are in the power of the tongue,” says Proverbs 18:21. How about we speak a little life?