Transcription
Would you pray with me, Lord? We just, I want to thank You right now. Um, for the life that You speak over us every day. We thank You, Lord. Thank You that You pour out, You've poured out Your written Word that reveals what You speak over us, how You feel about us. I thank You for Your rhema Word that You've spoken in ages past through the prophets and still speak today, that You love to speak to Your children. You love to speak life over us, and You love to give us words of life to demonstrate Your kingdom here on the earth. And I pray, Father, that You would come with Your Holy Spirit right now and You would illuminate in our hearts and our minds the power of our words and help us, God, to get those in alignment with Your heart. In Jesus' name, amen.
So welcome to our next freedom class on the power of our words. What is the most powerful weapon you possess? The Word of God says that one of the most powerful weapons we possess is that of our tongue. That from it, there is a harvest of life or a harvest of death. That bears some weight. So we want to pay careful attention to both. We want to pay careful attention to when our tongue is used to speak life, and we want to pay careful attention to when we are tempted to use our mouth to speak death.
So what are some of the things that come out of our mouth? Blessings, curses, encouragement, discouragement, hurt, healing. We tear down, we build up. How we feel comes out of our mouth, often attitude and outlook on life. The greatest, most powerful weapon we possess is our tongue. When we speak, we are in agreement with one kingdom or the other: the kingdom of light or the kingdom of darkness. God Himself spoke the world into existence. He didn't choose any other way. And in that, we are made in His image. And so we must understand that the power of our tongue is a creative power.
The scripture also tells us that the tongue is also the most difficult thing to control. Actually, in James 3:8-9, the Bible tells us it cannot be controlled in and of ourselves. The tongue is unpredictable and unstable when it's left up to our flesh. But when submitted to the power of God and to the Holy Spirit, it is one of the most powerful creative forces of life that we've been given. Proverbs 18:21 says, "Death and life are in the power of the tongue." Jesus, we see in the Bible, used His tongue for both. Mark 11:13-14 and 20 on describes Jesus as cursing the fig tree, and what He cursed was cursed. When He said, "You will not bear fruit," it did not bear fruit ever again. He also used it to speak life because we hold the same authority under heaven as Jesus Christ. As believers, it is our privilege and our responsibility to speak forth positive, life-giving words in a world immersed in negativity.
When we see Jesus' life, we see this over and over. Everywhere He went, He spoke words of encouragement. He spoke words of healing. He made sure that any environment He entered was left with a deposit of the kingdom, not just from His presence, but from the words that He spoke over people. He was intentional with His mouth. And we, as believers, have to become more and more and more aware, I believe, of the Holy Spirit, what He's saying, what He wants to say, what He wants to do in the situations that we encounter, even in everyday life, in our marriages, in our homes, with our children, in the church, through your work, and in your ministries. He wants us to have a constant, steady flow of life-giving words coming forth. Proverbs 12:25, "An anxious heart weighs a man down, but a kind word cheers him up." Proverbs 16:24, "Pleasant words are a honeycomb, sweet to the soul and healing to the bones." I want you to think about that. He says, just intentionally giving pleasant words throughout your day to people that you love or to people that are not pleasant to be with, not only are they sweet to the soul, they bring literally the soothing balm of heaven to your soul, but they also have the power to heal our literal bodies. This is important because if that is true, then it's just as true on the other end that our tongues have the power to bear so much weight that under our words, people's literally literal bodies or spirits are crushed. This tongue is a powerful weapon, and we wield it against the power of the the kingdom of darkness, or we wield it against the the purposes of heaven.
What about prophetic words? Words hold power for the future. In Genesis 1:1, we see, "In the beginning, God spoke." With a word, the world was created. With a word, you were created. I was created. That's amazing power. Jesus Himself is a fulfilled spoken prophecy. His birth was prophesied, His ministry, His death, His burial, and His resurrection were direct fulfillments of prophetic words. Let's look at one of these in Matthew chapter 1, verse 20, verse 22 and 23. "All this occurred to fulfill the Lord's message through His prophets. Look, the virgin will conceive a child. She will give birth to a son, and they will call him Emmanuel, which means God is with us." I want us to look here that not only is the conception and birth of Jesus prophesied, but so is His name. And it is very important that we understand that God spoke Jesus' name. And we speak different names and different things over people, and they have creative and even prophetic power. God used men to speak the future out. God sent it and set it in motion, and men, under the anointing of God, spoke.
When we think about this, we are created in Christ's image. And even today, God will bring His revelatory word to our hearts. He will bring prayers to mind for people. He will bring prophetic words, even over your life, through people, through people who speak life, who see things in you and call it out. And we need to hold on. We need to be very intentional that we hold on to those words that God speaks. But we also need to be very intentional about listening. If we, as God's people, can see situations where obviously the enemy is at work, but in our hearts, we're willing to go up to the Father and say, "What, what would You speak over this situation?" And whether that's in prayer in private, or whether that's face to face with people, the power of the spoken word can literally bring creative life. Uh, through the prophetic word, we are created in the image of God. Therefore, just as He spoke the world into existence, Christians can speak forth life, both in the present and the future.
I believe you're here sitting here because of words. You're in a job, in a circumstance, because of spoken words. You were saved because of the Word. Sometimes the Word of God tells us in Ephesians 6 that we have to fight for these, for for what is true, for what God has spoken over us in His Word. And different circumstances and different things in life happen. Different people speak different things over us that require us to have to take captive different words that are spoken over us and fight and and maybe even make an exchange for what people say versus what God says. So in Ephesians 6, it says, "Take up the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God." And here we see God beginning to show us that the Word of God is a weapon, and it's powerful, and we must begin to believe it. We must begin to use it. The Word of God is not just an instruction manual or a self-help book, although it is useful for both. It's not just a big book filled with unbelievable stories that may or may not be true. It's a letter, a declaration of God's Word. It's for us, it's over us, it's God's heart for us and His truth about us. It's His voice, His Word. When we get this, I mean, we really get the power in this Word, we will eat it up. We will hunger to know it. We will hunger to ingest it. And then we can understand the power of the tongue.
We must begin to claim this Word, not just read it, not just know about it, but we must begin to claim the Word of God. We see this when the Israelites begin to take the land. They had to literally claim the Word of God that it was theirs. There were scary barriers involved. There was lots of battles that came against the spoken promise of God, and they had to take up the literal Word of God that said, "I have a land for you. It's a good land, and I'm giving it to you." They had to take it up and claim it, start speaking the Word out loud. This is one of our greatest weapons, and one that I do not think that we utilize sufficiently in the body of Christ. We may think it, we may read it, but something different happens when we begin to speak out the Word of God. Think about words of encouragement that you've been given. You may have thousands of people that think really nice things about you, but you would never know that because there's no power in that. They may pray it, and there's power in that. But when someone comes and speaks, something happens to your spirit, something, a creative power is released. And in that, we have to understand that this Word of God is powerful. God describes it as a weapon that we are to wield and to use.
So we need to start speaking out the Word. We need to speak it out loud. We need to speak it often. And we need to speak it into our situations. Ask God for specific scriptures for you. If you're in a situation or times when you're needing a specific word, ask God. Ask God to reveal from His Word what, what He's claiming over you, and then you claim them as your own and declare them out loud. Lies are going to come. They come sometimes through mouths of people. They come sometimes directly from Satan himself, planting thoughts or different ways that their, that lies are spoken over us. Lies come. Fight it with the truth of the Word of God. Did you hear me? I said fight it. Do not just acquiesce, take them in, ingest them as if they are, they are truth, or even as they are as powerful as God's truth.
People are not living out their destiny, and we see that all around us. We, we can see it sometimes in different areas of our life, but a lot of people aren't living out that God-given destiny that He has for them. We are called as God's believers to see that and not just look aside. We're called to begin to appropriate the Word of God over their life, over others that we see that need. Maybe they don't know the power of the weapon of the Word. And maybe our dedication to knowing scripture and decreeing it over them will bring forth life. As we speak out the Word of God, we begin to help people grasp their identity. I want you to think about your own personal life, things that you maybe knew were true, but when other people acknowledged it and spoke it out loud, it came alive for you in a different way. And if we go even further than that, we see sometimes that people call out different things in us that we never knew were there. You kind of, they say something, he's like, "What? How do you see that in me? Or how did you hear that from the Lord that that's who I am?" But as we dwell on it, as we begin to take that Word in, as it begins to cultivate in our heart and in our spirits, then the more it is repeated, the more it is reinforced, the more we have ability to grasp it and ingest it.
I want you to think about the people in your life that have spoken, spoken things, spoken life over you. I want you to really think about moments of where you were maybe, you were maybe you were doing great, and it just took you to a whole other level. Or maybe you were really, really struggling, and it literally, the spoken Word of God became life. You know, it's interesting, that's what God called His Son. He said, "He is the Word." He is the Word, the revelatory Word of God to us. So sometimes, we, because we are the beloved of God, and because He trusts us, and because He, the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Jesus lives in us, and the authority of Christ is within us, He will literally have us in situations and circumstances that we don't know how in the world we got there. But really, it's an assignment. It's an assignment. However we found, when we find ourselves there, we have an assignment from the Lord to come into these situations and circumstances and to speak life. And when we encounter these situations, we want to be those that do as Jesus did. We want to declare righteousness. We want to speak peace where there's chaos. We want to declare light over darkness. We want to declare faithfulness in the midst of lawlessness. We actually want to speak victory where it looks like defeat is imminent. We want to speak life where it looks like there's physical death. We want to come in and speak healing. We have this power in the power of our tongue entrusted to us by the Holy Spirit.
Go back to Mark 11:23-24. Go with me there. And here we see this is, uh, right after Jesus has spoken and cursed the fig tree. Here we see that Jesus is not instructing us to talk about the mountain. He is telling us to speak directly to the mountain. He is instructing us to talk to the ailment, to the pain, to the circumstance, not about it. I want us to really pay attention to this because a lot of times when we get in certain scenarios or in our relationships, we will talk about things all day long, but very seldom do we stand up in that rightful authority that we have in Christ, in that place, and speak to something. Very seldom will we'll talk about our problems. We'll talk about the outcomes of things. We'll talk about people, maybe even when we instead of speaking to them, instead of speaking to that situation in prayer and in our declarations. And it's important that we begin to make that shift. If we would talk less about things and speak more directly to things with the words that God is speaking, or the words that God has already spoken, we would see life, the as it is in heaven, invade earth and invade our hearts, invade people that we love, and invade the circumstances and the outcomes that He possesses and positions us to be a part of.
Where do our words come from? Matthew 12:33-37 says, "Words come from the fruit stored up in our heart." This can be hard to look at. So when we're, you know, screaming out anger or bitterness or judgments or unforgiveness comes forth, we have to recognize that the Word of God says very clearly, "What comes out of your mouth is directly, directly a result of what's in your heart." We cannot look away. We cannot minimize it. What comes out of your mouth is an overflow of your heart. In the same way, what comes out of our mouth in a good way comes from our heart. So when we speak forgiveness, when we speak love, when we're intentional about encouragement and lifting up, it is evidence that the Spirit of God is alive and moving through us. Proverbs 23:7 says, "As a man thinks, so is he." Our thought pattern comes forth in our speech. So we want to pay attention to what's going, what goes into our mind. God's thoughts for us are good. We need to believe it and receive it and confess it. But what are we letting into our mind? Remember, what comes out of our mouth is a direct reflection of what's in our thoughts and what's in our heart. Think about the TV you watch, think about the movies, or even the music that you're listening to. Continually meditating on things of the kingdom of darkness or in the lies of Satan that he plants, builds doubt and unbelief in your spirit until it overflows out of your mouth. This is why it's so important, as we learned in our previous lesson, that we take captive our thoughts. Because if we dwell on them, because Satan knows the power of our words, and because God knows the power of our words, they will eventually come forth and bear fruit, that creative, powerful fruit in our life. Therefore, we want to guard our minds and our hearts, and we want to fill them with the Word of God and the truth of God and the thoughts of God. The more of God's Word we put in us, the more the Word of God will come out. Proverbs 18:20 says, "Get full on good words."
So let's talk again about the power of our tongue as it relates to curses and blessings. James 3:10 says, "Out of the same mouth proceeds blessings and cursings, my brothers." This should not be. Lies become hurt when we take them in as truth. Lies become curses when we walk them out. And this is an important distinction. Lies may be spoken over you all day long, and you may think about it, but if you take captive those thoughts, they will not bear the fruit. But if we dwell on lies and curses, then we begin, and we begin to walk them out, they become curses. Um, think about some of the curses that have been spoken over you and the power that they've, how the power they've had over your life, how they've impacted you. I want you to take a minute and think about those. I remember growing up, listening to different people talk, and whether it was, whether it was someone saying, "Oh, they're so shy," or whether they're like, "Oh, they're so loud." You know, um, it can be on either end of the spectrum, but those things begin to affect how you walk things out. It's like if someone keeps telling you long enough, "You're shy," then you become timid, and boldness is not a part of how you express yourself. And if someone tells you, "You're too loud, you're too boisterous," what do you do? You begin to try to shut that down and and make it not so flamboyant. And in either way, in either one of these, um, what I want us to see most importantly is that words that we speak about people, even if they're joking, I mean, some of the most intense, um, pain comes from words that were said, just or joking. And we want to be sure that the fruit that comes out of our mouth is good fruit. Even if we think we were joking, we don't know how that joke would hit somebody else.
We also want to make sure that we pay attention to how other people's words spoken over us are affecting us. Have we taken captive that word that was spoken over us? Have we tested it according to the Word of God and what He says over our life? And if not, if we've let that have too much power, then we need to yield it and surrender it to the truth of God's Word. So what is the truth? We need to get to the root of that. If we've lived under certain curses that we know are affecting our life, we need to get to the truth of God's Word so that we can begin to declare it. So I want you to repeat after me, um, right where you are: "Father God, I confess that I have believed this lie." And name the lie. "I declare that the truth will set me free, and this lie will not have a hold over me any longer." And then I want you to ask Him, "What is the truth?" Where there may have been a curse that you've been walking out from a lie that was planted, asking for the truth. And as the Lord brings that truth to mind, I want you, where you are, to speak out that blessing that He gives you.
Blessings are God's love language. He doesn't speak in any other language other than love. Our desire is to match words with His kingdom. Our words that go forth, we want to be completely in alignment with the kingdom of God. Therefore, we yield our speech to Him at all times. And I want to say this about yielding our speech. Sometimes I believe that God profoundly puts direct words in our mouth to encourage people, and we will use any and every excuse under the sun to not go speak it. Right? And we, we have to yield our speech to Him because He has chosen to make His appeal through us. And so if there are positive, life-giving things that He gives you, you have, you have to be willing to yield any uncomfortableness or any, don't rationalize it away. People need to hear the life-giving words that God speaks, and sometimes He does that through us. Then we also, on the flip side, need to yield our speech to Him when we want to say things that we shouldn't say. And we all have been there. We all know that we, we do it. It's like temptation in that weak moment to just, in our frustration, in our pain, in our tiredness, weariness, whatever it is, we just want to just say what we think or say how we feel. And I want us to be very careful that we, that we literally yield to the power of the Holy Spirit to yield our words back to Him. Our speech needs to be patient. It needs to be kind. Needs to be without envy. Needs not to be prideful or rude. When this type of language pours out of our mouth, life is cultivated all around us.
I want us to think about, um, places and words, uh, that were spoken over us, words that were used to wound, specifically. I know that, um, we've all been guilty of this, intentionally or unintentionally, that words we've spoken have created wounds. And most certainly, it doesn't take you long to think up a place where someone's words wounded you. And I want us to take just a minute and ask God to give special highlight to one of those places. And as we think about that, Father, I just say, "Would You come right now and reveal any, uh, wound that our heart still carries from any, uh, word, words that were spoken that were destructive or hurtful?" And we just bring those to You right now, God. We, we make the exchange, God, of what, what was said and all the hurt that's in our heart, the wounds that are there, and we bring it up, and we ask You, Lord, to speak Your words directly to that wound. And Father, right now, I ask that You would get each of us a special increase, a special increase of awareness of how powerful our tongue is. And today, any place while we're coming before You that You want to remind us of any hurtful words that we've spoken over any person, I pray You would bring that to mind right now. Would You bring back to our hearts any place that we wounded someone with our words? And in Jesus' name, we just take a moment to repent to You, God, for speaking anything other than life over Your beautiful creation. Father, would You reveal any step that we may need to take in repentance, in restoration, to go back and speak words of life?
I want us to end this time together right now with remembering, asking God to bring up a prophetic word that's been brought to you over your life. And if you, um, if you can't remember or you've never had a prophetic word spoken over your life, rest assured that the way God spoke in the Bible and speaks, He still speaks today, and He loves to speak our destiny up. So if you've had a prophetic word spoken over you, I want you to draw that up, bring that to mind. And if you, if you haven't had that, then I want you to go up and I want you to ask God to give you your first prophetic word. I want you to ask Him, "What do You speak over my future and my destiny? Who do You say that I am? What do You say that I'll accomplish in the time You've given me on this earth?" And as God brings that to mind, I want you to take a moment to agree in, in prayer and in declaration over that prophetic word over your life.
And I would like to pray. Lord, I thank You for today. I thank You that You are a God who always has, from the beginning of time, spoken life with Your words. And I thank You that You are a God who never changes, that You will always, through Your Word that endures forever and through Your rhema Word, God, will speak life over all creation, over Your beloved. And so, Lord, uh, today, I just speak a blessing over each person. And I pray, God, that that Your words would come alive in their heart and in their life. I pray that again and again, they will have divine encounters with Your words of life through the written Word. And I pray that they will have many life-giving words spoken into their heart and over their destiny. Lord, today we bless each one. We bless them, uh, with hope, with encouragement, with the power, God, of Your Holy Spirit moving upon them and through them. And we bless them, Lord, to fulfill their God-given destiny to the glory of Jesus in every day that they walk the earth. In Jesus' name, amen.