Hi how are you all today? I am well and have had a great week. My second book is going well and I really encourage you to get it in your journey of living the life God intended for you. How was your week?
In this blog I want to look at the gift of a word. We usually don’t think of our words being gifts. But they are and they can be good gifts or bad gifts to ourselves or others.
The verse that speaks about this is found in Ephesians 4:29 and in the Message Bible, it states:
29 Watch the way you talk. Let nothing foul or dirty come out of your mouth. Say only what helps, each word a gift.
This verse tells us to watch the way we talk. Be careful of what we say.
Proverbs 18:21 in the Message Bible further confirms this and states:
21 Words kill, words give life;
they’re either poison or fruit—you choose.
So we see that words can be good or bad. So going back to our original verse, what goes gift mean?
A gift in the Oxford dictionary means a thing given willingly to someone without payment; a present. This means that a gift is not necessarily good but can be good or bad.
So what does the Bible say regarding words and especially the first mention of them? The first mention of someone speaking is God at creation. He is using His words to create gifts for man. Let’s look at verses 1 to 5 of Genesis 1 in the Message Bible. It states:
1 1-2 First this: God created the Heavens and Earth—all you see, all you don’t see. Earth was a soup of nothingness, a bottomless emptiness, an inky blackness. God’s Spirit brooded like a bird above the watery abyss.
3-5 God spoke: “Light!”
And light appeared.
God saw that light was good
and separated light from dark.
God named the light Day,
he named the dark Night.
It was evening, it was morning—
Day One.
Verses 1 and 2 state that the earth was nothing, empty and black. There was no life on earth. There was nothing on earth at this time that God could have used as a gift to man. So, God did what only He could- He spoke words but not any words- creative words that were a gift to man.
Verses 3 to 5 state that God spoke and light was created. Darkness by itself is never a good gift, only light and darkness together are good gifts. Mankind needs both to function. The light to work in and the dark to sleep in.
If we look further into this passage of creation, God continued to speak words that produced gifts to mankind. He spoke words creating sun, moon and stars to give us something to look at in creation and something to warm us up. The sun is good for our health and the moon and stars are good for our soul. Further, they are not only gifts to us in the physical but they tell the story of Gods redemption for mankind.
Then God created our food- plants, trees and herbs by His Word. He then created all the animals and then once all was ready , He created mankind. How did He create man? By the words He spoke. We were created as gifts to the world and for God. Just think about that for a moment.
You were not an accident, you were created as a gift by God Himself. Psalm 139: 13 to 14 in the Message Bible states:
For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
14 I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
your works are wonderful,
I know that full well
God formed us and knitted us together. That is so amazing to me.
So how are you and I going to use our words- to create or tear down? Let’s be mindful of that this week and know that the words we speak might also be a gift to others.
Bless you and keep living the life God intended for you.
Karen
0 Comments