More Thoughts About Words

I always find when I write, that I write so much more than the message I really want to convey. And, I'm sure I will continue to do that here.

Between a comment my brother posted about my last post, and an email he sent to me, he hit on the absolute core of what I really wanted to say in my last couple of posts. It only took a few good words in the comment and in his email, but I thought about them a good bit, and I'm going to ramble here about my thoughts.

God's word is enough. When God speaks, nothing matters, but what He is saying. God's very word creates peace and joy, as well as brings blessing to His people. God's word is the only word powerful enough to bring a universe into being, and the only word powerful enough, by itself, to bring hope into my heart.

The word hope, in it's verb form, is used so often, just as "love" is. Truly, we can all decide to use these words how we wish, and I use both of these on a daily basis to mean lots of things. My thought is this though. When we use the verb forms of these words so freely in our daily language in discussing unimportant things, we often fail to recognize the difference when we use both the verb and noun forms of the words in discussing weightier things. We make trite, words and phrases that truly do have meaning, in spite of what any dictionary says or doesn't say about the words.

But, I don't think that's the root of the problem. This is where we get to the real issue. "I love my car." "I love God." Do these really have different meanings? Sure, because we really do love our cars, houses, jobs, families, whatever, and we don't really love God. Or, I guess I should say, that we love Him on a lesser level than we do these other things, when our love for God should be exponentially greater than our love for things and people. Our hope in God should be exponentially greater than our hope in and for things.

So, maybe we don't need to stop using hope and love in everyday language. Maybe we ourselves just need to learn, and teach, the sure confidence of the gospel, the gospel of Jesus Christ by which we see the very worth of God Himself. Maybe we need to look at our savior, and learn what love really is; See God's promises fulfilled in Christ and know why we have hope. Maybe it's not about words. Perhaps it's about doing more than just pretending to be God's people, and about having real experience with the subjects we're discussing when we use these words, hope, and love, in light of the gospel. Maybe then the words really will have meaning.

- david