The tongue can bring death
or life; those who love to talk will reap the consequences. Proverbs 18:21
“You’re just like your
no-good father!” “I’ll never get the money to buy my own house.” “Nothing good
ever happens to me.”
We hear statements like these all the time and they are accepted as the norm.
But what if those words have more power than we realize they do? As it happened,
she DID turn out just like her
father. He never DID get the money to
own a home. And disaster DID keep
happening to the one who expected it. This verse tells us that often our
results are tied to our words.
A
self-fulfilling prophecy is a
prediction that directly or indirectly causes itself to become true. What
we declare is often accepted as truth and then carried out. When we speak error
long enough, we start to believe it. After a while, we lower our expectations
to match it. Maybe you are now living out the negative predictions others spoke
over you. Without realizing it, you began to believe them and lived accordingly.
With our words we can shatter someone’s expectations, cancel their dreams, and
doom them to disaster. It’s not due to some mystical power, but because negative
predictions cause us to give up. However, we confess God’s truth to ourselves
and others, it bears fruit. When we speak life and truth, we raise our
expectations. Faith is kindled and endurance is fueled. The more we speak
faith, hope, and love, the more we—and those in our lives--experience it.
Evaluate the way you speak
to yourself and to others. Are you words in agreement with God’s truth?
.
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