NEW VOCABULARY
Charles Faupel
As I have
progressed in my journey with my Lord, I have become
increasingly aware and convicted of the sloppiness of my words as I attempt to
describe this walk. I suspect that this
is a malaise that affects nearly all of us.
Just recently, I was sharing with my friend Gerry my desire to enter
into and live in that realm of the Spirit beyond the veil, to live in the presence of God, not just
experience His presence from time to time.
I know that Gerry understood perfectly what I was saying, but he
responded with a mild rebuke: “You ARE in the presence of God continually
Chuck; it is just a matter of you being continually aware of it.” That rebuke stopped me short. I realized that it is not a matter of my
somehow having to position myself (or even be positioned by God) in that
realm. He has already positioned me
there! It is a matter of my words lining
up in agreement with the truth of my spiritual location, with Him in the secret
place. My words will either affirm or
deny this reality. Affirming the place in which I live is essential to acting
out of and from that realm of the Spirit.
For this
critical reason, I am now correcting my vocabulary in that regard. More
importantly, I am realizing afresh how crucial our words are as we negotiate
this terrain of the Kingdom of God into which we have entered.
Our Words are a Window
to Kingdom Realities
Recently, I
wrote an article entitled “New Glasses,”
in which I pointed out the importance of recognizing the reality of God
residing within us, these temples not made with hands. Truly understanding the “geography of God,”
we have a new perspective from which to understand ourselves, the world around
us, and indeed, the nature of the Kingdom of God itself as it is presented in
scripture. An important feature of these
“new glasses” is the vocabulary that we use to describe the reality that we can
now see with greater clarity. Failure to
use words that effectively convey this reality will keep us stuck in an old
paradigm that will hinder our progress in the Lord.
There are
multitudes of ways in which our words betray us and reflect a false and limited
vision. We are fond, for example, of
extolling the virtues of “freedom of religion,” especially in the United States,
but also in many other countries of the world.
This is so ironic because such a phrase is really an oxymoron when we
understand the true meaning of the word religion. Lynette Woods clarifies the meaning most
poignantly:
The etymology of the word “religion” is quite
revealing. It stems from two words: re (again)
and ligare (meaning
to bind or tie, a bond or obligation). Religion puts
people into bondage and blindness again and again. It is part of the curse
because it separates us from God. It is something which has been part of
mankind ever since Adam and Eve decided to trust themselves and their own
judgments rather than trusting God and we are daily faced with this same
choice: trust God or Self. (Woods, 2008).
The truth is
that our freedom is not a freedom of religion at all. Rather, the freedom that we enjoy is a freedom of the Spirit that derives from
the life of Christ that emanates from within each and every one of us. This freedom is not dependent upon any
“rights” that are guaranteed in any jurisdictional constitution. It is time to update our lexicon. “Religion” is simply not a word that should
be in the vocabulary of a Spirit-led follower of Christ, except possibly when
intentionally referring to those institutions created by man that have
erroneously been called “the church.”
This, of
course, brings us to another of those words in our vocabulary which has taken
on an entirely inappropriate meaning—I am referring here to “church.” Our English word “church” is derived from the
Greek word Kyriakos, meaning
“belonging to the Lord,” or “related to the Lord.” It is used only two times in the New
Testament, and in neither of those places does it refer to the body of
Christ. In one instance, it is used in
reference to the Lord’s Supper (1 Corinthians 11:20), and in the other to the Lord’s day (Revelation 1:10). The term that the Biblical writers used to
refer to the body of believers was the Greek term ekklesia, referring to a body of people who were called apart for a
distinct purpose. Indeed, as I have
pointed out in an earlier article entitled “Ecclesia: Taking Back Our Identity”, the term was typically used in that
day to refer to a political gathering of town elders or other governing group
who were specially called apart for governance over a particular political
jurisdiction. These writers were very
careful NOT to use the more “religious” term sunagogue (from which we derive
our English term synagogue) which was the gathering place of Jewish religious
leaders. These early disciples of Jesus were clearly separating themselves from any sense of religious identity. They saw themselves, rather, as a body of
people who were called apart unto an alternative jurisdiction, that being the
Kingdom of God. The words they used to
identify themselves mattered. They were
not just another religious sect, as many of the Jewish and secular leaders of
the day thought them to be. They were,
rather, part of God’s grand masterplan to further the advancement of His very
Kingdom within them and so upon the earth!
We, too,
must be careful to adopt a language that reflects the Kingdom reality in which
we live. Too often we speak of “going to
church,” referring to getting in our cars and traveling to a building with a
steeple located on the corner of Fifth and Main. If we are a little more sophisticated, we
speak of the church as consisting of the people who are sitting in the
pews. Even this understanding, however,
obscures our vision of the nature of that to which Paul and other writers refer
to as the body of Christ, which we are.
The gospel writers had it right: we
are the CALLED OUT ONES. We have
been called apart, “outside the camp,” separated from the sunogogue.[1] When Sarah and I are asked “What church do
you attend?” increasingly we find ourselves answering, “What do you mean? We ARE the church!” This is sometimes a little off-putting to
people, but it conveys the truth that we have been called apart from the
religious systems of man.
I could go
on ad infinitum with the ways our
vocabulary has misrepresented the spiritual reality of that to which we have
been called. My purpose here, however,
is simply to emphasize that our words provide a window into the reality that we
perceive and from which we operate. When
we choose our words carelessly and erroneously, the view from the window that
we behold is an altogether false image. This
in turn has consequences for the way in which we negotiate the unchartered
terrain in which we find ourselves at this time in God’s timetable in which we
are experiencing a transition from what is commonly known as the “church age”
to what I and others have termed the “kingdom age.” Just as those early disciples, who found
themselves in a time of transition between the age of the law and the church
age, were very deliberate in the vocabulary they used to describe themselves,
we too must be so diligent.
Words Have Consequences
Most of us who
have gone through school in western countries were trained to understand that
vocabulary words describe certain realities.
When we were toddlers, we were shown a color and were asked “What color
is the grass?” We would respond
“Green!” We were then given a hearty pat
on the back and were then asked, “What color is the sky?” to which we would
respond “Blue!” Again, we were rewarded
with accolades that built our two-year old confidence. As we progressed in our education, our
vocabulary became richer and much more complex so as to describe the nuances of
reality around us. This was, of course,
wonderful education, and an individual with an extensive vocabulary is a
tribute to parents and teachers who did their job well. This education, however, had another “latent”
or hidden effect. It taught us that our
vocabulary is but a reflection or expression of the reality that it attempts to
describe. Nothing could be further from
the truth. The words we use have
tremendous power that go far beyond merely describing reality around us. They impact that reality and have a profound
effect on one’s daily experience. Indeed,
they have the power to either facilitate or inhibit our journey to full
maturity in Christ.
A Brief Lesson from Social Science
Many years
ago, sociologist C. Wright Mills (1940) penned an article entitled “Situated
Actions and Vocabularies of Motives” in the leading journal of his
discipline. In that article, he
contended that one’s vocabulary actually shapes one’s perception of reality and
in turn their behavior. This article
represented something of a paradigm revolution in his discipline. To more fully appreciate Mills contention regarding
the power of words , it might be helpful to consider
the work of two other sociologists/criminologists who were trying to understand
juvenile delinquency, and why some kids who would get into occasional trouble
would go on to become full-blown juvenile delinquents, while others engaging in
the same acts would grow up to be law-abiding young people. Gresham Sykes and David Matza
(1957) discovered that the hardened delinquents that they studied routinely
engaged in what they termed “techniques of neutralization.” These were verbal “excuses” that they used to
justify their behavior. One such technique
was “denial of responsibility,” in which the would-be delinquent justified
their behavior because they were the victim of a bad home life or other
circumstances beyond their control and therefore could not really help what
they were doing. Another was “denial of
injury” in which they contended that they didn’t really hurt anybody so what
was the harm? (Shoplifters would often use this excuse, claiming that the
stores were insured for their losses anyway, so no harm was really done.) Still another was “condemnation of the
condemners” in which the delinquent would insist that the injured party really who
was accusing them deserved the injury caused them. (Here again, shoplifters would say things
like, “They have been ripping us off with their jacked up prices all these years,
and so they deserve to be ripped off in return.”) Sykes and Matza
identify a total of five of these “techniques” of neutralizing one’s delinquent
behavior. It is important to point out that
these authors were not saying that these were mere excuses for delinquent acts
already committed; they were suggesting, rather, that these were verbal
justifications that provided the motivation and incentive necessary to continue
on in their wayward behavior. Their
words actually contributed to shaping their future behavior. Vocabularies clearly have power, as Sykes and
Matza found that these verbal gymnastics were not used by kids who did not go on to
become delinquents following their initial misdeeds.
One further
example might be helpful to drive home the consequential power of words. Researchers have noted that nearly all
children go through a phase of stuttering in their early developmental
years. This is usually mild and often
goes unnoticed by parents and others. A
study of children who went on to stutter as adults revealed a remarkable
pattern. Those who went on to stutter
had the regrettable experience of others (typically parents) expressing concern
over their childhood stuttering and drawing undue attention to it. Such excessive attention of the parents
created a “labelling” effect whereby the child began to take on the identity of
the label imposed upon him or her of “stutterer.” Those children who grew out of their
childhood stuttering tended to not have such doting attention placed on their
speech pattern. The parents’ words
wielded a powerful influence over the lifetime of the child (Lemert, 1951).[2]
The Power of Words on Our Journey of
Faith
The
discovery of the potency of words by social scientists should come as no
surprise to any serious follower of Christ.
Ironically, however, we too often fall prey to the powerful impact of
our words when we simply use our words to convey the apparent reality that we
see and experience around us. We wake up
in the morning feeling aches and pains and before we even think about it, we
begin complaining about our physical ailments; before you know it, we are
complaining about everything around us that doesn’t suit our fancy. And did all this complaining improve our
day? Predictably, it only made it worse. I often wonder how many people go to an early
grave simply because they spoke sickness and death over themselves just about
every time they encountered some physical malady.
I am
speaking here of merely the natural world, of course. Because that which we perceive with our
natural senses appears to us as the true reality that we live in, our
vocabulary is prone to describe that reality, be it positive or negative. What we so often fail to realize is that in
speaking forth what we see in the natural world around us, we are doing much
more than simply describing that world.
We are also reinforcing it every time we so speak. We hear of wars and rumors of wars. Podcasters of all stripes are prophesying
economic crashes, food shortages, government takeovers and just about every
doomsday prediction conceivable. As we
get caught up in the web of fear that they are weaving, we find ourselves
speaking these “realities” to ourselves and to those around us. Before you know it, we find ourselves in
fear, and responding to that fear in ways that only reinforce and even
exacerbate our experience of the negative perceptions of reality around us.
What people
of God must realize is that our true habitation is in another realm
altogether. It is out of the reality of
this realm of the Spirit that we must
speak with words that accurately characterize that reality and beyond this,
touch and transform the world that Jesus overcame with His words. This Spirit
reality is not a reality that we will perceive with our natural senses—though
as we continue to live in and speak that reality it will seem ever more real
and natural to us. This is a realm that
we perceive through our spiritual
senses. Our spiritual senses are
developed as we listen to that resonating and quickening voice within. The Holy Spirit may speak as we are reading scripture
which He will quicken unto us in unprecedented ways as we listen. He may speak to us as we fellowship with
others, listen to our children, or even through mundane tasks of washing dishes
or mowing the lawn. There is no end to
the mechanisms that the Holy Spirit will use through which to speak to us. It is important to realize that it is that
quickening and resonating Word within us that constitutes our reality as
spiritual people.
This is, furthermore,
the reality that we must speak forth—even when it defies everything that the
natural world around us would seem to proclaim. Scripture gives us some
definite clues as to what it means to speak forth that truth. When the Pharisees inquired of Jesus when the
Kingdom of God should come, for example, Jesus responded, “The Kingdom of God cometh not with observation. Neither shall they
say, Lo here! or, lo there! for,
behold, the kingdom of God is within you (Luke 17:20-21). The Pharisees’ very wording of the
question betrayed their understanding of the Kingdom of God. They understood it as something
external—indeed, they believed it to be a political reign—that would take place
sometime in the future. Jesus corrected
their understanding—and ours. I wrote of
this at length in the recent article entitled “New Glasses”
to which I referred earlier. What is so
important for us to understand at this time is that the very vocabulary that we
use to characterize the Kingdom of God shapes our understanding of it. It is so very critical that we quit speaking
of “going to heaven when we die,” or that we pray for “a visit from the Lord of
glory in Holy Ghost power;” or indeed that we quit
expressing our desire to “enter in to the realm of the spirit” as I mistakenly
expressed to my friend Gerry. The truth
is that the Kingdom of God reigns within us fully at this present time. We need instead to be thanking God for His
presence within. It might be more
fruitful to confess our tendency to keep Him at a distance outside of
ourselves, and seek Him within ourselves for an enlargement of our awareness of
His mighty presence within. The
vocabulary we use, even in our praying, has a powerful impact on the experience
of God that we have.
We are so
easily lured into the trap of speaking that which appears to us to be reality
in the natural. As we see the corruption
and degradation around us, we are prone to bemoan these evils and then proceed
to address them through our own carnal understanding. As we understand and speak forth the truth of
the Kingdom of God within us, however, we realize that we must address that
which is going on around us, with a new vocabulary, from the reality of that
Kingdom. There is probably no more
powerful demonstration of this principle than Jesus’ response when he was
tempted of the devil in the wilderness.
The circumstances that He was confronted with would make the devil’s
solution appear so tempting to the carnal mind.
He was desperately hungry. “Just
turn these stones into bread. You can do
it. You’re God!,”
was the whisper of the enemy. Jesus knew
that He could. But there was another
reality out of which He spoke. It was
the reality of the Kingdom of God which was within Him, from which came His response, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by
every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God” (Matthew
4:4). Jesus knew the power of words, and He knew
that the words that He spoke “proceeding out of the mouth of God” through
Jesus’ very mouth were life and were His true bread. Oh, the power of our words!
Our Words Impact the Natural World Around Us
“And God said…and God saw that it was
good.” The very material universe in which
we live was brought into existence by the very word of God! As we speak the reality that comes forth from
the realm of the Spirit, the natural realm is inevitably affected. Paul spoke of Abraham who believed against
all natural odds God’s promise that he would be the father of many
nations. Abraham believed God who “calleth those things which be not as though they were”
(Romans 4:17). Abraham stood on the
promise of God, even when he was asked to sacrifice his promised son
Isaac. When Isaac noted the fire and the
wood and asked of his father where the lamb was for the sacrifice, Abraham
replied, “My son, God will provide
himself a lamb for a burnt offering: so they went both of them together” (Genesis
22:8). Abraham spoke that which he knew
by the promise of God—he refused to speak that which appeared to be the reality
of his natural circumstances. As a
result, God’s promise to Abraham was fulfilled.
Whenever
Jesus was confronted with sickness, death, or demoniacs, he simply spoke the
Word of redemption to that situation. We
do not read of Jesus engaging in the antics of holding large public meetings
for healing, calling cripples forth to the front and having them throw down
their crutches or dispose of their wheel chairs in any of the recorded accounts
of Jesus’ ministry. It is true that He
did on occasion require acts of obedience on the part of the recipients as when
he daubed mud on the eyes of the man born blind from birth and told him to go
wash in the pool of Siloam. Even this,
however, came forth from the mouth of Jesus as He was speaking from the realm
of the Spirit within Him.
Some years
back a friend related to me a powerful experience that she had involving a
miraculous healing that took place. There
was a woman (whom she had never met) who had contracted an extremely rare
disease that left her in a coma. The doctors could do nothing for her and she
was expected to die. A relative of this
woman was relaying his fear of her inevitable death to my friend. The dying woman, in a hospital many miles
from the church where they were talking, was young and would leave behind her
husband and their three children. My friend
hearing this had a young family herself. While listening to this hopeless and desperate
man she was filled with the Lord’s compassion and His desire to intervene. She
was compelled by the Holy Spirit to tell this despairing man what the Lord said
to her spirit:
“SHE WILL NOT DIE, the Lord will raise her
up out of the coma and she will live!”
The man
looked at her absolutely bewildered by these bold declarations. This was surely an act of faith to speak the
word of the Lord to this man. All kinds
of questions would naturally go through one’s mind: “Why would he believe me? I’m a nobody and he
doesn’t even know me. Who do I think I
am invading this man’s grief and making such an outlandish claim? Besides what if I heard God wrong, and the
woman dies? The man’s grief will only be
made worse and I will surely have egg on my face!” But my friend who shared the
story with me claims that her spirit was at peace once those words were spoken
and she was fearless and completely assured that the Lord would step into that
hospital room and completely heal the dying woman for His glory! The following Sunday was Resurrection Sunday
and my friend was in the church where she had spoken those powerful words to
the man just the previous Wednesday. She
was met by a woman she did not know who told her that she was sent by this man,
and that he wanted her to know that the woman in the coma (his relative) had awakened
from the coma and was healed just as she had spoken she would be. This man was with the woman in the hospital
that day and wanted my friend to know God had done
it! What an incredible gift to this young faithful woman on Resurrection
Sunday! My obedient friend never laid
eyes on the dying woman, nor the man after she spoke the word of the Lord to
him regarding his dying relative, but I suspect that a glorious reunion awaits them!
I recall another
conversation that I had with a spirit-led pastor many years ago. This conversation took place some years after
the fall of the Berlin wall in the 1980’s.
My friend and pastor recounted how he was in the shower one day just
prior to the fall of that dividing wall.
As he was in the shower, he distinctly heard a directive from the Lord
to face the east. As he did so, he found
himself calling for the fall of the Berlin wall. He did not understand it at the time. It was but a few days or weeks later that
Mikhail Gorbachev authorized the dismantling of the wall. My friend was amazed, only to be further
astounded when he learned of the testimony of several others around the world
who had the same experience as did he.
His words were world-changing!
Words Have Power
I cannot
emphasize too strongly how important it is that we attend wisely and
judiciously to the words that we speak. They
frame the very world in which we live.
When we speak merely that which we see through our natural eyes and
experience in our natural man, we but reinforce the illusion that the serpent
deceived Eve with back in the misty beginnings of time: “Ye
shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then
your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil” (Genesis
3:4-5). We repeat Eve’s transgression
every time we speak out of the lower realm of flesh and carnality as we fall
victim to the illusion that this fallen state is truly who we are. The serpent was speaking death to Eve, even
though it appeared so logically appealing.
And she repeated the lie to her husband.
Oh how powerful unto death were those words that were spoken into the
mind of Eve on that fateful day!
Friends, our
words are no less powerful today, whether they be
words of death or words of life. The
wise man said “A man's belly shall be
satisfied with the fruit of his mouth; [and] with the increase of his lips
shall he be filled. Death and life [are] in the power of the tongue: and they
that love it shall eat the fruit thereof” (Proverbs 18:20-21).
Our Lord amplified this truth when he said “(It is) Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man; but that which cometh out of the mouth,
this defileth a man…Do not ye yet understand, that
whatsoever entereth in at the mouth goeth into the belly, and is cast out into the draught? But
those things which proceed out of the mouth come forth from the heart; and they
defile the man.” (Matthew 15: 11, 17-18).
Our words
are either Words of Life or words of death.
When we speak out of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, we are
speaking words of death. This is so,
even when we are speaking out of the good
side of that tree. These are words of
death because they are coming forth from our natural man—from the tree of
knowledge of good and evil—no matter how good or laudatory those words
are. We are called to partake of the
Tree of Life—which is the very Spirit of God—and to speak out of that Tree.
It is not a matter of speaking good vs. evil;
it is a matter of speaking life vs. death. The words that we speak come from one of
these trees. We are partakers of the
Tree of Life, and I challenge each one reading these lines to listen carefully
to the words you speak. Do they simply
reinforce the best (or worst?) of man—even man’s religious ideas? If so, you
need a new vocabulary—one that reflects Truth as it is imparted to us by the
Holy Spirit. We must speak only what we
hear the Father say! It is His word from His mouth that will transform
our world from death to life,
from hell to heaven, from darkness to light. This is the Kingdom of God on
earth from where we are seated with Christ and co-reign unto life and
immortality.
REFERENCES
Lemert, Edwin. M. 1951. “Primary and
Secondary Deviation.” In E. Rubington, & M. S. Weinberg (Eds.), The Study of Social Problems: Seven Perspectives (pp. 192-195). New
York: Oxford University Press.
Mills, C. Wright. 1940. “Situated
Actions and Vocabularies of Motive.” American Sociological Review,
5 (6), pp. 904-913.
Sykes, Gresham. M.,
and Matza, David. 1957.
“Techniques of Neutralization: A Theory of Delinquency.” American
Sociological Review 22, pp. 664–670.
Woods, Lynette. 2008.
“Religion…But Not as We’ve Known It.” Available online: https://unveiling.org/2008/10/16/religion-but-not-as-weve-known-it/
10/2024