John 12:49-50 – Own the Words
49 For I have not spoken on My own authority; but the Father who sent Me gave Me a command, what I should say and what I should speak. 50 And I know that His command is everlasting life. Therefore, whatever I speak, just as the Father has told Me, so I speak.” John 12:49-50, New King James Version
Melvyn Bragg got my attention. In his The Adventure of English, he was noting how liberally the masters of the American South co-opted the vocabulary of their slaves. He comments with deserved acidity at the masters figured they owned the words as well as the people.
I could repent all day in paragraph after paragraph for the evil hypocrisy of those Americans who purported Christian convictions right alongside the right to own another person. In this space, I would rather go an inch or two toward setting the descendants of slaves and masters truly free.
The Bible makes clear that all of us were slaves to sin. We still are if we have not instead become slaves to Jesus.
Bound by Satan, Jesus says we spoke lies because our words came from the father of lies. He, by rights, owned our words as well as our persons.
Then came Jesus to take down Satan's strongholds and recapture the Christian for Himself. Christ now owns our language. What's more, He shows us how to use it.
The legalistic tendencies that remain within me would now expound on how to Speak Like Jesus, taking the bravery of His verbal directness and the subtlety of His masterful metaphors
as my model.
I would then be setting myself up as well as any of my readers who aspire to speak or write with excellence for a new form of condemnation. However eloquently the phrasing of our just sentence rings, His rightly entrusted gavel slams to end our efforts to be our own verbal Messiah.
The righteousness in our words, as in our lives, will ALWAYS fall short of His. Shall we, then, revert to the language of our old master? Let it not be so! Instead, we take up the submitted spirit from which Jesus lives and speaks in John 12:49-50. His words, He said, were the words His Father gave him to speak.
This IS so with us. Christ the Word made flesh lives within us, and the Trinity gives us words. Ever so occasionally, Christ may give us words to savor and speak that approach His eloquence. At other times, he may have us speak in the soft and pared down language He must have used as He drew the your children into his lap.
The biggest challenge the Spirit must overcome by the righteousness of Christ is perhaps to open our ears to listen for that prompting. Generally, we are already speaking in the habit to which we are most accustomed. We failed to wait for His words and His timing because we are impelled by our own.
Enforced silence, then, is His tutoring space. Being willingly yoked to Him in His Word as passed down to us perfectly is how we, ever so slowly, see the tongue renewed to speak out of the fullness He places in our hearts.
Melvyn Bragg got my attention. In his The Adventure of English, he was noting how liberally the masters of the American South co-opted the vocabulary of their slaves. He comments with deserved acidity at the masters figured they owned the words as well as the people.
I could repent all day in paragraph after paragraph for the evil hypocrisy of those Americans who purported Christian convictions right alongside the right to own another person. In this space, I would rather go an inch or two toward setting the descendants of slaves and masters truly free.
The Bible makes clear that all of us were slaves to sin. We still are if we have not instead become slaves to Jesus.
Bound by Satan, Jesus says we spoke lies because our words came from the father of lies. He, by rights, owned our words as well as our persons.
Then came Jesus to take down Satan's strongholds and recapture the Christian for Himself. Christ now owns our language. What's more, He shows us how to use it.
The legalistic tendencies that remain within me would now expound on how to Speak Like Jesus, taking the bravery of His verbal directness and the subtlety of His masterful metaphors
as my model.
I would then be setting myself up as well as any of my readers who aspire to speak or write with excellence for a new form of condemnation. However eloquently the phrasing of our just sentence rings, His rightly entrusted gavel slams to end our efforts to be our own verbal Messiah.
The righteousness in our words, as in our lives, will ALWAYS fall short of His. Shall we, then, revert to the language of our old master? Let it not be so! Instead, we take up the submitted spirit from which Jesus lives and speaks in John 12:49-50. His words, He said, were the words His Father gave him to speak.
This IS so with us. Christ the Word made flesh lives within us, and the Trinity gives us words. Ever so occasionally, Christ may give us words to savor and speak that approach His eloquence. At other times, he may have us speak in the soft and pared down language He must have used as He drew the your children into his lap.
The biggest challenge the Spirit must overcome by the righteousness of Christ is perhaps to open our ears to listen for that prompting. Generally, we are already speaking in the habit to which we are most accustomed. We failed to wait for His words and His timing because we are impelled by our own.
Enforced silence, then, is His tutoring space. Being willingly yoked to Him in His Word as passed down to us perfectly is how we, ever so slowly, see the tongue renewed to speak out of the fullness He places in our hearts.
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