The Present is Merely Consequence Catching up to Yesterday’s Words

There is a need among not just Christians but throughout the human race, and that need is vital. People do not understand that the Bible is a book of principles and promises designed by God to help them reach their highest and best destination. The principles of God are settled laws that will work for any human being, irrespective of the person’s state of salvation. The promises of God are only applicable to His children who believe in Him and believe Him (two different things), and who have accepted His Son, Jesus, as their Savior.

God is a God of principles. He is not moved to fulfill His words because we cry, get angry, or rail at Him. He is a God who will do anything but violate His words because the standing of this whole universe, everything He has created, is held up by the integrity of His word. In the following verses, we see that God created the heavens and the earth using the wisdom of principles:

By wisdom the Lord laid the earth’s foundations,

By understanding he set the heavens in place. (Proverbs 3:19, niv)

He made the earth by his power; he founded the world by his wisdom and stretched out the heavens by his understanding. (Jeremiah 51:15, niv)

To demonstrate God’s steadfast principles, I offer an elementary example. Take words, for instance. What did Solomon—one of the men most blessed with godly wisdom that ever lived—mean when he laid out the principle that “Death and life are in the power of the tongue: and they that love it shall eat the fruit thereof”? (Proverbs 18:21).

It is easy to think your words don’t matter because oftentimes you don’t see the manifestations of the things you say. But consider this: a supersonic plane travels faster than the speed of sound. You see the plane and hear no sound, only to hear the sound moments after the plane has passed. Similarly, the spirit part of you is supersonic. It is your spirit that speaks through your body—therefore, words are spiritual. And when you speak words in the present, those words go into your future faster than the material body is able to comprehend. By the time the material body you live in catches up to the words you speak today, it appears to the material body as the future.

Therefore, the man or woman who has not had his or her spiritual senses exercised by reason of use, as described in Hebrews, will not sense the correlation between what they spoke yesterday and what is happening to them today:

But solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil. (Hebrews 5:14, niv)

Christians ought not to live life the way the world does—oblivious to the fact that our words can advance or sabotage our aspirations.

You may have seen those documentaries where a seed is planted and then, through time-lapse photography, the seed germinates, sprouts, grows leaves, and flowers within what appears to be seconds. Do you know that if that seed was planted in front of your house and the natural process of time passed before the seed germinated, sprouted, grew leaves, and flowered, chances are that you would not notice it because it is so incremental?

It is the same thing in your life. All the words you have ever spoken since you became conscious of the intent of words are spiritual seeds. In the spiritual realm, those words activate just as in the time-accelerated documentary of the seeds of a plant. They germinate, sprout, grow leaves, and flower within milliseconds. But because your body is of the physical world, it takes time for them to manifest in the natural realm. However, as surely as you have spoken them, they will manifest!

This is what Jesus is telling us in Matthew 12:36: “And I tell you this, you must give an account on judgment day for every idle word you speak” (nlt). Why would the Lord warn about a “careless word”? Because He came to earth from the spirit realm and knows there is no such thing as an idle word. Words affect you, your environment, and thus, humanity.

You cannot say things and expect that those things will not come to pass in your life. God created this world by speaking things into existence. Americans elected Barack Obama because he spoke his way into power. You spoke your way into a job, and you married your husband because he spoke a proposal to you. Or, conversely, your wife wedded you because she accepted your proposal to her. If, in these situations, words can manifest themselves in reality, why do people of the most holy faith—handed down from Abraham and the patriarchs—believe that this spiritual principle doesn’t hold true for us?

And it is not just spoken words that affect our reality. Our thought life works with our spoken words to affect our reality. Ephesians 3:20 says:

Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us. (NIV)

From this verse it is clear that God is cognizant of our words, our thoughts, and imaginings. Yet so many of us speak the right words but sabotage it with our thoughts. René Descartes said, “I think therefore I am.” Permit me to paraphrase him and say “I think excellently, therefore I am excellent,” or “I think defeat, therefore I am defeated.” This principle did not originate with Descartes, however. It is taken straight from Proverbs: “For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he” (Proverbs 23:7)

Just as material world ignorance of the universal physical laws of God (what the world calls the laws of nature) doesn’t excuse you from their consequences in this material world, similarly, in the spiritual realm, ignorance of God’s principles does not excuse you from spiritual consequences that manifest in the physical; they apply to you nevertheless. For instance, humans are not naturally conscious that the world is constantly going around and around in orbit on its axis. Yet, however unconscious we are of this fact, it does not stop the earth from orbiting. It is an established principle, and we are better off when we understand and harness it.

I see believers taking Scripture out of context, expecting it to work for them without applying the principle behind the Scripture, and getting frustrated in the process. My heart is moved with compassion to fill this need. Every Sscripture taken out of context is, of course, a pretext! When I began studying the Bible as if it was a personal letter written to me by my own father (and in reality that is what the Bible is), I discovered that its principles, when applied, worked for me. More and more, I’ve come to realize that the Word of God will only work if you work it!