I've found over the years, as I've begun to look into this area, I found I'll just look at people sometimes, and just talk with them, they begin to weep and they're bleeding, because you look past the outside at that cocky, confident attitude or whatever it was, and suddenly saw inside there's a hurt person, who doesn't know what to do with what's ringing and echoing around in their life. So words, verbal violence wounds people. The fourth thing it does is, it intimidates people, and shuts down their gift, intimidates them, and shuts down their gift. 2 Timothy, Chapter 1 and Verse 6, Paul's talking to Timothy, and he says stir up the gift which is inside you, don't be afraid. Why was he afraid? What was he afraid of, and why was he afraid? He was actually afraid of people. People were intimidating. You know what they were doing? They were telling him you're too young to be doing that job. Who do you think you are? They were challenging him, and Paul wrote to him another time and said, don't let anyone despise your youth. Sometimes older people can have a tendency to do that. When a young person's arising and emerging, the light of God is shining on them, they begin to speak. Who do you think you are?
What that does is it intimidates, so verbal violence or angry words or accusing words, abusing words, what they can do is so intimidate a person, it shuts down their gift, they can't function, they can't even be who they're called to be. You come in a home environment where there's a lot of anger, and shouting, and disturbances and things like that, you've got to find a way to survive it. What you do is you shut your spirit up, you close up, and you close up house, and you go away somewhere in your mind, in your emotions. You just vacate being present, so this is a huge issue, especially people who've been in homes where there's been physical, or sexual, or verbal violence or anything like that. They get shut down, then you see, you come to Christ, but you've got to actually open that part of your life that was shut down, and let the Holy Ghost heal you, restore you, and begin to start to change what you believe about yourself. Does that make sense? You're all getting quieter. How many know what I'm talking about here, aye?
Here's another one then, another thing of verbal violence. It stirs up or causes further anger, so if you've been in a place where people are yelling and abusive, how many know that the first thing you feel is, you feel hurt when people yell at you? Well, what follows on just after that? You get angry. You get angry, and if you can't find a way to deal with the anger, you just internalise it, and then you've got all this anger. The Bible says that. It says in Proverbs 15:1, a soft answer turns away wrath, but grievous words, harsh words, stir up and create anger. So if you're in a verbally violent situation - you have a think. Young people, think of the homes of some of the kids that you're going to school with. I have seen them in classes. They can't function. They can't succeed. They're too much of an emotional mess, because of what's going on in their homes. They're wounded, they're angry. There's a lot of young people that are really angry, and you get a few drinks, they go crazy. They get in a car, and away they go, and they go crazy, but actually they're angry, and they've got no way to deal with the anger, don't know what to do with what they're feeling, see?
They've been affected by this whole deal, and we need to know how to get out of that. So it stirs up anger, finally it lowers esteem, it lowers the value. So when you're abused, one of the things that happens is your feeling of the value you have about yourself, it tends to be lowered. You actually feel very lowered in your esteem, but you feel down on the inside, rejected and often depressed as well. But these are kinds of things that happen. This happens all around. You walk down the street, you can see people who look like that. You can see it in their eyes. You get into a church like this and of course, what we encourage is expression to the Lord, but if people have got controls, and are shut down, and been hurt and wounded, what happens is they actually find it real difficult to do it, whereas it's the most natural thing for a little child. They don't worry about anything. What happened on the way?