When God wants to change something in the natural world, He always gets someone to speak, because words are the way the power of God is released from the spirit world into the natural world. Death and life are in the power of the tongue. Your tongue has power. With our tongue we express our words, ideas, feelings, and fears. If there's bitterness/anger or doubt/limitation in your heart, you'll express it through your tongue. Change on the inside, then you'll start to see the things change on the outside. Internal shifts first.
Great, if you've got a Bible, if you could open it up, Proverbs 18:21 and I want to share with you today. I want to continue where we started last week. We were speaking about the creative power of the tongue, and I want to just pick up again, I want to talk about shaping your world with the word of God, shaping your world with the word of God - still part of that same series, the creative power of the tongue.
Proverbs 18:21, death and life are in the power of the tongue. Death and life are in the power of the tongue. Your tongue has power. With our tongue we express our words, we express our ideas, we express our feelings, we express our fears. If there's bitterness in your heart, you'll express bitterness through your tongue. If there's anger in your heart, you'll express anger through your tongue. If there's doubt and limitation in your life, no doubt you'll speak that through your tongue as well. Your tongue has power to speak out over your life, and around you into the environment, and change it, and so we see if you have a look at all of creation, the only one creature in all of creation that has the power to build civilisation and culture are human beings.
The thing that distinguishes us, that enables us to be able to do that, is we have a spirit man, we're created in the image of God,, and we can speak words that communicate in ways that the animal world cannot. We never came from the animal world. We came from God. We're a spirit being, and so last week we talked about how God used words, and we talked about the beginning in the Bible, the first ways that God used words, number one, He used words to create, so if we have a look at how creation took place, we saw the spirit of God was moving, and then God spoke words, and words released something. There was something came from the spirit world, and manifested in the natural world, something that was existing in God's heart, and in substance in the spirit world, manifested in the natural world. People that have had glimpses of heaven, or been to heaven, say there are some things which are like what it is on earth, but they're much more intense and full of life, see?
So the things which are in the natural world, in many areas, are reflections of the unseen spirit world, but they came into being because God spoke. We saw also that God used words to establish relationships, and we then talked about our responsibility to use our tongue to honour God, and then to actually represent Him, so I want to look now at the creative power, the creative power of God's words. So I want you to look with me in Jeremiah, Chapter 1. I want to just establish that, because if you don't understand this, everything we do afterwards over these next weeks, you'll miss it, because you haven't got to embrace this one thing, that God's word has power to change what you are seeing, and living in, and experiencing. God's word has the power to change it, but you've got to be able to be linked to that word, and know what to do with that word, and I'm just going to be taking one aspect of that, which is particularly speaking and declaring the word of God - but there are other aspects of course. We need to walk in obedience. I like what Bryden was sharing, how he began to speak over his life, and then he began to order his life according to what he was speaking and believing in his heart. Then externally, everything changed.
So firstly I want you to see that consistently, when God wants to change something in the natural world, He always gets someone to speak. He'll always get someone to speak something, because words are the way the power of God is released from the spirit world into the natural world. It's almost like God is waiting for someone to speak His word. When God wanted to prepare a generation for the coming of Jesus Christ, the Bible says He raised up a man. His name was John the Baptist. It said the word of the Lord came to him, and he began to speak what God was saying, and he upheaved a whole nation. See, the whole nation came out to hear him, because something was in the words he spoke, and it's getting that, not just the word of God, but there's something in it we want.