The Spoken Word

I'd like to start out by reading one verse from, in fact, half a verse from Isaiah 50 verse 4. The Lord God has given me the tongue of those who are taught that I may know how to sustain with the work him who is weary. Most of us believe, at least theoretically, that every follower of Jesus is given a ministry right off the bat. Before Peter ever had any conception of what salvation was, he was already given a ministry.

All Peter knew about himself at the beginning there was that he was a sinner, sinful man. And it's interesting, Jesus doesn't say, okay, first of all, we have to get you born again and take you through the three steps or four steps or ten. All Jesus says to Peter is, don't be afraid.

From now on, that means this moment on, you're going to be catching men. And we know that those of us who are in any way serious about following Jesus, even in spite of our hang-ups and our problems and all our unanswered questions, are immediately given some kind of work. We are called into his work, into his ministry.

Jesus does not call us to come and sit in a pew, he calls us to come and get under his yoke and work by his side. But our problem, of course, is exactly what does that mean? Of course, we know that we're to make disciples, proclaim the gospel, reap a harvest, talk about the kingdom of God, but specifically, what does that boil down to in our daily lives, day after day living? The Lord has given me the tongue of those who are taught, that I may know how to sustain with a word him who is weary. In a world where words are cheap, glib, more often than not, false, we are sent out to bring people from darkness to light and from the power of Satan unto God by the power of the sheer spoken word.

And it was given to him the book of the prophet Isaiah. He opened the book and found the place where it was written. The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives, recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord. Notice that all this is accomplished by means of speaking. All Jesus does is speak, and the blind receive their sight, and the captives are set free, the oppressed are given liberty.

The thing that people noticed about Jesus' ministry, right off the bat, was that his words had life in themselves, like they were like seeds, and if the ground was receptive to those seeds, they grew. And he went down to Capernaum, a city of Galilee, and he was teaching them on the Sabbath, and they were astonished at his teaching, for his word was with authority. And in the synagogue there was a man who had the spirit of an unclean demon, and he cried out with a loud voice, Ah, what have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God.

But Jesus rebuked him, saying, Be silent and come out of him. And when the demon had thrown him down in the midst, he came out of him, having done him no harm. And they were all amazed, and said to one another, What is this word? For with authority and power he commands the unclean spirits, and they come out.

All he does is speak. The unique thing about Jesus' spoken word was that his word, in some strange way, had the power to create the reality of which the word was a symbol. For instance, if he said to a person who was just beaten down with guilt, Your sins are forgiven, the stain of guilt was removed.

If he says to a lame man, Get up and walk, the lame man finds it possible now to walk. To the leper, Be clean, and the leprosy leaves. To the wind, Be still, and it quiets down.

To a man who's been unstable all his life, Jesus says, Now I'm going to call you Peter, the rock. And from that instant the man finds it possible to take on the nature of a rock, instead of a glass of water. The Father had taught him to speak as one who is taught that he might be able to sustain with a word him who is weary.

His word was spirit, it was life. He spoke, and the desert of the human heart began to flourish. Now it is to exactly that ministry that every single one of us is called.

And the problem down some 20 centuries has been that again and again people have found some way of stunting that. And they insist that the spoken word, or the ministry of the word, or whatever they wanted to call it, they wanted to reserve it for certain people that they would call preachers or by some other name. And they would cite scriptures such as, in Acts where the Apostles had seven deacons chosen and they appointed them to look after the distribution of food, so that the Apostles could continue to concern themselves with the ministry of the word and prayer.

And so it sounds logical, this is our job, we preach, and you guys take care of the food. But look what happened to the people who were appointed to look after the distribution of food. Deacon Stephen was the first one to be stoned to death.

Why was he stoned to death? For distributing food? No, for preaching. Philip, Deacon Philip, goes up to Samaria and proclaims the word, goes down into the Gaza Strip and proclaims to an Ethiopian eunuch. And he is not only called Deacon Philip, he's also called Philip the Evangelist.

Now that calling was given to all. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God with boldness. All these signs shall follow them that believe.

In my name shall they cast out devils, they shall speak with new tongues, the hallmark of the believer. The indication that that person has in fact received a heart of flesh for a heart of stone is that that person, man or woman, speaks with a new tongue. That they now have the power to sustain with a word him who is weary.

Now notice, it's not just the power to quote Scripture. The Pharisees could quote Scripture too. The devil can quote Scripture.

Nor is it eloquence. Some of the most deceitful and treacherous men and women on earth are eloquent. Nor is it giving sympathy, nor is it uttering sentimentality.

But it's rather somehow being able to speak a word which brings somebody who's down back up again. And you can think in your own life of how this happened. At one time or another when you were down and somebody spoke a word which they may themselves not even remember, and it was like water coming down in the desert of your heart.

It was like a five ton load being lifted off your back by the sheer power of the spoken word. Wednesday night a young woman came in here, almost staggered in here, and sat over in this section and just sobbed her body out almost. She was at the end of a rope and the one thing that seemed left to her was to drive a knife into her heart.

And I'm not betraying any confidence, she was quite frank and open about this. Now nobody walked up to her and gave her a thousand dollars, and nobody proposed marriage. And yet somehow before the evening was over this woman received enough hope that she could pick herself up and go forth again.

And the reason was that people talked to her and what they said to her somehow quickened hope in her again, gave her life, sustained her. Now this should be going on not so much inside these walls as outside. We ought to be going forth with a word that is able to heal the sick, raise the dead, and bring the people who are down in the dumps back up again.

Now there are many people to this day who insist, now you're going too far. That kind of powerful spoken word was reserved for the Son of God. Jesus could do these things because he was the Son of God.

He was the Son of God indeed. But remember that Jesus had divested himself of his divine prerogatives. He'd given them up and had emptied himself of all that and come down and become a genuine human being, not just a docetic appearance, not just like something that looked like a man, but it was really God.

It was God, but it was truly man. And there was nothing about him that you could say, well, he's different from other men by looking at him. I mean he was genuinely and perfectly and utterly human and every divine and holy thing that he did was under the anointing of the same spirit that is to anoint us.

So he spoke a word from a human heart with a human voice out of a human mouth that raised the dead, but he did it as a human being. And the reason he was able to do these things as a human being was that as a human being submissive to his Father now, he concentrated on doing three things. First, he listened.

Jesus never spoke a single word that had not been given to him. He concentrated on what his father had to tell him. Secondly, he prayed.

His ministry of his spoken word was sandwiched between intense prayer. He didn't do anything without prayer. And thirdly, very important for us to notice, he also concentrated on being a servant, on faithfully doing the cruddy job.

Thirty years in that hit town of Nazareth, working three and a half years taking the gospel around Israel, but notice he took the gospel around Israel not as some hotshot celebrity flying first-class and eating in the best hotels, but always as one who was right down at the very street level with the lowliest of men, a servant still. Now if we're going to have utterances from our mouths that will in fact bring healing to people, it will never come about by our trying to speak divinely, you know, trying to get that divine intonation. But it will rather happen when we, without even realizing what we're doing as far as the speaking, it'll be quite so spontaneous if we will concentrate on three things.

Listening, praying, and especially serving down at the bottom level. If we're going to have a sustaining word on our tongue from God, first thing we're going to have to learn to do is listen. And it's significant that this passage from Isaiah goes on to read like this.

Let me read the thing from the beginning. The Lord God has given me the tongue of those who are taught, that I may know how to sustain with a word him who is weary. Morning by morning he awakens, he those who are taught.

The Lord God has opened my ear and I was not rebellious. When you go to the scriptures, you go to the scriptures not to find a message to ram down somebody else's throat, nor do you go to the scriptures to find support for your well-buttressed doctrinal position. You go to the scriptures for something for yourself.

Never, never, never read the scriptures with somebody else in mind unless you are seriously interceding. Otherwise, you read the scriptures to hear something from God yourself. Lord, that's me.

Lord, I'm in that shape. Lord, help me. The scriptures, the Bible, is Mount Sinai.

You go up there on Mount Sinai to meet God. The Bible is that hillside outside Trapernium. You go there to hear from Jesus.

The Bible is Calvary. You go there to hear what the Lamb of God has to say. We have to learn more crafts than anything else to truly, honestly, earnestly, consistently listen, to hear.

Our problem so often is that we now think we got our diploma. I've mastered the subject. Now I can teach.

And all we ever teach is religious death. We have nothing to say that's going to bring life to anybody else unless we are continuously hearing from God, drinking it in, soaking it up, conforming our lives to the things he's telling us. We will not have life on our tongues until we learn how to listen with our ears.

Secondly, if we're going to have a sustaining word on our tongue that is going to really bring people up into the presence of God and heal them, we're going to have to learn to pray. You know, and everyone says, oh, here we go again, prayer. You know, but who of us is satisfied? Dwight Moody tells us about the time when he thirsted for the Spirit, the Holy Spirit.

He wanted the Spirit, and he cried out and cried out, and I guess he was in a hotel in New York or something, and the Spirit descended upon him. And he says that after that, messages that he, the same kind of truth that he preached before, began to get a result, a response that he had never seen. But what we have a tendency to do when we hear such a testimony is to jump to conclusions.

Ah, when I get the baptism of the Holy Spirit, then it'll just come like that. The baptism of the Holy Spirit, my friend, is the baptism of prayer. The Spirit of God is the Spirit of prayer.

If the Holy Spirit has come on you and you're not praying, then you have to ask whether it's really the Holy Spirit. Doubtless what took place in Dwight L. Moody's life at that point was that he began also to experience by the Spirit's power a prayer life that he had never known. For apart from a prayer life, there is no power that is of any truly godly value in our utterances.

Finally, if we're going to have a word on our tongue that will truly sustain the weary, we're going to have to learn to settle for the cruddy, low-profile, payless, thankless jobs and keep doing them all our lives. Somebody, I believe it was here some years back, somebody was preaching, it was an excellent message, but, and this was somebody from across the earth, but he said one thing that I have problems with and it's so often commonly believed. He said, Stephen was faithful in serving tables and so finally he was promoted to preaching.

That is Tommy Rock. That whole conception that I'm faithful with serving tables, then I'll be giving the important work. Stephen, doubtless, was serving tables right up to the day he was martyred.

His message coming across his tongue had such power from God because he was a servant. A dispute arose among them. Which of them was to be regarded as the greatest? He said to them, the kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them and those in authority over them are called benefactors, but not so with you.

Rather, let the greatest among you become as the youngest and the leader as one who serves. For which is greater, the one who sits at table or the one who serves? Is it not the one who sits at table, but I am among you as one who serves. There's a direct connection between the power of God on our tongues and our willingness to do the dirty, thankless job faithfully.

Isaiah 58, if you pour yourself out for the hungry and satisfy the desire of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom shall be as noonday. And the Lord will guide you continually and satisfy your desire with good things and make your bones strong. And you shall be like a water garden, like a spring of water, whose waters fail not.

The water garden, the spring of water, utterance. Jesus says, what is it? In John 7, if any man thirsts, let him come to me. Whoever believes in me out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water.

He's talking about the spoken word. It's the people who do the foot washing who get the anointed tongues. Okay, so we need people to help in the nursery and we can stand up and beg about this and they're needed.

Do you know what? The greatest need is our need to be in that nursery, or to help with those kids on Wednesday night, or to drive people to the doctor, or to go visit people in the hospital, or to go see the sick, or to count, you know, do that figuring work that's so boring, or do that work in the back room, or work with those people who never, never, never express any kind of gratitude. We need that, because it's only when we begin to pour out like that on the thankless jobs that we begin to experience the reality of God's Spirit coming across our mouths. Ah, but my ministry is so important that I really don't have time to do those menial jobs that anybody can do.

I need to be free from them so that I can do the things that I'm gifted and equipped to do. The minute any of us looks upon his or her ministry in that light, your ministry has become a bag of wind. Until we're prepared, see, to let our hands and feet become involved in labor, even to the point of getting them dirty, and that includes the mind and every part of it, but the thankless jobs, until we're willing to do that, we will have nothing of truly value, godly value, to offer to anybody from God.

So when you take all the commands Jesus gives to us concerning our ministry to the world out there, they boil down simply to a ministry of the spoken word in every one of us. This goes for those of us who are tongue-tied and shy and inhibited, as well as to those of us who talk far too much. We are all of us, with no exceptions, called to begin to speak with a new tongue.

Don't settle for anything less than a river of living water coming out of your heart and across your mouth and bringing life to those around you. This will surely happen in all of our lives as we learn to listen to God, as we learn to pray, and especially as we learn to get down off our little pedestals and get to work. The Lord God has given me the tongue of those who are taught that I may know how to sustain with a word him who is weary.

We pray father that you give to all of us here encouragement to know that this is what you're calling us to. And where we've been trying constantly to pass the the needy ones on to somebody who we feel is more eloquent, help us to become bold now and help us to prepare ourselves before you, away from the eyes of the world, in such a way that when these moments of opportunity come, the word we give may not be canned or religious fact or something so full of self it reeks, but that every word that proceeds out of our mouths will be from you and will be confirmed in the lives of those we touch with signs of your mercy. We ask it father in Jesus name.

Amen.