“If
you continue to believe as you have always believed, you will
continue to act as you have always acted. If you continue to act as
you have always acted, you will continue to get what your have always
gotten. If you want different results in your life, all you have to
do is change your mind.” (—Anonymous, quoted in Power Thoughts
Devotional, Joyce Meyer, page 344).
Sometimes
it is downright awesome to think that the configuration of the world
as we experience it is fundamentally determined by the words we use
to describe it. Herein lies a power seduction for verbal man.
This, of course, is not to say that I can without dire consequences
call boiling water lukewarm and put my hand in it without
consequences. There is an outside world that can call us to task if
we are too far out of synch with it. Nevertheless, overwhelmingly in
a vast array of matters that confront us, the words we use to process
phenomena are decisively important in our perception of the world and our interaction with it. It
reminds us that all creation was in the beginning the thought of God
made concrete in the Word of God—the words of thought and the
realization of fact were one—but this transcendent power is
exclusive unto God alone.
This
is Advent season, a time to remember John 1:14 (NLT): “So the
Word became human and made his home among us. He was full of
unfailing love and faithfulness. And we have seen his glory, the
glory of the Father's one and only Son.” We are reminded that
words can be true—in line with the Word—or false—in line with
Deception. The great mystery that confronts is why anyone would
perceive falsehood rather than truth—why the survival instinct
would drink from the cup of destruction rather than from the cup of
life. This perversity of perception may one day be understood in
terms of organic processes, and the hope is that the suffering caused
from it may be alleviated with application of the minute precision of
physics. Surely religion and great literature—which derive much of
their livelihood from the dysfunctions of man—will meet such a
development with opposition and much ambivalence. Man has come to be
fixedly identified with perceptual tragedy—we lust for it—and we
feel that much would be lost without it. We are not sure that there
would be positive gain if Ozzie and Harriet should supplant Hamlet.
We thereby can get some intimation of the extent of our perversity and the mighty lure of
descriptive power.
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