"If You're in Love, Show Me!"

[HKHaugan]

The Word 10

When Julie Andrews played Eliza Dolittle in My Fair Lady one of her songs vented her frustration with suitors, "Words, words, words, words---if you're in love show me!" If you think about those words for a bit you find they carry an awful lot of meaning. They are deeply relational and when you say "I love you" you’re hoping they hit the heart. The actual words may be little and contain only eight letters but think of the impact they have. You are laying your heart out in the open to convey something that is beyond the words. If you are receiving them and allow the words to sink in something happens that is beyond the words. Now if you are a person whose heart trusts Jesus and you receive those words from Him and in turn say those words because of Him to someone, you are immersing yourself in a spiritual atmosphere that lifts you into His dimension. Now you are beginning to experience what John means when he said, “In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God and the Word was God.” This invisible reality that is so much of a need in us is a Person in whose image we are created. That's what John was saying.

John doesn’t leave it there. He goes on. From this spiritual personal reality everything we can see, hear, feel and touch came through Jesus who is the Word. Every particle, atom and force in the universe was created through Him and each part has a significant function, meaning and purpose in its operation. It is this invisible personal presence of Jesus who has revealed Himself to us to show us we are central to His plan in this huge environment. How do we know this? Because John tells us immediately that in Jesus “was life and that life was the light of men.”

What does John say? “In Him was life and that life was the light of men.” He wants us to see Him spiritually because when we see Him we have in Him the light that lights the mind, the heart and the spirit in each of us. What we see in Jesus is the revelation of what it means to be a person, a spiritual person, an image of God. Paul tells us He is the image of the invisible God and that all the fullness of God is in Him. The writer of Hebrews says He is the exact representation of God. These all point to the revelation He brings through insight, understanding, truth, grace, love and all the qualities that God had for each of us to experience in a relationship with Him. These are all Jesus’ work in us through His Holy Spirit.

Until we see and accept Jesus, biological life is consumed and influenced by that internal block Scripture calls sin. Sin is the self-centered mind, heart and spirit taking control and trying to figure out from within their place in existence. Sin is all about personal survival, about me, about what I want, what I perceive are my needs and how the rest of the world fits around me. This is why it can be said that the archangels of sin are fear and pride.

What is revealed in Jesus is a perfect sinless life alive in a human body consumed and influenced by His Father and His Father’s will. He was the Word from His Father. He was faithful and His faith replaced all fear. He had no fear. His bearing, demeanor, attitude, character, personality and mindset were perfect. They were His language. Perfection which Scripture calls Holiness and righteousness were perfectly spoken in His humanity. This is what John knew and experienced in Jesus and why he wrote so eloquently about Jesus being the Word.

So in Jesus we have a whole group of words from the Word and these words become the way we allow the Spirit of God to transform how we think, make choices and speak. He is the Word of words, the life within and the light to bring the mind, heart and spirit together to think, speak and act---together. John goes on to use other words that round out how we become like Jesus, how we become the image of God He intends and how we overcome the sin that has caused us to be separated from God and one another with so much discord and confusion within.

Our Word vocabulary expands with the word ‘belief.’ John goes on to say that all who believe in His name have been given the right to be God’s children. Birth becomes ‘spiritual birth,’ being ‘born again’ through ‘faith’ from above. The qualities of God seen in Jesus are His ‘glory’ which is given us to reflect. ‘Grace’ is the full attitude of acceptance God has for us. ‘Truth’ for the mind and ‘grace,’ God’s openness, given so that we can experience His ‘fullness’ are words that bring His ‘will’ in every next moment. From the fullness of His grace we have one ‘blessing’ after another. His blessings are His personal touches from one moment to the next which are the visible ways He lives in through our belief, trust and faith in Him.

Belief, born again, faith, belief, trust, love, grace, truth, fullness, blessings, life, light are words from the Word. The purpose if this new vocabulary is to reframe our thinking so that the thoughts we have are God’s thoughts and the way we speak are words inspired by the Holy Spirit. When we start building a spiritual vocabulary it is a consciousness of the Spirit that gets us to rethink the use of our human languages, the way we speak, our intention with each word and phrase, because we have been blessed by the core Word---Jesus.

Perhaps now we can we see why Scripture tells us to be quick to listen and slow to speak. James got this absolutely right when he wrote six paragraphs on the use of the tongue (the whole of ch.3). Jesus the Word begins a whole new thinking, speaking and acting experience within each of us. We can practice it with our families, our friends and co-workers and among those who don’t know Jesus. Need I mention that all of Scripture is the vocabulary of God and its principles obeyed speak a spiritual language beyond human language? It’s that language that the non-believer hears within, whose heart the Lord wants to touch. John’s Gospel is a language where words have intense spiritual depth because what he is conveying is the depth of Jesus who speaks in words that penetrate the core of our being.

“And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. We beheld His glory, the glory of the One and only, begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth (Jn.1:14).” Who will our words from Him touch today?