Words are simultaneously a wonderful blessing and a terrible curse. They are a blessing because they allow humans to communicate quickly and efficiently. Words can transfer large, complex ideas from the mind of one individual to another with little effort. Furthermore, words can motivate people to achieve great feats, bring deep emotions to the surface, and create or assuage overpowering fear and guilt. Secular history is replete with magnificent samples of how words can cause great good or great harm. Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, the speeches of Winston Churchill or Martin Luther King, and the diatribes of Adolf Hitler are but a few examples.

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However, the Bible  is the most spectacular example of this blessing because ‘the righteousness of God,”  “the mind of Christ,”  a “knowledge of salvation,"  and so much more is revealed in it. The Bible allows us to know “the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge!… to experience the unknowable. It is no wonder that David declared: “How precious to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them!” 

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I have already alluded to the most obvious curse attendant to the use of words. Words can communicate bad ideas and create evil outcomes. However, a second curse lies within the blessing of verbal communication that is less obvious. That curse is the nature of the principal communication element – words.

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A speaker (or writer) may carefully select his words to succinctly capture his intended meaning and thus feel that he is communicating with his audience; nevertheless, his attempt to communicate may be a failure; not because he does not know how to express himself but because the hearer (or reader) had a completely different understanding of the meaning of the words chosen by the speaker. That different understanding could result from the hearer’s social experiences, his level of education (or the lack thereof), previous instructions, cultural biases, how a particular word was used during his adolescent years, or an almost endless set of other influences. The fact that the speaker used a word or phrase correctly does not matter. Communication does not occur if the hearer does not understand the word or phrase the same way the speaker did. The ability to know how an audience perceives what one says is a marvelous capability.  It is, I believe, a small part of what made Jesus such a skilled teacher.

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Whether or not a failure to communicate is meaningful depends on the importance of the topic. I know of nothing that could be more important than understanding and sharing the message we have from God.  Spiritual communication is the responsibility of the speaker (writer) . Therefore, I took on creating these articles, acutely aware of three things: (1) the limitations of my understanding. I could be wrong! (2) my limitations to write in words and phrases that will accurately transfer what I understand to be true, and (3) the enormous damage I could cause by writing (or saying) the wrong thing. Over the years, I have repeatedly asked God to grant me the gift of understanding His Word and communicating what He has taught me. Never more so than now.

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