From Hearing to Believing, Part 3

When I was single and before I was a Christian, it seemed that God kept trying to get my attention in a strange way… by sending Christians my direction, disguised as attractive young women with whom I’d want to get romantically involved. One of these lived out-of-state and had a little sister living with her non-believing family. One day, I saw a note she’d sent to her little sister, pinned up above the girl’s bed. It read:

So do not fear, Regina, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.

Of course, at the time, I didn’t recognize that as being from Isaiah 41:10, but it was the first time I had seen anyone making the Bible into something personal. In my last post, I talked about “preaching the gospel to yourself” – that is, actually reading it out loud. But now I’m going to take it a step further and suggest, like Regina’s big sister did, to actually personalize it.

Now, as soon as someone talks about both personalizing scripture and saying it aloud, someone cries, “Foul! That’s the positive confession, name-it-and-claim-it prosperity gospel!” But exactly what is it about personalizing scripture that gets us into such a tizzy? Could it be that it makes God so, well… personal?

I’m sure that part of the difficulty for many of us is that it sounds a little too much like the “positive affirmation/positive thinking” self-help movement. The difference is that positive affirmations is self-righteousness disguised as truth. Consider the following, taken from one such web site:

• I approve of myself and feel great about myself
  
• I am a good person
  
• I am an important and valuable human being, and I deserve to feel good about myself
  
• I deserve to be happy and successful
  
• I have the power to change myself

One site even claims that “self-esteem is not given or obtained from external things.” Yet, we know the truth expressed in Romans 3:

“There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands, no one who seeks God. All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one.”

That’s just one scripture I can use to rebut the claims these affirmations make. So let me be very clear on this point: personalizing the Word of God and speaking it out loud is not the same as “positive affirmations” – because God’s word is truth. Whereas, a positive affirmation such as “I am a good person,” apart from God, certainly is not. So does speaking God’s truth out loud release some type of spiritual power that causes good things to come your way? I doubt it. But I do think that the truth of God’s word coming out of your mouth and back into your ear helps get it down into your heart much better, more so than just silently reading your Bible. And if that’s something that helps your believing and builds your faith, what exactly is wrong with that?