Learning to Speak God from Scratchনমুনা

A New Way of Speaking God Have you ever stopped to wonder what the word grace means? A quick prayer you say before a meal? An unmerited gift? The opposite of a klutz? Countless generations have picked up spiritual words like grace and wrestled with their meanings. Their experiences force us to re-ask old questions and brainstorm new ones as we seek to understand the worlds we live in and the world yet to come. Because when we speak God, we are not just voicing letters strung together in a certain order. We are handling containers of spiritual knowledge. God always finds a way to break through and keep God’s people talking. After 400 years of silence between the Old Testament and New, the Word Made Flesh burst onto the scene declaring a new kingdom, a new grace, a new way of speaking God. Jesus launched his ministry in his hometown synagogue, announcing that he had been anointed by God to proclaim—that is, to speak God. He would say “Come, follow me” and “Your faith has healed you” and “Go and sin no more” and “Blessed are the meek.” With each proclamation, closed doors swung wide and lame legs danced and blind eyes could see. Jesus loved language so much that he often delivered odes to linguistics. He said good people should utter life-giving language, that we will have to justify the way we speak in the afterlife, and that humans can’t live by bread alone but by nourishment from divine words. It’s no wonder, then, that the last command Jesus gives his disciples was to go into the world and speak God. How will you speak God to someone else today?