Words are containers for faith, and the principal way for faith to be transmitted and effectuated.
God's will and power are released in the earth by His words, and His words are released through the faith of His people. Our words are faith's trigger. Without a trigger, a gun is useless.
When we speak God's Words and will by faith, the physical order is transcended and changed. Situations change. Bodies heal. Provision comes. Blessings come. Storms calm. Relationships heal. Threats subside. Even armies have been victorious and nations have fallen.
God's Word. The Bible, which consists of the combined Jewish and Christian Scriptures, is referred to as "the Word of God."
In the Greek language in which the New Testament was written, it is the logos (Word) of God, meaning "expression." The Bible is the written Word, or expression, of God.
The Bible says that Jesus Christ is the living Word, or expression, of God.
In the beginning was the Word (logos), and the Word was with God, and the Word was God... The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us (John 1:1, 14).
Jesus is the eternal Word who was made living flesh. But the written Word is also living:
For the word of God is living and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart (Hebrews 4:12).
The King James Version translates that as "For the word of God is quick, and powerful...." Quick, of course, means alive, and powerful is probably a better translation than active. The Word of God has a unique, built-in power that no other book has. The Bible is not just ink on paper, or bytes on my hard drive such as with my computer Bible. These are only a means of representing and transmitting life and power. The Bible has a life of its own. That is because it is the mind of God.
See Appendix 2 for a summary of the proofs of the Bible's divine origin.
My testimony. When I was a little kid, I believed the Bible, without doubt, but I did not understand why I was so trusting. My parents did not attend church. It was just something God put in my heart. Years later as an adult, when God began to strongly deal with me, I began to really study the Bible for the first time.
One day about that time as a young captain, I asked my U.S. Air Force chaplain,"Is the Bible really infallible?" His answer was wishy-washy, which only fueled my interest. I learned later that many ministers attend theologically liberal seminaries where the authority of the Bible is under attack by unbelieving professors, no different from the way it has been under attack for centuries by avowed atheists. True, it doesn't make sense. You would think those professors would find some other line of work and way to make a living than by teaching something in which they do not believe, and damaging the faith of others. God only knows how much faith they have destroyed and damage to the kingdom of God they have done. But they need to know that God keeps score.
All this caused me to make a study of apologetics, the discipline that marshals all the empirical evidence for the Bible's reliability. I discovered that the evidence for the Bible's complete reliability is absolutely overwhelming. If it has any errors in it, you could not be sure what or where they are. Who would you trust to tell you? A professor? Hardly. They do not have divine authority. If you lined up all the professors in the world end-to-end, you would not have enough to reach a conclusion. I had rather trust God. If you cannot trust all theBible, you cannot trust any of it. If it has one error, you cannot even be sure if John 3:16 is true, and if you are not sure John 3:16 is true, you have no hope of eternal life. But thankfully, it is all true, including John 3:16, even though we will spend a lifetime trying to understand it all, and we will still be trying when Jesus takes us home.
Even after I came to this conclusion, it was years later before I realized the sheer power of the Word. Let me explain.