The Creative Power of Your Words

We have the ability either to bless or to curse.

Your words are powerful! They can carry the creative power of God or the destructive power of the devil. They can encourage or discourage, heal or hurt, build up or tear down. Depending on whether you speak a blessing or a curse over your family, the words you speak will produce either good or harmful results.

Most people readily accept the concept of blessings as valid or biblical, but they are either skeptical about, or refuse to believe, that curses can be passed on as easily. In most cultures, a curse is viewed as something a witch, warlock or practitioner of voodoo would conjure up and place on someone. In truth, a curse can come from such sources.

But the Bible says that we all have the power in our tongues to both bless and curse. Deuteronomy 30:19 declares, “I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing; therefore choose life, that both you and your descendants may live” (NKJV).

A curse is the result of speaking evil over or praying against a person or thing. To curse someone with negative, condemning words can cause hardships and failure in that person’s life.

Jesus said in Matthew 12:36-37, “But I tell you, on the day of judgment men will have to give account for every idle (inoperative, nonworking) word they speak. For by your words you will be justified and acquitted, and by your words you will be condemned and sentenced” (The Amplified Bible). Why did He say we would be judged by our words? Because there is power in the tongue!

In Proverbs we read, “Death and life are in the power of the tongue, and those who love it will eat its fruit” (18:21, NKJV). James 3:8 describes the tongue as “an unruly evil, full of deadly poison.” With it, “we bless our God and Father, and with it we curse men….Out of the same mouth proceed blessing and cursing” (vv. 9-10).

James leaves no question about the power we hold within our tongues, but that power can either work for us, or it can work against us. There is no storm on life’s sea through which we cannot safely sail by proper use of the rudder that is in our mouths. Our tongues can be a powerful tool used in our favor, but they can also be an unruly and deadly force, causing our lives to be shipwrecked if we let them run out of control.

Everything about us has been, and will be, determined by the words we speak. We have the power to call those things that be not as though they are. We have the power to pull down strongholds, the power to bind and loose, the power of life and death in our mouths!