“I’m pickin’ up good vibrations…”
The Beach Boys, 1966.
I recently read “so if you say ‘you’re a piece of junk you stupid car’’ your car responds to your words.’ A good and simple thought, except your car….body…nation…doesn’t, per se, understand the English words you speak to it.
None of it’s forming substance was birthed in english, or by any known tongue, so earthly language isn’t it’s native tongue. Do speak though.
All created things were formed by the energy behind the spoken word, so to the extent that our energy is released back towards ‘it’, the thing in question understands and responds to what your believing empowers those…Urdu…words to mean.
People have an interesting, if not always consciously understood, relationship with vibrations. Whether it’s the shared electrical frequency of attraction, a radio wave length or using a microwave, we’re all surrounded with, touched by and consciously employ currents every day.
Beyond the radio, there’s music, which as far as I can tell, moves everyone- not exactly in the same way perhaps, but moves all for sure. Music is nothing more than organised, hopefully somewhat rhythmic, vibrations springing into the air from the energy applied to the drum skin, the guitar strings, the piano keys or the tongue and breath to the Saxophone reed. In the end, we’re not moved by the instruments -which remain silent - until empowered by the released energy of the trained musician. It’s the people themselves who move us. Their own expressions and essence that we often find so beautiful when connected to the others in the band. All that energy of mind and body connecting into attractive sound. We often take the sound’s origin for granted. That is the person behind the instrument.
Paul said in 1 Corinthians 14 ‘that if the trumpet gave an uncertain sound, who’d prepare himself for the battle?’ (I’d encourage the reader to re-read that paragraph like they’d never seen it before.) Because…
beyond the music, beyond personal confession, I’m thinking about the prophetic voice. I hope I’ve adequately raised the point that the musician is the power behind the instrument. In fact, it takes a musician to make the song. At performance, the instrument and the score simply respond to the strength and skill of the user.
In other settings I’ve said ‘the pray-er is more important than the prayer.’ This is not to discount the prayer, or group prayer in any way but to point out that a score to a reader who isn’t a musician never becomes a song and moves nothing. A prayer to a non pray-er is in danger of becoming like the Apostle’s creed, spoken weekly by many who neither understand nor believe it. It just hangs limply in the air.
In prayer, or prophecy, one can have the word but if their spiritually trained energy can’t carry forth what the songs author intended, well the music isn’t moving…for us all…to the place it was intended to move. We might get a mixed bag of results.
Couple this thought with the idea that some of those obstacles that we pit that energy against, are living things and have a will of their own. My car is in fact a stupid piece of metal, plastic, rubber and leather. While I admire and appreciate the energy that went into it’s assembly, in the main it ‘listens and looks at me’ more or less like a rock. And, there are times to use your faith on a rock. If they can ‘cry out’. they can listen, too.
The powers behind a nation though; the forces of evil that actively resist the word of God, well that’s different all together. Different even then when I speak to my own body or circumstances; something within my own jurisdiction. This is an entirely new league requiring new levels of wisdom, strength and experience.
When something expansive, with originating powers behind it (a nation) gets spoken to and doesn’t like it, well it may just fight back. It may say, ‘Jesus I know, Paul I’ve heard of but (as Jerry savelle said years ago ) who in hell are you?’ And, in that chapter of Acts, one antagonist chased, beat, stripped naked, seven men trying to do well. Hmmmm
I’m certainly not saying don’t pray or prophesy. I’m saying it’s not a game. Climbing up onto a national stage requires a lot of second and third chair work before you should become a proclaimed soloist.
Paul’s context in 1 Corinthians above is speaking in tongues. What I really think is that I need to slowly, cognitively, speak in tongues in the way Paul described in Roman’s 8. That I should sigh and moan until my mind quits wandering and that other Spirit within takes hold, walking me past my own thoughts, values and narrow beliefs and into the place where He can freely; praying through me and drawing pictures in my mind as he does, set the future’s course, employing my own strength and energy to pray, or prophecy, it’s existence.