Revisiting My Needed, Favorite Words

I have favorite words…do you?

Maybe because my “love language” is words of affirmation, I treasure words … especially words I hear from God. Sometimes His words are those that “jump off the page of Scripture.” Sometimes they are words that enter my consciousness, gently or suddenly or in response to a question I barely had time to ask.

But my favorites are those early morning, barely conscious words that come in the stillness. Often these (His) words give me a “heads up” about my day.

I’ve been thinking of my favorite words these days. Some were my “Words for my Year,” like “Himself,” “fullness,” “unfolding,” “Friend.” Some of these and others, I return to long after their year passes.

I’m feeling particularly in need of one of my words these days. Things are getting more and more confusing and stress-filled, with pending “nastiness” and “harshness” and “arrogance” and “divisions” breaking through.

So this is the one I am clinging to with my whole heart and mind — the “simplicity that is in Christ!”

I feel like we Christians make everything about knowing God and living the Christian life so complicated and sometimes, so intense (as if complication and intensity in our culture isn’t enough).

So here is the verse and word I cling to and go back to again and again.

But I fear, lest somehow, as the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness, so your minds may be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ.
2 Cor 11:3 NKJV

So in the days to come, I’ll share my meditations on this beautiful verse and this sweet, rest-producing word that “just finds me” when I need it most.

Thank you, Holy Spirit, for your indwelling tutelage. And teach me afresh, O Living Indwelling WORD, to hear Your Voice and follow You (John 10:27).