Just Say The Word

"Just Say The Word"

Luke 7:1-10

How many of you think you have the power to heal another person?

(Assuming none raise their hands). Why is that?  You'd think at least one or two might say they had such a power, such an ability.

What I want to try and do this morning is convince you that all of you have the power to heal.  You all underestimate yourselves and what you think you can do, under God's leading and power.  So, are you ready for this?

First, let's look at the Centurion in this story.  Here is a person of power and authority.  Because he's been in the circles of power so long, he's also skilled in recognizing other forms of power and authority.  He knows it when he sees it.

So what does the Centurion recognize in terms of Jesus' power?  What he perceives in Jesus is the power of his spoken words.  Or maybe, more accurately, the power behind Jesus' spoken words.  Words can be spoken, but they may be lacking the power behind them that has the ability to heal.

Proverbs 16:24 states, "Kind words are like honey--they cheer you up and make you feel strong." Another version says that kind words are "sweet to the soul and healing to the bones."  There's a Japanese saying, "One kind word can warm up three months of Winter."

Here's the pivotal phrase spoken by the Centurion:  "Just say the word, and my servant will get well."  All's you have to do is say the word, Jesus, and the power of that word--the power behind that word--will do the rest.  But, what's the word?  What's the word the Centurion wants to hear from Jesus?  "Yes, your servant is healed.". Or, "Go; it is done." Or, "Yes, so be it".  "Just say the word."

Are you able to speak such words?  Maybe not on your own.  That is, not without the Power that was also behind Jesus' words.  With the power of God--which is ultimately the love of God--we can speak a word that will have impact, and believe it or not, can heal.  There may be people who are sending us the message, maybe from a distance (or we to them), "Just say the word."

I want to share some words with you, that if you speak them with the Power of the Lord behind them, have the ability to heal others.

Here's the first word:  "I'm sorry."  How hard it is to say this word some times.  It is the truth that it is only the power of God that makes this word heal.  Spoken insincerely, spoken flippantly, spoken without God in it, there is no healing.  It is only a word.  But when it is spoken with God in it, what healing can take place.

Saying you are sorry is a leveler.  What has happened is some kind of awful imbalance in your relationship with another.  There's a power game going on in which one is trying to, in a sick or hurtful way, exert power over another.

At one time, J. Paul Getty was one of the richest men in the world.  He went into a Neiman-Marcus store and bought some clothes, but refused to pay the delivery charges.  "So," reported one of the stores founders, Stanley Marcus, "when I was in California, some time later, I bought gas at a Getty oil company station, but refused to pay the tax.  Instead, I gave the attendant my business card and told him to bill Getty personally.  'Tell Getty that Stanley Marcus has gotten even,' I said."

As this example shows, most of the power plays in relationships are really petty and small.  All's it would take would be the good word of, "I'm sorry" and everything would be taken care of before escalation happens.

When instances of hurt happen, the outcome can be much sadder.  A father and his son had had an argument, that escalated out of control.  In the heat of the moment, the father told his son to get his clothes and leave home.  The son gathered some of his stuff together and walked out the door.  In the years that followed, the family often wondered what happened to their son.  They hoped that one day he might come back, but he never did.

One night the pastor was visiting in the home and the mother asked if he would participate in a ritual they performed every night.  Then she stepped out the front door and put the door key under the mat.  She explained that when the boy was living at home, they always left the key under the mat so he could get in.  "Now," she said, "if he should come back some night wondering whether we want him back, all he would have to do would be to look under the mat and see the key and know he was welcome."

The pastor wanted to say, "How much more healing and powerful it would have been, if the father could have just said, "I'm sorry," brought restoration to the relationship, and the son would have never left in the first place."

Like I said, saying "I'm sorry" levels the the imbalance that's been created by the petty power play or the hurt.  When "I'm sorry" is said, each can regain equal footing.  Restoration of the relationship can happen.

But the power behind the "I'm sorry" must be a God-infused sincerity.   Some say, "I'm sorry" so often, it's not taken seriously.   They keep being power petty, or keep being hurtful, keep saying, "I'm sorry" but nothing ever changes.  Or someone pushes another to say, "I'm sorry," so that when it comes, it feels forced rather than sincere. God's power, in God's good words, are about change, and creating deep change in a person's heart.

Spoken in God's way, from a heart changed by God, the word, "I'm sorry" can bring so much healing to hurt and pettiness.  "Just say the word."

The second word that you can say, that will be able to heal, is, "I love you".  You probably guessed this one when you saw where I was going with this message.  This is probably the most powerfully healing word that can be spoken, but is done so seldom.  Singer Lena Horne, in an interview one time said, "My mother was either cold as ice or she couldn't do without me.  I couldn't stand her.  I wanted very much for her to love me.  But to the day she died she never told me."

We may think that the opposite of love is hate.  That when we tell someone we love them, that we are curing the disease of hatred.  But in the Lena Horne quote I just shared, her mother probably didn't hate her.  Instead, it may have been a cold indifference that caused Horne to say about her mother, "I couldn't stand her".  As playwright George Bernard Shaw once said, "The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them; that's the essence of inhumanity".

To be indifferent is to treat someone you know as if they were of no importance.  None.  That their existence is not going to effect you one bit.  It's to treat someone you know as if you have no concern about them at all.  That is the opposite of love.  It's making others invisible to you.

One of the biggest sicknesses of American society right now is it is a society where people are used but not loved.  A strong, self-reliant kind of man, who didn't very often express his emotions, had to rush his wife to the hospital with a ruptured appendix.  The operation was a success, but the woman's condition deteriorated from the fairly simple procedure.  Despite a blood transfusion and intensive care, she continued to lose strength.  The doctors were puzzled because by all medical standards she should have been recovering.

They finally were convinced of the reason for her deterioration:  she was not trying to get well.  The surgeon, a long time family friend, went to her and said, "I would think you would want to be strong for John."

She replied, weakly, "John is so strong, he doesn't need anybody."

When the doctor told the husband what she had said, he immediately went into his wife's room, took her hand and said, "You've got to get well!"

Without opening her eyes, she asked, "Why?"

He said, "Because I couldn't live without you."

The nurse who had come in to check vitals on the monitor, noticed an immediate change in pulse and blood pressure.  The wife opened her eyes and said, "John, that's the first time you ever said that to me".  A couple of days later she was home.

When someone is in the grips of the sickness of feeling used for what they do, rather than loved for who they are, then there is the need to hear the healing word, "I love you".  To be able to say, "I love you," heals the feelings of living in a void, of feeling like you live in a society of relationships where everyone takes, but no one gives, to live feeling faceless--until someone needs something from you.

In one of the most profound fortune cookies, I got a fortune that read, "'Tis wisely put--exchange the love of power for the power of love".  The truth behind this fortune cookie quip is that the love of power makes people things.  The power of love makes people human beings.

The power of this kind of love is the power of God--who is, as the letter of John tells us in the Bible, love.  God is love.  To share the power of love with someone is to share the very person of God with that person.  This kind of love has the power to create personal dignity and identity, rather than creating puppets as our slaves or playthings.

How many people in your life need to be healed by this word, "I love you"?  Or maybe for your own healing, to hear this word from someone else.  Just say the word.

Here is the third and last word that you can say that will heal another:  "Way to go!"   Think of all the negative messages we receive that all carry the theme that some how we just don't measure up.  But most of all, how many of those negative messages get flipped off our tongues to or about others?

Christian author Joyce Landorf has written a book titled, Irregular People.  In the introduction to the book, Landorf highlighted some of the irregular people she has known.  She wrote about one:

There were the irregular parents who never attended any of their daughter's swim meets while she was in competition.  They were blind to the fact that she broke all the swimming records, in every event, her first year of high school.  Later, as a senior, she became the secretary of both her class and the student body, but at no time would either parent acknowledge her accomplishments.

She said of that time, "I tried so hard to make my parents see that I was good".  Then, when she had won the title of homecoming queen her senior year, she recalled thinking, Now they'll be proud of me!  But again, out of blindness, her mother's only cryptic comment was, "I guess it pays to be cheap with the boys".  Receiving no affirmation or approval from her parents wreaked havoc in this young girl's heart.  She eventually worked through this, but as a teenager she could not understand the blindness of her irregular parents.

The trouble is, there are varying shades of affirmation.  Sometimes it looks like affirmation, but is just a transfigured slap.  Negative statements may not be so blatant.  They may be along the lines of, "You're OK, but..." Or there are plastic complements.  Those are the kinds of complements that start out feeling good but end up making us feel fake and hollow.  Such as saying something like, "That looks nice considering you made it". 

We all want to do well in other people's eyes and be affirmed for doing something well, or for some admirable quality in us.  We want that so badly, at times, we are more hard on ourselves than others are on us.

Walt Disney seldom surveyed his animator's work while they were creating.  He understood the fragile nature of the creative process, and he wouldn't intrude.  But there was nothing to stop him after his animators left for the day.  Walt's nighttime visits to the offices became legendary, and animators often left their best work on the drawing table overnight, anticipating that Walt would inspect it.  But sometimes they arrived in the morning to find crumpled sheets of paper rescued from wastebaskets and pinned on a story board with the notation in Walt Disney's unmistakable handwriting, "Quit throwing the good stuff away."

There is a great sickness in our society that can be healed with a word that contains the message, "Way to go!". There is such a need for sincere affirmation, encouragement and compliments.  In a world that can be a place of pummeling degradation and negative messages, imagine the power the words of positive affirmation can have.  Just say the word.

I have mentioned just three words you can say that hold within them the power of healing.  I'm sorry.  I love you.  Way to go.  There is this wonderful symbiotic relationship that God has created between the ones who need to hear such words, and the ones who can utter them.  Luciano De Crescenzo put it best, I think:  "We are each of us angels with only one wing.  And we can only fly embracing each other".

The power of God is the ability to make each other fly through encouragement, love and being sorry for things we've done.  Imagine all of us walking around, still half winged angels, heads hanging low.  God is looking down on such a scene hoping and desiring that two of us would just get together and say one of these great words to each other, and then watch the embrace and flight that then happens.

I'll close with this poem:

Oh, that my tongue might so possess

The accent of His tenderness

That every word I breathe should bless.

For those who mourn, a word of cheer;

A word of hope for those who fear;

And love to all both far or near.

Oh, that it might be said of me,

"Surely thy speech betrayeth thee

As friend of Christ of Galilee!"