Jul | 10 | Framing Butterflies For Feeble Knees

Key Word:- HOPE

Title:- Framing Butterflies for Feeble Knees

Job 4:4 Your words have upheld him who was stumbling, And you have strengthened the feeble knees;

Our opening text today is spoken to Job by his 'friend' Eliphaz the Temanite. The spoken words appear to be true and should have encouraged the beleaguered and plagued Job deep in his spirit. Unfortunately they were but a mere pre-amble to some harsh and judgmental words that followed. Job's friend would become an Elephant of a Termite and walk all over Job's already sad and sickened soul, eat at his heart and bring down his house upon his now enfeebled little head.

Words are powerful things friends, they are either solid and foundational, slow and steady in building, or fast and swinging like a wreckers ball, filling lives with devastation and dust; Yes sir, words are as sweet as honey or as bitter and repugnant as rancid butter.

Despite nursery rhymes that tell of words that “Never hurt us,” we all know by experience the power of words, of even a single word! In a greater respect we also need to recognise the awesome and awful fact that words also breed. You see, when they depart our mouths, they spread their wings and enter the body through the ears and lay their eggs in the heart. The way those words are spoken, or maybe even received, means that years later, when the larvae eventually burrow up and leave, they either emerge as ravaging locusts that eat us away from the inside, or as beautiful butterflies, that visit each memory of our mind and mend the weeping hurts of many a present distress. Did you know friends as well that words, especially final words, last words, are words that haunt people?

Many of you have spoken some words to loved ones that you wish you could take back. I say to you, “You cannot!” However in the coming years you can so overwhelm the ones you have hurt, with words of such winged beauty that in time, the butterfly shall overwhelm the locust! If it is too late, if death has made the distance too far for your words to travel, then dear friend, repent and make your peace with God. Such repentance will turn your own horrid haunting to repentant regret and in time, Jesus Himself may reveal to you some of the loving and living power of other words you had spoken to those now departed, good words, powerful words, that you had spoken to them and had forgotten about. Yes, God can take the smallest smile in any word and turn it into a firefly in a loved one’s darkness. God is gracious, more than we can ever realize. Do not be destroyed by the haunting of your past horrible words to folk now gone.

So, may I encourage you today to begin collecting your words as framed pictures. Words that encapsulate pictures of what could be. Invest time, love, compassion and genuine care in the words you speak. Make them like apples of gold in frames of silver and deliver them packaged with a prepared possibility, even to those who yet do want to receive them. Life has taught me, that in time all words turn to pictures and either in rooms of regret, or halls of happiness, they are eventually unwrapped examined and held to the heart, before being hung on our inner walls as a perpetual reminder of the good or evil wished upon us or observed within us. Today my friend, fondly frame the fluttering butterfly.

Listen:- Your words were found, and I ate them, And Your word was to me the joy and rejoicing of my heart; Jeremiah 15:16

Pray:- Oh God in my mouth lays an unruly evil and a world of fire, even a flask of dripping poison! Oh Lord, tame my tongue, remove its whipping ways and make it like a lover's hand. In Jesus name I beg it, amen.