Journeying through history, Sharon recounts the resurrection of the Hebrew language, demonstrating the power of determined individuals like Eliezer Ben Yehuda and God’s divine prophecy. As listeners learn about the miraculous return of Hebrew, they are encouraged to apply similar perseverance and faith in their daily lives, speaking the language of creation and possibility amidst challenges to manifest God’s promises.
Greetings, friends and new listeners, and welcome to The Sound of Faith. I’m Sharon Otts. Thank you for joining us today because we know faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God. Today’s message, The Language of God, is a captivating recital of the creative power of God’s spoken Word. We are told in Hebrews 11.3 that the worlds were framed by the Word of God. And in Hebrews 1, 3, we’re told they are upheld by the word of God. In both verses, word in Greek is rhema, which is the spoken word of God. This opens up a vista of revelation from creation to the spirit of faith that believers speak in the language of God. And when we believe, when someone believes, they might not even know how to pray a sinner’s prayer. The Holy Spirit can convict their heart and they don’t know. Here’s what you got to say. They just say, Lord, help me. Lord, save me. Amen. Like my dad’s testimony, he said when the Spirit of the Lord came to him sitting in the living room all by himself at midnight, and he heard something in his spirit say, Son, why don’t you repent? He said, I’m not sure what it means, but I repent. Amen? You have to believe. You must believe. And it’s the only way that it’s going to happen. So I’ve already quoted Romans 10, 17. So then faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God. I’ve already told you that comes is present tense. It means keeps on coming. Keeps on coming. Faith keeps on coming. I love that God gives us the initial measure, but it keeps on coming when I keep on hearing. Amen. It keeps on coming when I keep on hearing and hearing the Word of God. Amen? So then faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God. You know that by there, by, that little preposition that, you know, who cares about a little preposition by? Well, I do. Let me tell you why. Because in the Greek, it’s the word ek, E-K. We bring it over into the English as x. You see that sign there? It says exit. It means out of it. Out of it you go. You go out of it. Amen? So now bring it into this verse. Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God. Faith comes out of it. out of hearing the word of God. Amen? And let me tell you this, I can’t forget about this little nugget. In this particular verse, Romans 10, 17, faith comes by hearing the word of God. Word is rhema. Rhema, spoken word of God. Of course it’s rhema. Why wouldn’t it be? We’re hearing it. That’s why you need to come to church. And hear the word of God. In addition to your own reading the word of God. In your own devotional and study time. You need to hear the word of God. Amen. Because the hearing of the word of God. God built it that way. He made it that way. So that when you hear it. It generates faith. Why? Because within the word of God is God’s own faith. The faith by which he created everything. He put his own faith in there. And I so much want to go to this, an example of Jesus, but I don’t have enough time to develop it, so I won’t go there. But I’ll just give you a little tiny clue that there was a place where Jesus said to the disciples, have the faith of God. And it was a tremendous lesson on speaking faith. Have the faith of God. In other words, have God’s kind of faith. Amen. and it comes by hearing the word of God. So faith is the language of God. God believed his own word when he said, light be. He believed it would happen, and it did. And when you hear it, that faith comes. That’s why I’m here this morning preaching this so that you can hear it, so that you can believe it, so that you can speak it. And if you think you’ve told me so much stuff, my brain is going round and round and I can’t remember half of it, which I understand because I spent hours putting this together and I’m giving it to you in an hour or less. Well, you can always get the CD and keep hearing it and hearing it and hearing it. So we’ve got to continually hear the word of God and we’ve got to continue to speak God’s word over our lives. We do it when we pray, when we pray faithful prayers. When you pray prayers where you go through the whole history of every bad thing that’s happened to you, you can get up and feel worse afterwards than when you started. How many understand what I just said? You know, it’s okay. You’ve got to be specific in your request. And you have to tell the Lord exactly what you’re requesting. So you have to give him the gist of what you’re requesting and be specific. But when you go on and on about how it made you feel and how you feel right now and you don’t know about this and that, you actually pray doubt. And you can feel worse afterwards. So we continue to speak God’s word over our lives when we pray. When we sing songs with good words in them. Amen. With good words in them. I’m picky about some of my songs. You know, I have to be because I like the songs that have God’s word in them. You know, I’m not saying that you only can sing out of a hymn book that was written in the 1800s. I’m not saying that. But I’m going to tell you, if you look at the words of the songs that were written back in the day, they’re full of scripture. You wouldn’t even have to own a Bible and you could read some of those hymns and get saved. Amen? So, a lot of songs today, you have to listen to over half of it before you figure out if it’s a Christian song. You’re waiting to hear something about God or Jesus. Amen? If the songs are always focused on the singer and the person, what they feel, how they feel, how bad I am. Oh, it was terrible. You know, you’d say that, but then let’s move on to the good part. Let’s get to the part of victory. Let’s get to the part where we glorify God. Amen. Every praise is to our God. God, my healer. God, my savior. God, my redeemer. Amen. We can pray God’s word over our life and we can sing God’s word over our life. And hey, one of my favorite ways is to quote it to the devil. I don’t have to tell God what he said in his word. He knows. But boy, do I like to tell the devil. Amen. I like to remind him. So it’s the language of creation. When Moses wrote the creation account, he wrote it in Hebrew. How many know that the book of Genesis was written in Hebrew? It is the language of creation. It is the language that God spoke to his prophets. You know, I find it interesting. Let me just throw this out there. Remember when Paul was accosted by Jesus on the road of Damascus and he fell off his horse and was blinded and Jesus spoke to him out of heaven? Paul made it a particular note to say he spoke to me in Hebrew. I don’t know why, but that catches my attention because everything that Paul wrote, he wrote in Greek. He was a Greek scholar of high esteem. Amen. But he said he spoke to me in Hebrew. It’s like Jesus says, I’m getting down here personal with you, Paul. I’m going to talk to you in the language of creation, the language of the Bible. Now, you know that Israel. Because of all their disobedience, they were always going into exile, into bondage. And their last great bondage was to Rome, which was happening in the time of Jesus Christ. And we know that Jesus prophesied and said, oh, you see this great, wonderful temple and you see all this beauty. He said, I’m telling you, not one stone will be left upon another. And his disciples said, oh, Jesus, wait a minute. What are you talking about? Not one stone will be left upon another. Why, it took Herod 46 years to build this temple. Look how great it is. And Jesus said, that’s what I’m telling you. There won’t be one stone left upon another. And it was only 40 years after Jesus’ death that it came to pass when one of the Roman emperors came in there and had sent his general, Titus, and they destroyed the temple. They destroyed it, set it on fire. They destroyed the city. They took a lot of Jews captive. And the ones that didn’t get captive were scared and ran and they were dispersed. They ran clear out of not just Jerusalem, They ran out of Israel and Judea. And they ran and were dispersed all over Europe. Even out into the east. The eastern nations. That’s why that you will find in a lot of nations where you wouldn’t expect it. You’ll find enclaves of people that follow the Jewish faith. They have found people in Africa that are honoring and going by the Jewish faith because they were dispersed in all these places. Amen. Even as far as China. So they were dispersed. The nation was dead. The nation died and the language died. The Jews were scattered. All of these nations, they begin to speak the language wherever they were dispersed. If they were dispersed throughout Europe, then they were speaking the languages of Europe. Amen. And Hebrew essentially died. It became a dead language. You know, like Latin is dead today. Although the doctors still use it sometimes in their medical practices. And they learned the Latin names of, you know, all of the sign stuff. But the language is dead. Well, Hebrew was dead. It was essentially dead. But God prophesied through his prophet Zephaniah. In Zephaniah 3.9. And he said that he would return to the people. a pure language that they may call upon the name of the lord to serve him with one consent now these people are scattered all over the place and god said that when he brought them back together it one there’s going to be a time and you can read you know all the prophets jeremiah isaiah they all tell about when the jews will be regathered that when they would that god would return to them a pure language Well in 1948, miraculously, Israel became a nation. And the Jews began to return from all over the world. By then, of course, the new world was discovered. There were Jews as far away as Argentina down in South America. Many Jews, of course, in America and Canada and all over the world, the Jews began to come back to Israel. And do you know that when they were returning to Israel that they spoke 66 different languages? So how are they going to become a cohesive nation? Speaking 66 languages. How many know that’s not going to happen? We see a lot of things today printed in English and Spanish, but what if everything had to be printed in 66 languages? You go to the airport and you’re trying to read where you’re, you’re supposed to be doing, and you got to find your language in 66 languages. Amen. So God knew that that wasn’t going to work, but he had been preparing for their return by the resurrection of the Hebrew language. After 2000 years, never has it happened. It is unheard of. It’s incredible that after 2000 years, a dead language would be resurrected to be spoken by a nation. But in 1881, a Lithuanian Jew named Eliezer ben Yehuda emigrated to Jerusalem, and he had a burning desire for Hebrew to be resurrected. Now, 1881, Israel was not a nation, and nobody at that point was really trying to let them be a nation. They were still under their Turkish Ottoman Empire. And I don’t want to get too technical, but that’s what’s happening right now that we’re having that problem with Turkey. Turkey’s wanting to… bring their empire back. Amen. So in 1881, he emigrated to Israel, but he had this desire. God had to put it in his heart to resurrect the Hebrew language. But the language has been dead for 2000 years and nobody but nobody speaks it. So he decided that he was going to create a dictionary with every Hebrew word in it. But by now, after 2000 years, he’s got to invent new words. Because it took him 40 years to do it. He’s got to invent a word for airplane and automobile and ice cream and so on. Amen. And so what he did was he made it a law that in his home. that they would only speak Hebrew in their home. The wife could only speak Hebrew. And the children that were born could only speak Hebrew to them. Now, when they go outside, they’re speaking all kinds of different languages. But in the home, he said, even the dog, you can only speak Hebrew to the dog. That’s what he said. And his wife was from Russia. So she spoke Russian and he’s from Lithuanian and he spoke Lithuanian. Now they must have understood each other’s language, but he said, we’re not speaking that anymore. No Lithuanian and no Russian, only Hebrew. She’s a housewife with five kids and you got to only speak Hebrew. He came home one day and she was singing a lullaby to the baby in Russian and he jumped all over her. He scolded her and said, I told you nothing is to be said in this house but Hebrew. Now this man Eliezer was diagnosed with tuberculosis when he was only 23 years old and his wife died of tuberculosis after only 10 years of marriage and five children. But six months later he married her sister. Now that is part of the Jewish culture. Don’t be thinking they had something going on. That’s not how that worked. It worked and it worked the other way too. If a woman’s husband died, and this is in the law of Moses, if a woman’s husband died and he had an unmarried brother, the unmarried brother would have to marry her. And so in this case, He married the sister. Now the sister had good health and she outlived him. She turned out to be a great helper. She traveled raising money. It took money for him to get this dictionary published. And they were dirt poor. I mean dirt poor. This was before it was a nation. They were poor. And she would go and raise money so that he could get these works published. He worked 19 hours a day for 40 years. He would take trips to travel throughout Europe to the great libraries so that he could try to trace the roots of Hebrew words. His dictionary ended up being 17 volumes. And I don’t mean a little book like this. I mean, huge volumes because he not only got all these Hebrew words, he would give you what they meant in other languages, in French, in German, et cetera. He would give you the etymology of the word, how it was used in certain ways. I mean, it was brilliant work. Some of the volumes did not get published until after his death. But during these years when he was doing this, people thought he was crazy. They said, you are crazy making your wife and your children only speak Hebrew. One time, one of his sons, Ben Zion, he named him son of Zion, was beat up by a bunch of kids because he was speaking Hebrew. They beat him up. People thought he was nuts, making them only speak and learn Hebrew. The super wealthy Rothschild Jewish family, and you’ve heard of the Rothschilds. The super wealthy Rothschild family did not like him teaching Hebrew. He said no. He wanted French to be taught to children in schools. But Eliezer Ben Yehuda persevered, writing and speaking the Hebrew language, the language of creation, the language of the Bible. It was said to him, it’s impossible. It will never happen. But he spoke Hebrew. His two wives spoke Hebrew. Their children spoke Hebrew. And today, millions of Jewish people living in the nation of Israel all speak Hebrew. Now why did I tell you that? Because this is what you and I must do. No matter what other people are speaking around us, we’ve got to speak the language of faith. We’ve got to speak what God’s Word says. When other people are speaking a whole other language, a language of doubt and fear and unbelief and what the world says, and a language of hatred and violence and racism, and all of these things, we’ve got to speak the language of faith, the language of creation, the language that God spoke when He created all things. Amen. We got to read it. Yes, we’ve got to study it. Yes, but we’ve also got to speak it because his word contains his faith. And just like God spoke and brought light where there was darkness, we can bring light where there’s darkness. Speaking God’s word, we can bring faith when there’s fear. Have you ever talked to a person that fear was so palpable you could see it on their face? That’s when you need to speak the language of faith. People that feel hopeless and in despair, we speak hope. We speak miracles into the impossible, but we’ve got to believe them in our heart. Last scripture, Hebrews 10, 23, let us hold fast the profession of our faith without wavering for he is faithful that promised. The word profession is also often translated in your English Bible confession. But I don’t care about the English. I want to tell you about the Greek. It’s two words. The first word is homo. H-O-M-O. The second word is lagia. Word. You put… Homo meaning same. And Lagia meaning word together. And you say the same word that God says. That’s what you say. The same word that God said in his word. Amen. Whatever he said in this word is what I’m going to say. And I’m going to do it without wavering. Without being moved and tossed to and fro. Amen. And when we agree with what God said in his word, because we believe it, we agree with it, there’s only one thing left to do. And that’s to speak it. Whether you pray it, whether you testify it, whether you preach a sermon to yourself riding down the road. How many have ever done that? Open your mouth and say the same thing that God says. Amen. Because God’s word contains the creative power in his word. And not only that, in a supernatural way, it increases your faith. Amen? So whatever you need today, there’s a scripture or scriptures that speak to your need. And you need to dig them out. When I was really going through the really bad time of my back, I had them… taped all over my bathroom wall so that when I was sitting in the bathroom, that wall was right in front of me and I read them. And if I said it once a day, I exaggerate not, I said dozens of times a day, I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. Amen. Because I was so immobile that I was very little that I could do. So if I got in the car, I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. I got out of the car. I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. Amen? It became second nature to me. I was saying it all the time. And that’s what God wants us to do. So can we stand together this morning? Amen. So I can pray with you and for you. But when you leave out that door or this door, I’m not going with you. You’ve got to take the word with you. Amen. You’ve got to keep hearing it and hearing it and hearing it. Amen. Because the devil will come and try to steal it off of you. But you’ve got to keep hearing it and hearing it. Amen. What an engaging word of the Lord, the language of God. God had so much faith in his own word that he literally spoke the worlds into creation, according to Hebrews 11, 3. And all these millennia later, every one of them remain exactly where he put them by that same spoken word. Hebrews 1, 3 says they are upheld by his spoken word. The Greek word rhema has had much attention in Christian teaching, but some have been disappointed. They spoke what they thought was faith, but did not see the desired results. Everyone who has received the spirit of faith will believe and will speak. Paul said in 2 Corinthians 4.13, I believe and therefore I have spoken. It is possible to speak the word of God and not believe, but it is impossible to believe and not speak. This is the law of faith. When it believes God’s word, it speaks. And God’s word is alive and active, creative and powerful. When God says something, it will come to pass if it only requires his faith in his own word. Amen. Amen. Amen. Within the seed of his word is his faith, and his faith speaks. When we have it, we also speak. And we profess, Paul said in Hebrews, we say the same thing that God said in his word. The Language of God can be ordered on CD for a love gift of $10 or more for the radio ministry. Request SK214. Mail to Sound of Faith, P.O. Box 1744, Baltimore, Maryland, 21203. Or go online to soundoffaith.org to order on CD or MP3s. But to order by mail, send your minimum love gift of $10 to P.O. Box 1744, Baltimore, Maryland, 21203. Request SK214. If you’re able to, please tuck in an extra love gift to help us to continue Sound of Faith Ministries during these unprecedented difficult times of COVID-19 and the unrest in our nation. We would really appreciate your support. We are now live streaming Sunday mornings at 11 o’clock on YouTube. Go to Sound of Faith Ministries. Till next time, this is Sharon Knott saying, Maranatha.
