Day 13: 2 Kings 19:6

"[Isaiah] said to them 'Tell your master this: the Lord says 'Don't be afraid of what you have heard. Don't be frightened by the words the servants of the king of Assyria have spoken against me." ~2 Kings 19:6 NCV

Words... they convey meaning greater than their individual power. They mean so much more than just a conglomeration of letters. They can inspire courage. And terror.

There are only certain sets of words that we need to actually bother about - and those are the words of God, and words from God. If God says we need to bother about the words of my leaders, I suppose we need to bother about those words too. But that's not the point. The point is that "threats" need to become empty, as long as they're not spoken from the mouth of God. "You're not good enough," my mind tells me. Well. God says I am "fearfully and wonderfully made." (Psalm 139) Take that!

If it's not from God, I'm not going to listen. I'm just not going to bother. Who cares? "Don't be afraid of what you have heard," the Lord says through Isaiah. "Don't be frightened by the WORDS the servants of the king of Assyria have spoken against me." Here's the background scoop: Good king Hezekiah of Judah has just received threats from the Assyrian king that they are going to raze Israel. The Assyrian king sends a whole letter of all the times he's been successful, listing all of the reasons Hezekiah is going to fail. Hezekiah sends some officials to find Isaiah, a prophet of the times, and he himself goes into the temple and lays out the letter before God. Isaiah tells the officials the above verse.

My Sunday School teachers always made me memorize Bible verses, and for a long time, I thought it was just because they didn't have anything better for me to do. But it turns out that the more of the Bible we have inside of me, the less of anything else is in there. Parents always said "Garbage in, garbage out," as far as thoughts and what we see and put inside our brain goes. But "Bible in," is going to mean, "Bible out." If we've got God's words coming in, if we have them hidden on the inside, we're not going to think negative thoughts. And if we do, we can counter those thoughts with God's words. And as I've already established, we only really need to bother about what God's words are.

Quite a simple conclusion, I suppose. God's thoughts will not inspire fear, they will inspire quite the opposite - confidence. So thinking God's thoughts means we conquer fear. Quite a deduction, wouldn't you say, Watson?