The Sentence I Said Myself

The worst thing ever said about you, you said.

Out loud. Once. Probably in company, probably as a joke, and it got a laugh, and you have thought about it since more than anybody who laughed has thought about it once.

That is the sentence. Not the one your brother said. Not the one at school. The one you said, in your own voice, about yourself, in a room with people in it.

And here is why it has outlasted everything anybody else said. When somebody else says a thing, some part of you can resist it, even if quietly, because it came from outside. There is nothing to resist when the source is you. It came in with your own authority behind it, and you have never once questioned a claim you made.

Let me put the plain thing first. You have not been careless with any of this. You have gone at the thing itself for years, in ways nobody has ever seen, and you got up after every attempt. Somebody who did not care would not remember what he said at a table.

So this page is not going to tell you to speak positively. That is a technique and it will not hold.

I want to hand you a verse about who has power over your words, and then I want you to use it in the one direction nobody thinks of.

Why your own sentence went deepest

Consider what makes a self-issued sentence different in kind rather than in degree.

An external sentence has to get past a check. Even a small check. Somebody says a thing and something in you weighs it, however briefly, against what you know. A sentence you say yourself skips the check entirely, because it originated inside the checking apparatus, and no man audits his own testimony.

So it went in without inspection, and it has been sitting in there with your own signature on it.

You have a sentence in you with your own signature on it, and no claim of yours has ever once been audited by anybody. Proverbs 18:21 says death and life are in the power of the tongue, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a proverb about speech operate on something a man said about himself decades ago.

And notice the other reason it has held. You have never retracted it. Anything said about you by somebody else you may eventually decide was wrong. But a man does not usually revisit his own statements about himself, because he assumes he had access to the facts.

You have been treating your own old testimony as reliable, and no man has ever once been a fair witness against himself. The written word says death and life are in the power of the tongue, which makes speech a power rather than a report, and the Spirit of God is the one who separates a power from a fact.

Death and life are in the power of the tongue

Solomon writes it as a statement about capability.

Death and life are in the power of the tongue: and they that love it shall eat the fruit thereof. (Proverbs 18:21, King James Version)

Death and life. Not accuracy and inaccuracy. He is not saying the tongue can be right or wrong. He is saying it carries force, and the force runs in two directions, and both directions are real.

Which means the sentence you said was not a description that happened to be unpleasant. It was an act with power in it.

You were performing an act rather than making a description, and no sentence with force in it has ever once been merely a comment. Proverbs 18 makes the tongue a power rather than a mirror, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that recognition useful rather than frightening.

And read the direction of the good half. Life is in there too, with the same power, from the same mouth. Solomon does not say death is in the power of the tongue and life comes from somewhere else.

You have the other direction available in the same mouth, and no tongue has ever once been given only one of the two. The Spirit of God is the one who makes the second direction usable by a man who has only ever used the first, and the written word says death and life are in the power of the tongue.

Retract it out loud

Now the part I came to say.

Take it back. Out loud. In the same voice you said it in.

That will feel absurd, and the absurdity is the point: it is the exact same absurdity as the original sentence, which also felt like nothing at the time. If the first one had power, the retraction has power, because the power is in the tongue rather than in the seriousness of the occasion.

You have the authority to retract your own word, and no sentence of yours has ever once been beyond taking back. The written word says death and life are in the power of the tongue, which puts both operations in the same place, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a retraction hold where a resolution would not.

And then put something in its place, because a retraction leaves a gap and a gap does not stay empty. Say what God says. Not something positive that you made up. Something He said, which has an authority yours never had.

You are putting something with real authority into the gap, and no word of God's has ever once been outranked by a word of yours. The Spirit of God is the one who makes a replacement hold under pressure, and Proverbs 18:21 is the written word underneath it, where the tongue carries death and life and both of them are in the same power.