Alabama’s legislature passed the meanest anti-immigration law in the nation. I wrote a letter protesting the spiteful law. An immigration activist asked, “But what are you going to do? Your letter is just words. What about action?”
Paul says that in this faith, it’s never “just words.” Paul led fledgling churches through letters, praising the church at Thessalonica for receiving his words “not as a human word” but as “God’s word” so that these words were “at work in you believers.”
All God had to do to create the world was to say the word. The gospel spread like wildfire throughout the world through witness, letters, and sermons. A couple of centuries after Paul wrote these words, the church defeated the Roman Empire without firing a shot or raising a platoon, all on the basis of a bunch of words called scripture.
Why are you a Christian? Why you are reading these words? I bet that God used words to “work in you”—nonviolent, noncoercive but powerful-in-the-hands-of-God words.
Tomorrow in church, through hymns, scripture reading, prayers, and a sermon, you will hear and speak only words. Be warned: Scripture tells a story of how an active, revealing God seizes these human words to do God’s work in the hearts and minds of people like you. By God’s grace little words like grace, love, go, and invite burrow into your soul; they ignite, push, and prod you to do something beautiful for God. It’s then that you acknowledge Paul’s truth-telling: Just through words, God is “at work in you.”
And by the way, that sorry law was erased without violence or mayhem, with nothing but words.