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Friday, January 7, 2011

I even wrote "YIKES" in the margin.

I am currently reading three books by Stormie Omartian simultaneously:  The Power of a Praying Woman, The Power of a Praying Life and the Power of a Praying Parent. I don't typically read three things at once but her books lend themselves to this as you can find parts of your life that you need to cover in prayer at a particular moment and skip ahead or move back to that particular chapter. 

Yesterday I was reading a chapter in The Power of a Praying Woman and the author wrote: "We will give account of every idle word in the day of judgment. (Matthew 12:36).  That sentence jumped off the page and slapped me in the face.  I even wrote "YIKES" in the margin.

I am quite certain that in the last 41 years I have spoke many idle words.  But what exactly is idle in this particular translation of the Bible? Maybe there was away out of this judgement.  Maybe I haven't spoken idle words.  What exactly does idle mean?  So I checked other versions of the Bible and this is what other translations listed in place of idle:

careless
thoughtless
foolish
empty
useless
non-working

Once again - yikes!  There is no way out of it.  I will be standing before God with a lifetime of careless, thoughtless, foolish, empty, useless, non-working words for which to account.

At the end of each chapter, the author has written a beautiful scripture based prayer.  I will be adding this one to the long list of things I am currently asking God for help with! 

7 comments:

kim said...

i have many "idle" thoughts/words but I don't think they are all bad. I think in this context it refers to "bad" like when you think bad thoughts or gossip about ppl...just my opinion though. No one can be saying/thinking productive words ALL the time. But you ca try to make those words/thoughts kind and good and not bad so thats what i think.

Mari said...

Yikes, from me too!

Annikke said...

God used you this morning to witness to me....

Yikes is what I said just now too. I have quite a morning and God wanted me to hear this so thanks for posting it!

Jaina said...

This is actually exactly what I needed to read this morning. Thank you Beth. I think I may just have to go buy those books, they sound excellent. Have you read the Mary books? I can't remember the exact titles, but something like Having a Mary Spirit in a Martha World, and a Mary Heart one. They're excellent.

Happy New Year too!

Anna B. said...

Yikes 3...

Kimberly said...

I've read her "Power of a Praying Wife", but I may have to look into "Power of a Praying Parent". Thanks for the idea

Kim said...

"Powerful" Reminder to us all!