“Change Your Words, Change Your Life”

"Change Your Words, Change Your Life"

Never in the history of the world have words been so cheap, quick, irrevocable, and viral. Through cell phones and the Internet, we now have texting, e-mail, instant messaging, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. In addition, we have radio, television, and printed media. Words are flying around in the atmosphere like never before. As of June 2010, 77.2 percent of all Americans use the Internet (267 million people). One quarter of the world’s population is online. Forty- one percent of all Americans actively maintain a profile page on Facebook, which generates one billion pieces of content every single day. U.S. awareness of Twitter has exploded from 5 percent in 2008 to 87 percent in 2010, and by now the figures are even greater. In 2010, more than 17 million Americans used Twitter and the average number of “tweets” per day in the United States alone was 15.5 million.

Obviously, there are good uses of all these forms of communication; however, there are many disturbing consequences, including online bullying that has led to teenage suicide, identity theft, child safety risk, pornography addiction, and ruined careers. Job applicants lose out because of Facebook accounts of bad behavior; workers send ill-advised e-mails before thinking. People have destroyed relationships by typing their most secret thoughts in e-mail and then pressing Send before realizing how revealing the message was. Owing to the information available today, personal privacy has all but vanished. Sadly, anyone can say anything about an individual— whether it is true or not—and it is out there floating around in cyberspace just waiting for someone to access the information.

People’s reputations have been destroyed by what others have said and yet their words held no truth at all. You might say that we have a “word explosion” going on, and we have yet to see what damage will be caused by it unless people learn the power of words and make a commitment to use them in a godly way.

This is an excerpt from CHANGE YOUR WORDS, CHANGE YOUR LIFE by Joyce Meyer. Copyright © 2012 by Joyce Meyer. Reprinted by permission of FaithWords. All rights reserved.