[img]1640|left|Arthur Christopher Schaper||no_popup[/img]“I believed; therefore, I have spoken.” (Psalm 116: 10)
Whatever one’s religious affiliation or spiritual inclination, there is something in the power of words.
The world’s greatest-and-still-growing best-seller, the Bible, begins with the Creator speaking Light, earth, lesser lights, and everything else into being. According to rabbinical commentaries, God breathed into man to make him alive, the original language suggests: “God made man a speaking Spirit.”
Even deconstructionists and post-modernists cannot ignore the supernatural origins of “language.” Algerian-French Jew Jacques Derrida described speech and writing as “religious acts” because a common faith and trust must be present for one man to communicate with another.
How It Started
The Gospel of John begins with the Beginning:
“In the Beginnning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
Jesus said:
“Therefore I say unto you, What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them.” (Mark 11: 24)
The key dimension that distinguishes man from the animals, which declares that he was made in the image of God, is that he speaks!
Kenneth Hagin, a powerful preacher who confessed his way by faith into health and wealth, wrote an interesting text: “You Will Have What You Say,” based on his blessed success from Mark 11: 24.
Other famous examples of people who believed and then received:
Born in war-torn Serbia, Novak Djokovic imagined and spoke forth that he would win Wimbledon. He did.
Oprah Winfrey imagined and spoke forth that she was destined for greatness. Oprah wrote to her second grade teacher that she deserved to be in third grade. She was promoted on the spot. Nothing stopped her from then on.
And then there was Ronald Wilson Reagan.
Ronnie grew up in an alcoholic home in Tampico, IL. Some of his closest friends said that his abusive upbringing taught him to ignore reality, to deny the hurt and evil he had endured as a child. A B-list actor in an A-list world, he did his first-class best. When roles diminished, his notoriety increased, first as spokesman for General Electric, then as President of the Screen Actors Guild. He won the California governor’s mansion in 1966. The Presidential favorite in 1968, Reagan witnessed party leaders coalesce around next-in-line Richard Nixon. Although the 1968 convention chanted “Nixon’s the one,” conservative supporters believed that Reagan should have won.
The Reagan Philosophy
The governor refused to acknowledge his 1968 run for President. Reagan was not living in denial. He refused to be defined by his failures. When a man believes something, he does not wallow in the past, does not dwell on losses.
He keeps speaking forth what he believes. Reagan would run again for President in 1976, the conservative favorite against the moderate incumbent Gerald R. Ford. Despite losing the nomination a second time, he wowed the GOP convention crowds. In their hearts, they believed “Reagan was the one.”
In 1980, “I paid for this microphone,” Reagan said, and he won the nomination. “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” he asked. Now Reagan was the one who won. He had campaigned for years. Goldwater’s 1964 loss became the Reagan win of 1980. Yet Dutch spoke forth a future deeper than his victory, one in which the world would be victorious over Communism.
Plumbing Reagan
An often-overlooked 1967 interview with New York Sen. Robert Kennedy outlines his deep-set hope:
Reagan is on record as having called for the Berlin Wall to be dismantled as early as May 1967, when, as governor of California, he appeared in a debate with Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, D-N.Y.
“Reagan was way ahead of everyone,” Kengor told Cybercast News Service in an interview. “Right from the outset, he envisioned a world without the Soviet Union, when even his political allies on the right pre-supposed it would be around for a long time.” (NewsMax.com – Reagan Repeatedly Pressed Soviets to Demolish Berlin Wall)
The key word from the column’s headline describes Reagan’s faith: Repeatedly, not as a formula but as a matter of being, a truth to be revealed in its proper time. Not just in 1967, not just at the GOP convention in 1968, but throughout his campaigning until he reached the White House and beyond. Reagan enthusiasts, Cold War historians, and anyone else alive and thriving in the 1980s will remember June 12, 1987. To the embattled yet pragmatic Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, Reagan boldly exhorted:
“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”
February 1988, the President demanded a timetable for dismantling the wall. Still the Soviet Politburo refused to listen. Reagan stepped down from office in January 1989. Nov. 9, 1989: The Germans clamored, clambered up, and danced on the Berlin Wall. Chunks and then entire slabs broke away. Germany, East and West, was connected once again. The wall came tumbling down. Sept. 20, 1990, former President Reagan, with grim determination, chiseled away a chunk of the wall.
What Reagan believed, he had spoken long before. The Wall was no more.
What do you believe? Have you spoken it? Believe, and say so!
Arthur Christopher Schaper is a writer and blogger on issues both timeless and timely; political, cultural, and eternal. A lifelong resident of Southern California, he currently lives in Torrance. He may be contacted at arthurschaper@hotmail.com, aschaper1.blogspot.com and at asheisministries.blogspot.com. Also see waxmanwatch.blogspot.com
