Can The Words I Speak Shape Someone's Future? | Ryan Kramer

online from wherever you're watching those that are in town for homecoming at FAMU. Hopefully you had a good time yesterday if you're worshiping with us, welcome. But can we also give it up for our Liberty Correctional Campus that's tuning in today and watching with us. I'm excited about next week. Next week is Throwback Sunday. We get an extra hour sleep. But what are you going to, what are you going to wear? What's your favorite decade next year next week? So I looked up the weather and I'm going to dress in whatever decade is, you know, the warmest because for the coldest because it's supposed to be cold again next Sunday and I was like, oh no, I'm so ready for the heat to come back. I know some of you aren't, but I am. Yeah, I'm an 80s guy. So I was thinking about like wearing one of those fanny packs that shows the hairy belly at the bottom. Don't worry, I will approve before he steps up here next week. I was thinking you're going to be like Top Gun or something like that. Well, maybe I got my aviators. So but yeah, let me let me lead in and ask you this. How many of you guys had a nickname when you were growing up? Yeah, yeah. Turn to your neighbor, tell them what your nickname was. And if you're brave enough, tell them tell them why you got that nickname. So my-- I don't know, whoever's laughing over here, I want to know what that name is. So my grandfather gave me a nickname when I was a baby toddler. Bobo was what he nicknamed me. And all the family started calling me Bobo. And I mean, I wore that as a badge of honor for decades. I could never find out what it meant because by the time I got old enough to start asking the questions, he had passed. So I'm asking my family members and they're like, I don't-- we don't know where it came from. We just know that he loved calling you Bobo. And to the point that he was a general contractor in Tampa, and he would, at some of the places that he would build, and they would finish out the parking lots and the concrete, he'd carved my nickname in it, Bobo, you know. And so recently, I just kind of went on this journey of what in the world does Bobo mean. And I was quite surprised by what I discovered because back in the late '70s, early '80s, it was a word that was used to describe like cheap off-brand sneakers. And then as I continued to look, all of my Hispanic people are probably already chuckling, but in Spanish, Bobo means dummy or idiot. And so that was my nickname. Yeah, so I had a family nickname. Everyone calls me Ea, because my name is Andrea. And so my niece is nephews, my sister. They all called me Ea. My brand new grandson, he is going to call me Ea. Actually, I'll answer-- That's our grandson, my husband. He is mine. It is the best thing ever. But when growing up, everybody else in the

church, I'm a preacher's kid. And so for whatever reason, my parents would put this t-shirt on me that says, "Here comes trouble." Yeah. And so I would walk around the church and everybody would be like, "Here comes trouble." And so that became kind of my nickname of trouble. But God has a sense of humor when it comes to what other people call us and what he says over us, because right here right now he put Bobo and trouble over a church. Welcome home. There's something about nicknames if you've noticed that they have a way of sticking with us. And names that we were given when we were younger and kids, right? We got them on the playground or maybe it was from a ball team that we played on or home, whatever it is. And we got these nicknames growing up. And there's just such power in nicknames because, I mean, if you think about it, many of us remember them and there's still some sort of emotional connection, whether it's good or bad. aren't just nicknames that are given to us. Some nicknames are ones that we give ourselves. - Yeah, so we have internal things that we say over ourselves, you're a bad mom, you're a man, you're a hot head, you're a lost cause, you're lazy, you're a husband, you're the third wheel. Those things that are starting to go through our minds that we say over and over about ourselves, and then there are the ones that we hand out to others. I have nicknamed all of my kids, there's nicknames for all of them, it's just because, you know, and they have, you know, honestly, no meaning, I was thinking about this, our youngest journey, for some reason I started calling her Jarny, which made me think of Barney, which made me think of the Dino, and so her nickname literally became Journey to Dino, and then I just start sending her memes of like,

dinosaur, like T-Rexes, that can't like, you know, have the little arms, I don't know, and so we give those names to others, so think about those nicknames that you give to coworkers, to classmates. - Which some might be good. - Some might be good, but some might not. You know, if we have this internal name that we're calling ourselves, what are we saying over other people that we're in contact with every day? - Yeah, and so we've been in this series and the foundational verse that we've been looking at every single week is in Proverbs 18, 21, and it talks about really the weight that is behind some of these names, whether the names that we've received or names that we've given, and it says that the tongue can bring death or life, that those who love it, talk, those that love the talk will reap the consequences. And I was thinking about that verse this week, and you know, it's almost like the Bible is helping us understand that words are like a boomerang, right? A boomerang you throw out and it kind of works its way around and it comes back to you. And you know, our death words, the things that we say, critical words or line words or whatever, like what we had talked about last week, you know, we release those. And what we don't realize is yes, those words go out,

but they come back to us in one way or another. And the good news though about that is so do life words. Like life words, when we begin to release those and other people's lives, they come back and they bless us in our life. And today we're going to dig into four different life words out of the book of Acts as we wrap up this final week of my big fat mouth, which has really been a series where we've been taking a close look at some of the words that we speak because they do biblically, they do have the power to shape our life and the shape the life of others. And so in week one, if you missed that, we talked about why our words matter. So much. And week two, we asked the question, why do we say things that we end up regretting along the way? Has anybody ever said something that they walked away from and they regretted it? And then last week was kind of interesting. It was a heavy word as we looked at some of the death words that we struggle with. And the statement that we kind of threw out that framed last week was we don't have to worship the devil. In order to work for the devil, right? So we talked about last week of turning in your notice. You don't have to give to me, it's time to resign from working for the devil by saying things and being critical in speaking out of his character and personality.

And today we're gonna be looking at life words. And we're gonna look at a guy in the Bible and how the life words that he chose to spoke, how it impacted not just his life, but it impact the life of many others in a powerful way. And so today if you're taking notes, we've entitled the message today, what's your name? What's your name? - Can we pray this morning? Heavenly Father, we thank you for your word and that it is true. And so we ask today, Lord, that you would help us, help us to speak words of life, that they will be words, Lord, that will encourage other people and will see salvation in our families, in our homes, for it. In Jesus' name, amen. So, one of the most famous nicknames in the Bible is a guy by the name of Joseph. But it's not the Joseph that you might be thinking of. We see this Joseph in Acts 4 and in verse 36 it says that there was a Joseph and he was the one that the apostles' nickname Barnabas. My guess is if you grew up in church or you've been following the Lord for a little while, you recognize this person as Barnabas more than you realize that his original name was Joseph. And it says in verse 36 that his nickname Barnabas, which means son of encouragement, that he was from the tribe of Levi and he came from the island of Cyprus and that he sold a field that he owned and he brought the money to the apostles. Now we don't know how Barnabas came to faith. We do know that he was a Levi, which meant that he was a religious person.

We know from this text that he was from the island of Cyprus, which means that he was not in Israel, which means that as a religious person he was around people that weren't necessarily like him. We learned in this passage that he had some land, so there was a sense of having some financial security and he ends up giving that up in order to advance the gospel. But I think what really jumps out to me in this passage is that his name was originally Joseph, but the apostles started calling him Barnabas. Barnabas was his nickname and it was a nickname that was given to him by the apostles because they watched the way that he lived his life. They watched the words that he spoke over people. They watched how he lift people up instead of tearing them down and so they gave him this nickname Barnabas, which meant son of encouragement. Now this week I was like, why didn't they just call him an encourager? Why did they call him son of encouragement? And what I even learned this week is that part of the culture of those days is that if they called him an encourager, then they would be speaking to what he did like an action. And so in those days people would give him the title son of whatever as a way of saying that this is who that person is to the very core of their DNA. It's not just something they do, it's who they are. And so it begs the question, I think that that is a question we've got to wrestle with a little bit this morning and that is like if people gave you a nickname from how they watched you live your life and the words that came out of your mouth, what might that nickname be? And I don't know about you, but I would be just as quiet if I was asked that question. And so what we're going to do is we want to drop into a season of Barnabas' life and we want to pull out four life words that he spoke in this season to a group of people that were beginning to follow Jesus. And so in the book of Acts, it's the infancy of the New Testament church. And we talked last week, it's that period of time where Christians are scattered all over the region because they're experiencing all this persecution.

And the good news though is that as they're being scattered around the region, they are continuing to preach the gospel and to talk to people about Jesus. And so a movement of God begins happening regionally all over the place, but especially in this city called Antioch. The God starts moving in a powerful way. And what ends up happening is the Church of Jerusalem, which was kind of like the mother ship, who was like the mother church, ends up sending their best encourage or Barnabas to go and to really be a blessing and to speak life into this church. So why don't you open up your Bibles, smart phones, And we're gonna start in verse 19. And it says, "Meanwhile, the believers who had been scattered during the persecution after Stephen's death traveled as far as Phoenicia, Cyprus, and Antioch of Syria. They preached the word of God, but only to Jews." Verse 20 says, "However, some of the believers who went to Antioch from Cyprus and Cyrene began preaching to the Gentiles about the Lord Jesus." And so Gentiles, they were just, they were that part of the area that they weren't Jewish. And so there were some believers that only preached to the Jewish church and then there were others that preached to the Gentiles as well. And verse 21 says, "The power of the Lord was with them." Underline that. When they went out to preach to the gospel, the power of the Lord was with them. And a large number of these Gentiles believed and turned to the Lord.

Verse 22, "When the church at Jerusalem heard that what had happened, they sent Barnabas to Antioch. When he arrived and saw this evidence of God's blessing, he was filled with joy. And then what did he do? He encouraged the believers to stay true to the Lord. Barnabas was a good man, I'm sorry, yeah. Barnabas was a good man, full of the Holy Spirit and strong in faith. And many people were brought to the Lord. Verse 25 says, "Then Barnabas went to Tarsus and to look for Saul who became, who was Paul. When he found him, he brought him back to Antioch. Both of them stayed there with the church for a full year, teaching large crowds of people." - Yeah, so let's dig in to look at verse 23 again. And one of the life words that we see Barnabas speak to these new believers are grateful words, grateful words. He says in verse 23 that when he arrived and he saw this evidence of God's blessing that he was filled with joy. Now this would be easy for us to kind of read past and keep going, but you've got to recognize this was Antioch, it was not Jerusalem. Like these are our people, these are new believers that are people that didn't grow up in church, they didn't understand all the custom, keep in mind Barnabas, right? Was a religious person, he was a Levite. And so it would have been super easy for him

to come into this moment of this new church of people that didn't know how to do church and to see all the things that they were doing wrong. Like they had to be, they had to be doing things that were wrong or outside of custom, but God was moving in a powerful way. And one of the things that makes Barnabas such an encourager is when he came in, he didn't focus on what was missing or what he felt was wrong. He focused on what was God doing and he spoke into that. I want to share just a couple verses with you of Philippians chapter two, verse 14. Says do everything. Can you say everything with me? Everything, do everything without. Wait a minute, I, you put this verse in there, didn't you? You put this verse in there. - And I put it on your point now. - Do everything without complaining and arguing. Okay, that's convicting. First Thessalonians 518, be thankful in all, say all. All circumstances, that's the good ones. And the bad ones, be thankful in all circumstances for this is God's will for you who belong to Christ Jesus. I am convinced, not because I'm good at it, I'm convinced that gratitude is a spiritual superpower. That it's a superpower that you and I easily overlook in our life and we wonder why things feel negative and we're frustrated all the time

and could it be because we lack gratitude in our life. Like I used to get, I used to get super annoyed find a parking spot up towards the front and she would thank Jesus for the parking spot. And I'm like, "Why are you thinking Jesus for the parking spot?" It's just an open parking spot, but it was, you know, Andrea was demonstrating what gratefulness looks like. It's waking up in the morning and instead of looking for the things that are wrong or missing, it's looking for the things that are right that God's in. Like thank you, God, for health today. Thank you, God, for a roof over my head, a car to be able to drive. It may not be the Mercedes Benz that I want, but I'm certainly not having to walk 20 miles to work. You know what I mean? It is finding things to be grateful for. The next word that we see there from Barnabas is encouraging words. And look again at verse 23, "When he arrived and saw this evidence of God's blessing, he was filled with joy and he encouraged the believers to stay true to the Lord. He encouraged the believers. We live in a world that is extremely discouraging. And as brothers and sisters in Christ, if anything, Barnabas shows us encourage one another. We don't know what our neighbor is going through. We don't know what the person, maybe we may know some of the person that's sitting next to us what they're walking through, but we don't know everything. And understanding that as believers, we have to encourage one another. Why? Because we are the light, we are the salt of this world. So if we are tearing each other down, well, why do I want to do that? I don't want to do that. I'm too tired. Things are coming against me.

We are to encourage one another. Look at 1 Thessalonians 511. It says encourage one each other and build up each other just as you are already doing. It's not occasional to encourage one another. If you are discouraged, find someone in the Lord that will encourage you. I want to be an encourager. I am so thankful, my precious daughter-in-law, sometimes there are things that we walk through, and so she was talking to my son, and she looked at my son and she said, Jeremiah, just call your mom. She just makes you feel so much better. That's who I want to be. I want to be when people pick up the phone to call me, that they feel better on the other. Not because I spoke my words, but because I encourage them to keep on going. This too will pass. All of us in the room that don't get a lot of phone calls, we know why now. I would be in that category. You know what's interesting about that verse and that word encourage, it's in the original language, the Greek word, it's paraclesis. Some of you that have been in church for a long time, the antenna just went off inside of you because what's so fascinating about this is that the word that is used scripturally to talk about Barnabas and being an encourager is the same root Greek word used in the Bible for the Holy Spirit. It's the same word that Jesus used to describe the Holy Spirit which means to come alongside. And what the Bible is saying is as an encourager, what we are doing when we choose to encourage is we are coming alongside somebody, discouragement pulls the courage out. Encourage puts the courage in and what Barnabas was so good at and I think what we could all use a lesson in is instead of speaking words that pull the courage out of people in a season that they are navigating, what would it look like for us if we started speaking words that put courage back in? Like I don't know about you but there's been times in my life that I have been at the very

bottom of the valley not sure if I could make it through and somebody would come along and speak not the surface level words but the words that went straight to my heart, my circumstances Does it change? I can keep doing it. And I think that's what God is calling us to be a church, to be a group of people that that'll do that. I think when you look at this to check this out, Barnabas encouraged them to stay true to the Lord, right? And here's here's what happened. The very next verse says, "And many people were brought to the Lord." And I do have to say, you know, when you say that the encouragement that He gave them was stay true to the Lord. Stay close to Him. That faith, that faith, those of us that have been saved for years, have been in church for years, we need to remember when we first got saved. When that deliverance happened, when that sin was removed and that new spirit was put inside of us, that faith, that joy, because what happens is we forget the gratitude, we forget to be thankful for what the Lord has brought us through. And the encouragement that Barnabas gave to the people was stay true to the Lord, stay close to the Lord. And then just like Ryan said, the next verse was, "And many people were brought to the Lord." As we encourage one another, do you know what happens? People start getting saved. No, you don't understand. There is a lost and dying world outside of these doors. And as we encourage each other, stay true, hang on, stay true to the Lord, keep your faith in Him. Other people will see what we're walking through and think, why are they so joyful? Why are they able to walk through it? It's because we are encouraging one another and they think, I want some of that because I'm walking through something and I don't have that. And it is our witness. Encouraging one another will bring other people to a saving knowledge of Jesus. Yeah, I wonder if one of the greatest attacks of the enemy is discouragement for believers. And here's the reason why is because God has a calling and a purpose on your life that's beyond your life. That He's called every single one of us to live a life that's on mission, which mission is we're reaching and sharing the gospel of Jesus with other people. And if God or if the enemy can bring discouragement into us to the point to where we disqualify ourselves from being used by God or we begin to walk away, choose to quit, right? He doesn't just destroy our life, but He impacts the lives of all the people that God was going to work through us to minister to. And so encouragement is even more important in these days and times. Like, like what would it look like if the Christians didn't act just like the world and discourage

everything? But what if we started looking at the people around us as sons and daughters of the most high and looked beyond all of our failures and mistakes? Last week, we read the verse says, we all make mistakes and we just began to look past that and started to deposit courage back into people. The third one that we see him do here are affirming words. And in Acts chapter 11, verse 25, and there's a connection that I want to make here, it says, "Then Barnabas went on to Tarsus to look for Saul." Now, that doesn't seem very affirming out of the box, but if you dig a little bit deeper and you understand that a few chapters before this, this Saul guy, like he was, he was persecuting Christians just a couple chapters earlier, like he hated Christians. He was the guy like when we've read the beginning about Stephen being stoned and that's why they were leaving and being persecuted. Paul was one of the guys that gave the okay for Stephen to be stoned. Like Paul or Saul was the guy that would go to believers' houses and drag them out of their houses and take them to prison. But in Acts chapter 9, Saul has this powerful encounter with Jesus and then he ends up taking on this name of Paul. But it radically, to being hunted himself because now he's preaching the gospel. And so what starts happening is he starts experiencing all this persecution as a new believer. And so he goes back to the mothership, right, the mother church in Jerusalem, and here's where the affirming words come in. In Acts chapter 9, verse 26, it says, "When Paul arrived in Jerusalem that he tried to meet with the believers, but they were afraid of him. They did not believe that he had truly become a believer." So in verse 27, "Then Bartibus brought him to the apostles and told them how Saul had seen the Lord on the way to Damascus, and how the Lord had spoken to Saul, that he also told them that Saul had preached boldly in the name of Jesus in Damascus." So like it's this moment where everybody else is seeing Saul for who he was, and Bartibus is stepping in and seeing Saul for who he is becoming. Friend, when we choose the life words of affirming people, we're not defining them anymore by the worst moment in life or a bad day or a bad decision.

Like we're beginning now to declare what God has spoken over them. To the point that we come alongside of them, even when they might not see what God is doing in their life, we come alongside of them and affirm what we see God doing in their life. Friend, affirming words don't ignore somebody's past. They just refuse to let their past have the last word. And church, what if we were those kind of people? Let's look at the fourth. The fourth thing is the sharpening words. So Acts 11, 26 says, "When he found him, when Barnabas found Paul, he brought him back to Antioch. Both of them stayed there with the church for a full year, teaching large crowds of people." Now realize this. They didn't just encourage them and then say, "Well, good luck. See you next year." But they stayed. They taught them. Like a good coach, they trained them. They challenged these new believers. Listen, Barnabas didn't just give sharpening words. He received them too. So we've got to know this as believers. There's a verse in Scripture that says, "Iron sharpens iron." We're going to look at that in just a second. But we can't just be that sharpening word for others and not allow others to speak into our lives. We should all have somebody that can say the hard thing, the sharpening thing and speak that truth in love. Years ago, we were walking through something at our other church

and somebody gave me this nugget of, you know, he said to me, he said, "Andrea, don't take criticism from somebody you wouldn't take advice from." We can't just let everybody speak into our life. But we need to find people that will call us out, that will sharpen us, iron sharpening iron. In Proverbs 27 verse 6, it says, "Wounds from a sincere friend are better than many kisses from an enemy." Ooh, you're doing good. Ooh, you're doing so good. You're doing so good. When you know you're not doing good. But you got somebody next to you on, oh, it's all right. It's okay. It's all right. You're doing amazing, sweetie. You're doing so good. No, we need those people in our lives to be like, "Listen, I understand your reaction, but God has better for us than that." See, there is a way for us to encourage one another and to build up one another without giving excuse to an action. That we can look at somebody and say, "Listen, I know you missed it there." a friend. Years ago, real quick, years ago, we were staff pastors in Deland. And it was a church that my dad was the pastor of, and he went to go somewhere else. Ryan and I ended up staying for an additional two years. We just loved this church. Two of our kids were born in this area. And I remember one day that, you know, when you have a new pastor come in and we're staff and we're like, Oh, you know, you know, JD did it a little different.

My dad did it a little different. And I remember we were standing in the auditorium and it was on a Tuesday or something. And Ryan was just saying something like that. And I stopped him. And I said, listen, is different. But God is called Pastor Clayton to do this. And there were things that we wish my dad would have done differently. And I told him in that moment, I said, if you need, feel like you need to say something, you need to go to him. I was, I was Ryan's wife. And in that moment, I was like, no, if you got it, if you, if you have that in you, babe, you need to go to him. And that's iron sharpening iron. That is me wanting to protect the spirit in my home. That is me wanting to say, babe, there is more in you than you being critical of your boss. There is more in you. Like, like, we've got to be able to allow someone in our life to be like, listen, I understand you're feeling that way. But don't allow the enemy to get a foothold. Go to the person that we encourage each other in that. Hey, man, you were hitting me awfully hard right there, by the way. I think there was a double, double meaning. I'm just so excited about like words, last week, death words. I was like, oh, we're going to help us through. So coming back to this, this idea of a nickname and whatever they called you, like, you know, some of us laughed with that. Some of us were like, got really quiet with that. But here's the good news that I would say is that, that my nickname Bobo was, was etched in concrete. But your nickname isn't. But the things that have been spoken over you and the labels that have been attached to you, that because of God's grace and through the blood of Jesus, that those aren't etched in concrete. See, Joseph wasn't born Barnabas. Joseph became Barnabas with every affirming word, every encouraging word, every sharpening word, every grateful word. That it was one word after another word, after another word, after another word that turned Joseph into a Barnabas. And that's really been the challenge for us in this series is not to feel the pressure and the weight of having to be perfect, but to recognize that, that our words aren't just words, that they matter. And that as these thoughts begin to come through our mind, right, what do we do? We weigh them. Week one, we weigh our words. The second we can, and this kind of challenge that we've been navigating is that as we weigh our words and the times

that we do say things, that we regret, we wish we wouldn't say it, we take the moment to trace the root, to recognize that those aren't just words, but they're coming from something. And we began to ask the Lord to reveal where are these words coming from? And then we looked at last week, we got to drop it. When those death words start coming to mind, right, we choose to drop them. We don't, we don't want to work for the devil and do his dirty work, right? And instead we want to carry life forward, we want to speak it. We want to weigh it, we want to root it, we want to drop it, and we want to speak it. And so our challenge really to all of us, as we leave today, is who's the soul. and Barnabas was looking at who saw was becoming, who's the saw in your world? Because every one of us has a soul. The person who's hard to believe in, right? The one that has the past. The one that everybody else has written off. Maybe as a child, maybe it's a parent, maybe a coworker, an old friend. But I guarantee you that there's somebody in your world that today they need to hear, I see what God's doing in you. There's more in you than you think is in you. There's got to be people in your world that are running on empty and instead of pulling courage out of them, you make the decision that you're going to put courage back into them. Maybe there's somebody in your world that is living their life defined by their past. All my brothers at Liberty Correctional that are there and you feel like your life is defined by your past. Here's the word of life that I would give you today is that you're becoming something that got a stirring something in your heart that you don't have to be defined by who you were. You could be defined by who you're becoming friend who has potential in your world that they haven't experienced or walked in yet and they need you to come alongside of them in order to help them get to the next level. Friend this week, let's be a Barnabas. Let's send that text. Let's make that phone call. Let's comment on that post. Let's bring life words, a deposit, courage in people instead of pulling courage out because friend somebody gave you a name that you're still carrying decades later and what would it look like if we gave somebody a name that's worth carrying decades later. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Thank you so much for tuning in today. We hope you enjoyed it and if you did, make sure you subscribe. Also, if something spoke to you in a special way, share it with a friend because you never know how it could transform someone's life. If you're interested in checking out our service times, make sure you go to our website

at transform tlh.com and we hope to see you at TC on a Sunday. Thanks so much and have a great day.