The Owner of the Outcome
Then the Lord said to me, “You have seen well, for I am watching over My word to perform it. Jeremiah 1:12
The Burden Was Never Mine
A few months before my daughter Eden was born, I brought my lifelong fear of childbirth to the feet of the Lord and asked for His help to overcome it. His response caught me off guard.
After voicing how overwhelmed I felt by the process of childbirth and the responsibility of bringing Eden into the world, a nudge in my spirit arose. True to His nature, the Lord reminded me of the truth: "This is My birth."
Wait, what?
So I sat in silence. Slightly offended, but mostly curious. How can this be? Am I not the one who is pregnant? I grabbed my Bible and began rummaging through the pages to see whether what I had heard would hold up. I found scripture after scripture reminding me Who really owns it all:
The Lord owns our bodies (1 Corinthians 6:19)
The Lord owns our breath and our destinies (Daniel 5:23)
The Lord owns the earth and everything in it (Psalm 24:1)
As those truths sank in, something shifted internally. What had been a heavy burden of responsibility for an outcome I do not own became freedom to release what rightfully belongs to the Lord.
He Watches over His Word
Jeremiah was young when God called him. His first response was that he did not know how to speak. Then the Lord reached out, touched his mouth, and said, "Behold, I have put My words in your mouth."
There is a divine order here. The words were God's before they were Jeremiah's. He was not told to think of something worth saying. He was handed something to say.
Then, the Lord showed him a branch of an almond tree and told him, "You have seen well, for I am watching over My word to perform it." In Hebrew, the word for almond sounds like the word for watching. God made a promise inside a picture: what He has spoken, He Himself will see through.
This is how He has worked from the beginning. In Genesis 1, all of creation became tangible because God spoke. In John 1, that same Word is revealed to be a Person. The Word is Jesus Christ, who became flesh and dwelt among us. Heaven has always come to earth by the word of God going forth. He has always been gracious to invite His people into it:
God handed Ezekiel the words and told him to prophesy to a valley of dry bones. He spoke what he was given, and the dead lived (Ezekiel 37).
Elijah announced a drought and later prayed the rain back. Both times he was enforcing what God had already determined (1 Kings 17–18; James 5:17–18).
God spoke descendants over a body that could not produce them, and Abraham held onto the word instead of the evidence (Romans 4:17–21).
Agreement Begins with God
The power is not in our words. The power is in the Word God has already spoken. This is a truth worth marinating on, because culture is selling a counterfeit version of it called manifestation.
The counterfeit teaches that our words create our reality, and that if we speak a thing with enough belief we can call it into being. That attributes the power to us. But our words do not have power when we are authors of them. They have power when God is the One who utters them first. Nothing of substance can originate from our words alone. But when we receive what God has said, agree with it, and say it back to Him, we get an opportunity to join Him in the work He is already doing. That is where the power is.
Hebrews tells us the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword (Hebrews 4:12). His word is alive, as He promises that "It will not return to Me empty, without accomplishing what I desire, and without succeeding in the purpose for which I sent it." (Isaiah 55:11).
Before we can declare the will of God, we have to desire what He desires and agree with what He has purposed. As Jennifer Kennedy Dean puts it, true prayer is God's words in your mouth. Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks, and what God has settled in our hearts is what rises to our lips.
His Birth, My Surrender
I carried that reminder into the hospital with me. More than twenty-four hours into labor, I had stalled. My dilation halted at 7 centimeters for over 8 hours, and I grew discouraged. Then I remembered what the Lord had told me.
My husband, Andrew, played worship music in the hospital room. As we sang together, I opened my mouth and said out loud what God had already said to me privately — that this was His birth, that my body was His, that the outcome belonged to Him and not to me.
My mother watched the monitor as my contractions spiked to the most intense I had felt. And in the middle of them, I had peace. Not because I had produced something, but because I had finally stopped trying to.
When the contractions subsided, the nurse came in with the news that my dilation was progressing again. Within the Lord's timing of 32 hours of labor, Eden made her entrance into the world.
I am not telling you this because the right words summoned my d, but because the weight moved off of me and onto the One who owned it. That is what changed.
Whatever you are waiting on today, you are not responsible for producing it. Find out what God has said about it. Then declare it with a believing heart.
A Truth to Remember
You were never asked to create the outcome. You were asked to agree with the One who owns it.
Prayer
Father, thank You that the outcome was never mine to carry. You own my body, my breath, my life, and everything I have been afraid of losing. Forgive me for trying to force into being what only You can bring forth. Help me to sit still long enough for Your word to settle into my heart, so that what comes out of my mouth is what has already come out of Yours. Today, I release my grip on the outcome and I take hold of what You have said. I trust You to watch over Your word and perform it. In Jesus' name, amen.
