The Active vs. Passive Voice (wisdom from the grammar books)
It’s been a bit quiet here at the blog! God has been working on me to improve my giddy mind, and at such times it’s a good thing to be quiet and wait on Him awhile. “Be strong, and let your heart take courage, all you who wait for the Lord!!”
But I am inspired to tentatively open up my laptop and peck a little at the keyboard today by something intriguing I just read on a grammar website. Yes, those grammar websites are often chock-full of meaningful spiritual insights! And this one was no exception. The article had to do with the tendency of writers to use the passive voice in their writing, rather than the active voice.
Here’s the explanation, straight from “The Grammar Girl: quick and dirty tips for better writing:”
“In an active sentence, the subject is doing the action. A very straightforward example is the sentence “Steve loves Amy.” Steve is the subject, and he is doing the action: he loves Amy, the object. Another example is the title of the Marvin Gaye song ‘I Heard It through the Grapevine.’ ‘I’ is the subject, the one who is doing the action. I is hearing ‘it’, the object of the sentence.
“But in passive voice the target of the action gets promoted to the subject position. Instead of saying, “Steve loves Amy,” I would say, “Amy is loved by Steve.” The subject of the sentence becomes Amy, but she isn’t doing anything. Rather, she is just the recipient of Steve’s love. The focus of the sentence has changed from Steve to Amy. If you wanted to make the title of the Marvin Gaye song passive, you would say ‘It Was Heard by Me through the Grapevine’, not such a catchy title anymore.”
We, like Amy, are the recipients of a great love! But so often the recipient (us) gets promoted to the subject position, and the focus of the sentence changes from God to us. I don’t mean that we are using a certain rule of grammar. I mean that we are thinking wrong, and out of that thinking comes too many songs and sermons and conversations that, while rightly showing ourselves to be the recipients of God’s grace and gifts, focuses the attention on us rather than the Giver.
If life was a grammatical sentence, and the sentence had to do with the fact that God loves us, we’d do well to make sure that God stays the subject and focus of the sentence, and not us. In other words, the main thing is not that we are loved…but that He loves us.
“In this is love, not that we have loved God but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 4:10.)