I am an unashamed word nerd.
I have a list on my Notes app titled “Whizz-Bang Words.”
Doesn’t everyone?

Sometimes they are words that are just fun to say: rollicking and flapdoodle.
I’d rather be described as the former (carefree and joyous) than the later (fool).

Sometimes they are words that go well together: linger and longer.
Surely they belong in a poem somewhere.

Maybe that’s why the Apostle Paul is my Bible Buddy. He was a master wordsmith. Finding the right words was so important to Paul that sometimes the Greek language just wasn’t big enough to express what he wanted to say. So Paul invented brand new words, usually by mashing together two smaller words and creating an expression that was revolutionary.

Perhaps he tossed in these unique expressions for some shock value. It made people perk up their ears. “What did he say? Come again?”

To prove the level of my nerdiness, I have made it my goal in life to find every one of Paul’s mashed-up, made-up words. Using some online resources, it’s not that hard to dig up these invented idioms that are found only one time in the scriptures.

One example is in Romans 8:37, “In all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.” More than conquerors is one word in Greek: hypernikaō‘ (pronounced hoop-er-nik-ah-o). Nikaō‘ means conquerors, but putting the hyper in front creates a whole new expression: we might say “super-duper conquerors.”

To be a conqueror implies complete, overwhelming victory,
but Paul wanted to add some punch
so he made up a new word:
hypernikaō‘—more than conquerors. 

Paul was a super-duper-hooper kind of guy
because
he served a super-duper-hooper kind of God.
May we learn to live in the
“more than”
“the overwhelming”
“the super-duper”
love of God.