The very title of this article sounds awful– and it is. What in the world could this have reference to— murder? adultery? robbery? perversion? Nope, it’s the tongue! James 3:8 says,”–the tongue is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison”.
Have you ever noticed how many things can be used for good or bad? Water can keep you alive or take your life, depending on whether you drink it or drown in it. Fire can warm and comfort you or burn and consume you. The same sun that melts the wax hardens the clay. Even so, the tongue can heal or hurt, delight or destroy. When misused, it is described by James as, “an unruly evil”. It can do untold damage and even destroy.
The tongue can be misused in several ways– lying, cursing, slander’ etc., but perhaps the most common is gossip. Some mistakenly assume that as long as what they say is true that it’s okay to say it. They think if they are telling the truth it is just fine to tell what they know– even if it means spilling-the-beans on others. But gossip is soundly condemned in the Bible. It is hard to say just a little about this subject, because the Bible says so much about it. Some folks ought to spend an entire day studying what God’s Word says about sinful speech. They might come away shocked that they have been entertaining such an awful sin in their life– a sin,perhaps, far worse than the sin of the person they have been talking about.
Compounding this problem is the fact that many people have garbage can ears— they just sit there listening to things that shouldn’t be said. That makes them complicit in the sin. If you are guilty of this you need to remember that those who complain and cry on your shoulder gossiping to you will gossip about you. Do yourself a favor and let them know that you would rather not hear it. I know from observation and experience that when a person sins, sometimes more harm is done by those who gossip about it than by the one who actually committed it. Please don’t allow others to make you their partner in crime by participating in their sin of gossip.
Have you noticed that in a great many instances when people leave the church they feel they must justify their departure by finding fault. And even that would not be so bad (yeah, believe it or not, the church is better off without some folks) were it not for the fact that they end up causing others to leave. That of course is the mission of some, but others do not intentionally provoke others to leave. However, they do it anyway by their insistence on talking to others about “the problem”. They refuse to simply walk away quietly without stirring up trouble. In some cases they know if they simply leave without an explanation it will raise questions about them, so their pride prompts them to point out that it is the fault of someone else. Isn’t it strange that they don’t want to stay and help the church get better– to work through the “problem” rather than run from it. It just might be that they are looking for a way out and are using the failure of someone else to cover-up their own. If you can’t fix the problem why should you be hearing about it? Not only are we responsible for what we say, we are accountable for the things we willingly listen to. Be very careful about allowing others to criticize the Lord’s church in your presence. Think about it.
