By Brian Mitchell
See if you can
guess of whom or what the author is speaking. “I am more deadly than the
screaming shell of a canon. I win without killing. I tear down homes, break
hearts, wreck lives, and destroy churches. I travel on the wings of the wind.
No innocence is strong enough to intimidate me, no purity pure enough to daunt
me. I have no regard for truth, no respect for justice, no mercy for the
defenseless. My victims are as numerous as the sands of the sea and often as
innocent. I never forget and seldom forgive. My name is...?”
Can you guess of
whom or what he is speaking? Most of it sounds like a description of the devil
himself. But that is not of whom the article speaks. Who or what could be so
cruel and heartless? He ends this article by saying my name is GOSSIP!!! The
abomination described in this article is something that indeed is very cruel
and heartless, and is something very strongly condemned in the Bible. Yet still
it is something often found on the lips of God’s children and we many times are
not even aware that we are guilty of gossiping.
The book of James
provides perhaps the most graphic warnings about the tongue in the whole
Bible—Jm.3:6 and Jm.3:8. There are very few sins that the Bible describes in
more serious terms, and yet there are very few sins which receive so little
thought or attention. As I said, there are times when we may not even be aware
that we are gossiping and that is why it is so serious. This is why we need to
understand what gossip is, so that we might never be guilty of it.
Taming the tongue
is not something that many of us often think about, until it gets us in
trouble, or until we are the victim of someone else’s misuse of the tongue.
What we must realize is the fact that there are few things in our possession
that have the ability to do more harm and damage. With our hands we may take a
person’s material goods or even their physical life. But with the tongue you
may take a man’s dignity, his good name and reputation, and all that gives his
life real value.
Sadly, you can do all of these things
without ever having the intention of doing so, all by getting caught in what
may seem like at times harmless chit chat. As I have said before, we don’t get
to decide how our words affect the lives of others, and that is why we must be
extremely careful with the words we speak. Someone once said, “A three inch
tongue can destroy a six foot man.”
I know a preacher
that once promised during his Sunday morning sermon that during his evening
lesson he was going to preach about that congregation’s greatest sin. Of
course, everyone came back that evening and heard a sermon on the subject of
gossiping. The interesting part of the story was the next he received a call
from one of his elders saying that two women from the church had called him to
complain about the preacher’s sermon—do you see the problem with that???
Instead of calling the preacher to talk with him, these ladies called an elder.
We should examine what the Bible says about
Gossip and we must make this terrible yet often overlooked sin seriously and effectively
handle situations where others want to share gossip with you.
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