Considering the tongue
As human beings, we love social interaction, whether it’s with everyone and anyone, like extroverts enjoy, or with our nearest and dearest, like introverts do. For most of us, it’s somewhere in the middle, but for all of us, it can spell trouble. Lying, whether so called little untruths or tall tales, are not of God and can lead to disastrous results. James 3:5 says it best: “Even so the tongue is a little member and boasts great things. See how great a forest a little fire kindles.”
Matters worse, we don’t even have to be talking to other people, many times we pronounce negative affirmations over ourselves without even realising it. For example, someone who grows up in a family of five siblings may pronounce in frustration that they have always been slow, without taking into account the four year age gap they also grew up with as the youngest sibling. Someone who repeated a year of school due to ill health, quickly forgets that, and labels themselves as dumb.
It doesn’t help that social media, and the media in general, tends to apply labels to most things and box everything else; short people tend to grow up thinking they don’t measure up…, but so also, do very tall people. The labels aren’t even consistent!
These labels can cause us to take our eyes off Jesus, yet we allow the labels to apply to our lives without even evaluating them. The Proverbs state that whoever guards his mouth and tongue keeps his soul from troubles… (21:23) and death and life are in the power of the tongue (18:21). It’s therefore important to consider in greater depth, the positive and negative effects the tongue can have.