learn to tame your tongue…

here are some statistics on the average american.  you have 30 conversations a day and you will spend 1/5 of your life talking. in one year your conversations will fill 66 books of 800 pages a book.  if you’re a man you speak an average of 20,000 words a day, if you’re a woman you speak 30,000 words a day.

now some of us are born with a silver foot in our mouth.  we have the natural ability to say the wrong thing at the wrong time.  nothing is opened more wrongly at the wrong time than our mouths.

like the stock boy at the grocery store, lady asked him, “can i buy a half a lettuce?”  he walked back to the manager to ask, not realizing she was walking right behind him.  he said, “you’re not going to believe this, there’s an old bag out there who wants to buy half a head of lettuce.”  he turned around and saw her standing there and said, “and this fine lady would like to buy the other half.”

our mouths get us into a lot of trouble.  james talks more about the tongue than anybody else in the new testament.  every chapter in book of james says something about managing your mouth. 

verse 2 of chapter 3 (niv), we all stumble in many ways.  if anyone is never at fault in what he says, he is a perfect man, able to keep his whole body in check.

james says, if you can control your mouth, you’re perfect.  now he’s not talking about sinless.  the word “perfection” in greek literally means “mature, healthy.”

when you go to the doctor and say, “i’m not feeling good,” the first thing he says is, “stick out your tongue.”  your tongue reveals what’s going on inside of you, not just physically but spiritually.  james says, you’ve got to learn to mange your mouth.  you’ve got to learn to tame your tongue.  you’ve got to get your tongue under control. 

just a thought from the front porch…