My enemy, my tongue

“Put away from you crooked speech, and put devious talk far from you.”
-Proverbs 4:24

I used to work at a place that thrived on gossip, and I really didn’t know to be on my guard until one particular day. I was ill and about to leave early, when I saw something my boss had put up in the breakroom. I was looking at it and muttering something to myself and then moved on. There was one other person in there with me, but I didn’t know she had heard me, and I hadn’t really said anything to be worried about. It wasn’t a criticism of anything.

Until I got an email from my boss, telling me that if I had something bad to say about her, that I needed to talk to her directly.

It took a while to get everything straightened out, but basically the other person in the room took part of what I said, put a bad spin on it, and ran to my boss.

That’s one time when I got a scolding I didn’t deserve, but there have been a hundred times, probably this year alone, where I’ve deserved a scolding for something I said. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to apologize to someone after saying something stupid – usually something I didn’t even mean, but had said out of anger.

Solomon, in the previous verse, told us to guard our thoughts. Now he is telling us to guard our words, and he’ll follow it up with a plea to guard our actions. That last part we all understand immediately. We want our lives to be judged by our actions, and so we hold ourselves back from doing something constantly. Every day I consider my actions and decide on the best course. I make moral decisions all the time.

But when we learn that we will be judged not only by our actions, but by our words and thoughts, we may not be so confident in where we stand.

While we may not slip up in our actions all that often, we are a bit more free with our tongues. Some people even count it as a virtue. “I just speak my mind,” they will say, usually because they know they are being jerks but don’t want to change. We lie to get out of awkward situations, or we’ll hold our tongues when we’re in the minority. We gossip, brag, and slander.

James tells us that “the tongue is a fire, a world of unrighteousness. The tongue is set among our members, staining the whole body, setting on fire the entire course of life, and set on fire by hell” (3:6). If you consider how much pain you have caused by your words, you’ll understand what he means.

The tongue is not something we can harness alone. It is not something we can simply control. When Solomon tells us to avoid devious talk, he is not thinking that we’re just such amazing people who can flip the switch and not be gossips anymore. No, if we’re going to understand this properly, we’re going to have to go back in his discourse to what started this – listening to his words (as in, the Word of God) for eternal life.

It is only by the Blood of Jesus that we can stand in righteousness. Without Him we are slaves to sin, but because of His death on the Cross we can be forgiven. It is He who intercedes for us, and by His Spirit guides us. And when we slip, it is by His Blood that we are forgiven again.

Let us, by all means, tame those tongues. We’ve caused too much hurt already. But you can’t do it by looking within and drawing on your own strength. We do it by turning it over to Him.