Taming the Tongue Part II.

James 3:9-12
9 With the tongue we praise our Lord and Father, and with it we curse men, who have been made in God's likeness. 10 Out of the same mouth come praise and cursing. My brothers, this should not be. 11 Can both fresh water and salt water flow from the same spring? 12 My brothers, can a fig tree bear olives, or a grapevine bear figs? Neither can a salt spring produce fresh water.

I hope you had a wonderful and safe Thanksgiving wherever you may be reading this. I might add, thank you, for taking the time out of your busy day, no matter if this is your first time or your 300th time reading my posts! I'm just so thankful I can keep this project going.

Yesterday was Thanksgiving and I talked about the obvious: being thankful. Meanwhile, on Wednesday I introduced to you the beginning of James 3. I mentioned how our tongue is one of the hardest things to train. We can boast with our tongue, lie with our tongue, hurt others with our tongue, and praise others with our tongue.

That leads us today's part of the passage. Verses 9 and 10 are very powerful and I was astonished when I heard them. I thought, "man this is so true." We can be minding our own business when all of a sudden we give someone a compliment. Then, not even five minutes have passed and we're cursing others by our discouraging words or just being downright evil. Yet, we do all this despite the fact that everyone is perfectly made according to "God's likeness."

It's so easy to do, but it's so wrong. This ties into hypocrisy: we're two-faced a lot of times. We act one way one minute, then the complete opposite the next minute.

With that said, it's highly important to work on "taming our tongue." We have to be careful what we say. Here's where the old phrase "if you have nothing nice to say don't say it all" comes in handy. I mean there's a difference between being honest and nice about something - and being honest and rude about something. You can still tell the truth, by saying it in a nice way. We have to think before we speak because quite frankly, we can't take away the words that slip off our tongue. James tells us that we can't tame our tongues, so therefore pray that God will work with you on the words that come out! The goal here is to sound like a Christian all the time, not just some of the time, or when you feel like it.

"I cried because I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet". ~Anonymous

I know it's a little late, but here's a funny video on Thanksgiving thanks to the Skit Guys; it should get the point across though



P.S. If you have trouble with the video stopping and starting, keep the video paused, and let it "buffer" (load) as it's called for a while. You will see the red bar along the bottom advance (speed depends on your Internet connection). Wait until that bar gets pretty far along (I'd say more than halfway) before you play the video and it shouldn't pause.