Bite Your Tongue Series

While we are on the subject of tongues, did you know that the world’s longest tongue, now this is serious, this is in theGuiness Book of World Recordsis 9.2 centimeters long?

The honour belongs to a chauffer in the UK. His name is Steven Taylor, and he can stick out his tongue 9.2 centimeters. Now you may not think that’s much, but you try it.

The tongue says James, “Is but a small member of the body.” Nothing compared to the size of your head, nothing compared to the size your feet, but he goes on to say, “Despite it’s small size,” and this of course is his whole point, “it has an unusual power. Likewise the tongue is a small part of the body, but it makes great boasts.” It has a power disproportionate to its size.

And then in James, Chapter 3, in rapid succession, gives us three very colorful word pictures to try to capture the importance of this small sized organ in our body. First of all he compares our tongue to a horse’s bit. He says in Verse 3, “When we put bits into the mouths of horses, we make them obey us. We can turn the whole animal.” A bit as you know, is a metal cross bar, usually it’s metal, that you put in a horses mouth above his tongue. It’s tied to his bridle and in turn it is tied to his reins, and when a horse has been trained and conditioned, that’s how you control the horse. And a little tug on the rein, this way or that way and the whole big horse has its direction changed because of the bit.

Then he goes on to say another example is that of a ship’s rudder. He says, “Or take ships as an example. Although they are so large and our driven by strong winds, they are steered by a very small rudder wherever the pilot wants to go.” Here’s this big ship, it’s driven by strong winds which is similar to the strong passions that drive our lives, but he says, it is controlled by that small rudder on the back by which the pilot can change the direction of the boat at will. And then he says, “it’s like a spark of fire. Consider what a great forest is set on fire, by a small spark.” You may not remember this news story, but back in the summer of 2003, a man by the name of Mike Barre, failed to properly extinguish the butt of his cigarette on the sidewalk behind his house, just north of Kamloops, B.C. That improper extinguished cigarette butt started Forest Fire.

That forest fire, by the time it was done, burned 260 square kilometers of forest and woodlands. It destroyed dozens of homes and businesses and ended up costing the province of British Columbia $31 million to put out. For that, Mike Barre was dragged into court, found guilty and fined $3000.

As the song that we used to sing years ago, “Pass It On” reminds us, it only takes a spark to get a fire going. And so James uses these examples, the example of the bit, the example of the rudder, the example of the spark starting a fire to indicate the inordinate amount of power of the tongue to set in motion things that are highly destructive. And who of us hasn’t been guilty at one point or another of speaking out of turn and starting a forest fire.