Fill Your Mouth With Life

Proverbs 18:21

Death and life are in the power of the tongue, and those who love it will eat its fruits.

• With the tongue Caesar sent armies to war,

• Adolf Hitler incited mass genocide and cults like Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Mormons sprang up.

• With the tongue Wesley preached to thousands,

• With tongue Winston Churchill inspired a nation to stand firm

• With tongue Billy Graham brought millions to faith.

The power of tongue

• It is one of the smaller organs of the body.

• The weight for a male is about 70 grams, for a female, 60 grams. However, its potential for evil is so great God saw fit to imprison it

Tongue is always behind a double jailer: the teeth and the lips. I am talking about the human tongue.

Recent research has revealed that there are few

places more infested with harmful bacteria than the human mouth.

More than one hundered million microscopic critters live there. Fungus grows in the oral cavity.

The tongue can be an instrument of great peace,

• The tongue can be a great inspiration or great destruction and devastation, on the world stage or in your life.

• That’s why you must learn to master your tongue.

How many times have you said things and regretted it?

• How many times have you spoken out and wished you could take the words back?

• So many people I know, have so many regrets about what they have said

Master your tongue or it will master your life, ruin your reputation, and destroy your relationships.

? If you want to look to master your tongue, we can read nothing better than the passage of James I shared before

I came across a statistic that shocked me. I was not sure I believed it.

? I read that the average person speaks 11 million words a year.

? Do you know how many words that is in a lifetime? At the age of 65 it is seventy-one million, five hundred thousand words. Imagine the magnitude of that many words.

When you see the doctor the first, he is checking is the tongue. He can diagnose the illness only by looking at the tongue. (Mt 12:34). How we speak reveals a lot about usIf you can master your tongue you can master your whole body. However, James points out that the tongue is basically untamable, and that it is itself set on fire by hell.

James 3:6-8 (NIV-WS)

The tongue also is a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body. It corrupts the whole body, sets the whole course of one’s life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell.

All kinds of animals, birds, reptiles and sea creatures are being tamed and have been tamed by mankind, but no human being can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison.

Tongue is illustrated as :-

• As illustrated by the horse (verse 3)

• As illustrated by ships (verse 4)

• As illustrated by a wildfire (verse 5)

The Greek word for hell here is Gehenna, which is the valley of Hinnom, the garbage dump of Jerusalem, where the fires are never quenched, where they burned everything from garbage to criminal’s bodies. If you stop and listen to the things people say, even things you sometimes say, you will see the stamp of Hell fires upon it.

We tame animals, says James, but we cannot tame this tiny piece of our bodies!

And it’s a poison, a deadly poison! How many relationships have been destroyed by the poison of the tongue?

So let’s have a look at some of the ways your tongue causes destruction if you do not master your tongue…

A TONGUE THAT IS DESTRUCTIVE

1. GOSSIP

? Right at the top of the list of the tongue’s destructive power is gossip. Gossip is what sells magazines.

? Gossip is usually thinly veiled with acceptable phrases like, “Have you heard about…?” or “Did you know that?” or “Keep this to yourself, but I heard…? or “I don’t believe it’s true, but I heard that . . .”

Of course, among Christians the most infamous gossip which says, “I am telling you this so you can pray.”

A pastor in a small town had a notorious gossip in his church, and she turned her gossip on him. One day she felt convicted, so she came and asked the pastor for forgiveness.

“Of course”, he said, but then he asked her to do something strange… “Please take a pillow, cut it open and go to the top of the hill overlooking our town and throw the feathers into the wind.

She thought this strange, but she did it, and the feathers floated across the whole town. Then the pastor said, “One more thing… could you go and pick them all up please.”