Series: Christianity Uncensored
Message #4: Gossip Uncensored
By: Jud Wilhite
We do live in a culture that loves dirty laundry. It’s spun all around us. We see it in all kinds of things. In particular we see it in the lines at the supermarkets when we look at these little things called tabloids. We see headlines about woodpeckers that kill thousands, aliens that are abducted, a new Elvis Presley sighting. I thought to kick us off on this subject we’d do a little supermarket tabloid test. I’m going to put five tabloid headlines on the screen. I want you to determine which one of them is an actual tabloid headline. Ready?
Number one: Two hundred forty pound baby signed by New Zealand football team. Number two: Wolf boy abducts neighbor’s dog. It was our honeymoon! Number three: Two hundred foot Jesus appears in Washington. Number four: Psychic feline moves objects with mind. And number five: Vasectomy reduces chances of being abducted by aliens. In case you were wondering, there you have it. Talk amongst yourself and determine which supermarket tabloid headline is real? I hear lots of threes – you are right! Two hundred foot Jesus appears in Washington. Nice job. Apparently CNN missed that one. There is another tabloid that says they found Jesus’ sandal in Central park.
One more time – here is a few more. 1) World’s oldest woman thrives on lard and booze and probably lives in Vegas. 2) Exorcism cures monstrous zit. 3) Leprechaun ejected by casino. He’s too lucky! 4) Vampire poodles go on a bloody rampage. 5) Lincoln was a woman. Now as you look at this we’re yanking your chain just a little bit. The truth is, all five of these are actual tabloid headlines. Just for fun I thought we’d throw the fifth one up – Lincoln was a woman. There it is published in the World Weekly News. Then it says, “Was John Wilkes Booth her jilted lover?”
We live in a culture that’s inundated with tabloids and dirty laundry. There is all sorts of stuff flying around. There is gossip in our work places. People talk about other people. We spread hearsay and rumors. The rumor mill turns. Sometimes it’s hard to know. Even in conversations have you wondered, “Am I gossiping right now when I’m saying this? Is it gossip? Is it not gossip?” It can be a real challenge. One thing I’ve realized is that it’s hard to nail gossip down and to determine when you are doing it. But it’s always easy to tell when you are being gossiped about. Isn’t that the truth? You wonder “Is this gossip? Am I telling gossip?” But when you hear someone else talk about you, you know when you are being gossiped about. It bothers you in that sense.
I thought Rick Warren gave a great definition of gossip and how we know when we are gossiping. He said this, “When we are talking about a situation with somebody who is neither part of the problem or part of the solution, then we are probably gossiping.” When we are talking about a situation with someone who is neither part of the problem or the solution; I found that very helpful. Let’s say you are at work and you have employees that you work with, maybe you have a work situation and you have a conversation with your employee about another employee, maybe someone under you. How are you going to deal with a situation? Is that gossip? Not if it’s part of the problem or solution. You are trying to actually get to an end solution that is actually good for everybody. I think intent is really important when we talk about gossip as well. Do you say these things to harm them or to really help them? You can have some hard conversations with people, let’s say in a work environment, but the end goal of it is to actually help that individual take steps and improve and be able to thrive in their work environment. What is our motivation in the things that we share?
We can get in a lot of trouble with our words. I’ll never forget when Lori came in with a brand new haircut. It’s the first time she had her hair done this certain way. I think we had been married for several years. She came in and her hair was sort of red. She had it colored. She came in, she doesn’t tell me these things, she just shows up. Check it out, do you like my hair? I paused for about three seconds and said, “Well, I love you.” It was ugly at the Wilhite household. Sometimes we say things that get ourselves in trouble.
When you think about words, statistics say we speak about one-fifth of our entire lives. The average person has over thirty conversations a day. That would fill up in a year sixty-six books at eight hundred pages a book – each year. Crazy, huh? There are lots of opportunities to make mistakes. James says this, he talks about the tongue more than any other writer in the New Testament, he says this in chapter three, verse three: “When we put bits into the mouths of horses to make them obey us, we can turn the whole animal. Take ships for example. Although they are so large and driven by strong winds they are steered by a very small rudder wherever the pilot wants to go. Likewise, the tongue is a small part of the body but it makes great boasts.” The tongue is a small part of the body but it makes great boasts.
Now when you go to the doctor and you’re sick and not feeling good, what’s one of the first things the doctor says to you? “Stick out your tongue.” Because your tongue reveals something about what’s going on inside of you. James says in our own lives our tongue is so significant because it steers our lives and it talks about deep internal things that are happening. The first thing he says is the tongue directs your life. If you want to know where you are going to go in the next five to ten years, look at what you say. If you want to know the direction your life is moving, look at your conversations. Look at the words that are coming out of your mouth. We shape our words, listen to this, but our words shape us. We shape our words and then our words shape us.
He gives us a couple of examples on how the tongue directs your life. First of all, he says it’s like your horse. It’s this two to three thousand pound animal. It’s a huge, beautiful, muscular animal. But you put a bit in a horse’s mouth, this little piece of metal right over the tongue, and then you add a ninety pound jockey on the back of that three thousand pound horse and that jockey can steer that horse wherever he needs it to go. James says that’s what the tongue is like. You have this little bitty muscle that has a huge impact on our lives. It can make you or break you. It can open doors for you into the future. It can close doors for you. It can help other people. It can hurt other people. It’s wide open. It will determine the direction of your life.
I think a great example of that comes right out of the news this morning. Early, as I was making some coffee before I came up to church, I had Sports Center on getting the download for the day. I’m watching and it’s Terrell Owens again all over the news. He’s the wide receiver for the Philadelphia Eagles. Now he’s been benched. Why? Because he couldn’t keep his mouth shut. He kept running his tongue and now it’s determining the direction of his life. Which is great news because the Eagles play the Cowboys on Monday night and the Dallas Cowboys have a great chance now of pulling this game out. He’s benched and now there is all this controversy about it. Your tongue can make you or break you. We have to be careful about the words that we speak.
James gives another example. Think about a ship, like the Queen Mary in Southern California. It’s this massive ship. It has three acres of recreational space on it. It’s huge! In fact, the anchor of the Queen Mary is the equivalent in weight to ten cars put together. It’s a massive ocean liner. Yet it’s steered by a relatively speaking small rudder that directs that ship into the wind and waves of the sea. It takes it here and there. James says the same is true for our tongue. It literally directs your life.
The next thing he says is the tongue pierces others. The tongue has tremendous force for either good or harm. It can pierce others. He says it this way in chapter three, verse five: “Consider what a great forest is set on fire by a small spark. The tongue also is a fire. A world of evil among the parts of the body. It corrupts the whole person. It sets the whole course of his life on fire and is itself set on fire by hell.” Verse seven: “All kinds of animals, birds, reptiles, and creatures of the sea are being tamed and have been tamed by man but no man can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil full of deadly poison.” There is James giving us the uncensored, straight up, no holds barred truth about the tongue. Don’t you affirm that statement? Even when you hear it as harsh as it is, doesn’t it just ring true? The tongue can be a restless evil. It can be a deadly poison. It can destroy lives.
It’s like a fire. Think about a beautiful area in Colorado like maybe the Rocky Mountains. It’s beautiful with the trees and greenery. All of it can be up in smoke due to a spark. It was the Hayman Fire that was the largest fire in Colorado history. It literally cost well over 150 million dollars. One hundred homes were destroyed in the midst of this fire that burned through 137,000 acres. It was Terri Bartan, a U.S. Forest Service worker, who eventually plead guilty to starting that fire. It just takes a spark and then it gets out of control. James says the same is true for our tongue. You can make a statement or a comment and then things begin to get out of control.
One of the big problems with gossip isn’t just that gossip hurts other people. It’s that in the statement of gossip we often get the story wrong. How many of you remember the telephone game? You set people in a circle and you tell one person a sentence. Then that person tells it to the next person, and the next person and the next one. You go all the way around the circle and the last person makes the statement of what they heard. It gets messed up, doesn’t it? Just to show you as an example we took some very sharp minds here around Central and took one of the most famous TV theme songs ever – this song had 110 words. They passed it like a telephone game around the circle. They were coached and then immediately put on camera to try and be able to sing along to the theme song of the Brady Bunch. Here is what happened.
(VIDEO)
Think about it though – that was just 110 words of a famous television theme song. Imagine how much we mess it up when we pass along hearsay and gossip that’s a thousand words or ten thousand words. We say all this stuff and we get the story wrong. It can be so devastating.
Bonnie Miller at the Chicago Tribune writes these words: “Gossip – always hurtful but once limited to note passing, phone calls, and scrawls on bathroom walls, is more pervasive and vicious as ever thanks to the Internet.” A senior in high school said that as an eighth grader she was the subject of an online rumor that she had slept with the football team. She said, “I think it was started by the ex-girlfriend of a boy on the team. It didn’t matter where it came from. People wanted to believe it. There was no way to refute it. I wanted to kill myself.” That’s the pain and the devastation that can come from gossip. It’s like a fire.
Then James gives another illustration. He says, “Think about the animals at the zoo. Man has been able to tame animals, reptiles, birds, and all these different things but no man has been able to tame the tongue.” He says, “It’s a restless evil.” Which is a term, restless, that he used back in chapter one, verse eight when he talked about a double minded man, unstable in all of his ways. In other words, it’s liable to break out at any moment. It’s a restless evil. You never know what the tongue is going to do. Then he says it’s like a poison, a deadly poison. The Greek word there is literally snake venom. Let’s just say the word gossip on three. One, two, three. Gossssssssssssip. It’s like snake venom. It’s deadly and poisonous. It even sounds snaky. It can hurt and damage people. The tongue can pierce others.
Then James says, “The tongue reveals our hearts.” The words that we say point to something deeper that’s going on in our lives. He says it this way in James 3:9, “With the tongue we praise our Lord and Father and with it we curse men who have been made in God’s likeness.” Oh, that’s convicting, isn’t it? We come in here and sing songs on the weekend. We praise our Lord and Father. We say, “God, You are good and we love You. We are so grateful for who You are. You are amazing.” Then we walk right out the doors to our cars. We say, “I can’t believe that *&*% cut me off!” We walk into our home and sit around the table. To curse somebody doesn’t mean you say a curse word. It’s a lot deeper than that. You could curse someone by saying, “You’re good for nothing.” What are you doing? You are putting a curse on their life. “You’re a horrible person.” “You’re worthless.” When we say those things we are cursing the very people that are made in God’s likeness. James is saying this shouldn’t be. “Out of the same mouth come praise and cursing, my brothers this should not be.”
We all wrestle with this. I wrestle with it. I’m not standing up here this morning like I have it all together. I struggle with it. Do you know where I find I struggle with it the most? It’s in the four walls of my own home, particularly with our kids. I love them so much but they are so into everything. Sometimes our kids will do something and I’m tired and worn out. I’ll snap. I’m all stressed out and I’ll snap a little bit and say things I regret. Sometimes I’ve done that with Lori. In the four walls of our own home can be the most difficult time. You go out to work and your bosses can slice you to pieces with their tongues. Then you take that and go home and slice your spouse to pieces with your tongue. Then your spouse jumps on your kids with her tongue. Then the kids jump on the dog because there is no one else to pass it on to. It bleeds down through the whole family. James says to watch our tongue because people are made in the likeness of God. They are valuable.
Let’s talk about how we can do just that. He gives us a couple practical examples. Let me just share a broader picture on it. First of all, when you are gossiping and when you are struggling with this whole area you should look beneath the words. There are things that will come out of your mouth, maybe you continually gossip. You have to ask yourself “Why?” “Why do I say things about people that aren’t true? Or that are half-truths?” Often people will do that so they will look morally superior to that other individual in their lives. They do it to put themselves in a greater position. That’s why they say it. If that is going on in our hearts and lives, then we need to look beneath the words and say, “Maybe there is an insecurity in my life. Maybe I need to realize that God loves me just as I am. I don’t have to make myself look morally superior to anyone else.”
Another thing is we tend to gossip about areas of weakness in other people’s lives that we see. We connect dots that may not be connected. Often we criticize in others the weakness in our self. For instance, if you are a cynical person and you don’t like that about yourself, then you will often criticize cynicism that you see in someone else. If you are a proud person and you don’t like the fact that you struggle with that pride issue, you’ll often criticize other people around you. You see it a mile away because that’s what you don’t like in yourself. We amplify it in others. If that’s the case, then look beneath those words. What do we need to work through in our own lives to deal with that?
Another thing we can do is to ask God for help. James says that no man has tamed the tongue. He doesn’t say that God can’t help us tame the tongue. In our own power and our own strength we won’t be able to do it. But with God’s power and God’s strength we can go a long way towards taming the tongue. I love the Psalm in 141 where David has this prayer. He says, “Set a guard over my mouth. Keep watch over the door of my lips. Let not my heart be drawn to what is evil.” If we started to live our lives praying that prayer over a regular basis, “God, help me set a guard over my mouth and watch my lips so that what I say doesn’t lean towards evil.” Imagine what God would do in our lives. Ask for God’s help.
Speak words of life and of encouragement. I love the story that Ken Blanchart tells, a business executive that does business training all over America. Ken Blanchart and Barbara Glands did some training with three thousand front-line workers at grocery stores and retail outlets across the country. They talked about the power of words and how what you say really does make a difference in people’s lives. A month later, Barbara said she got a call from a guy named Johnny, who was at the training. Johnny told her early on, “I’m nineteen years old. I have Downs Syndrome. I work as a bagger at a grocery store.” He said this almost immediately. He said, “I went back to the store and I didn’t know how to apply your statements. I liked your talk but I didn’t know what to do with it. I went home and talked with my dad and got an idea. My dad and I sat down at the computer and everyday we come up with a statement that is affirming of people, that’s encouraging. If I can’t find one in a little quote book, I’ll make it up. We’ll type it up six different times on the computer. I print off fifty sheets and cut all of them.” So he has three hundred of these quotes. Then, every night, Johnny signs each one of them personally. Then the next day at the grocery store he puts this stack right by where he bags the groceries. He gets everyone’s groceries bagged up. Then on the last sack he puts the quote of the day, the encouraging word, in the sack. He makes sure he looks them in the eye and says, “I put something very special for you in this sack. I hope it will brighten your day.” He’ll take them out to their car and help them load up.
Johnny does this every single day. Barbara said after about a month she got a phone call from the manager of that grocery store. He said, “Barbara I can’t believe it. Something really amazing is beginning to happen. I was walking around the store and I noticed while we had lots of checkers at the checkout line, there was no one there but maybe one or two people. The line where Johnny was doing bagging went all the way back to the frozen food section.” True story! He said, “I would tell them over the intercom that there were other lines you could move over to. We would walk down the line and tell people there were other lines open. People would just look at us and say, ‘No, we’ll wait because we want Johnny’s encouraging word for the day.’ One woman came by and grabbed the supervisor. She said, ‘I used to only come to the grocery store once a week or once every other week. Now I come by almost every day. I buy something just so I can get Johnny’s encouraging word for the day.’” About a month later, the store manager called Barbara and said, “It’s changing our entire culture of our store. Even in the floral department when a flower was broken they used to just throw it away. Now they walk out into the lines, on their own initiative, they pin it onto elderly women or young girls. They brighten their day.”
Listen, there are a lot of people in the org chart at that grocery store but I’m telling you the most important person is Johnny, the bagger. He’s speaking words of life and words of life can change a culture. It can change a group of people. Friends, if it can happen at a grocery store it can happen in a church. This is a place where we speak words of life to one another. We are a community that says, “We’re not going to gossip. We’re not going to share hearsay. We’re not going to engage in this deadly poison that can destroy lives, family, and people. We’re not going to spread those stories. We’re not going to hear them or pass them on. We’re going to put a stop to them. We’re going to share words of life.”
It’s a hard world, isn’t it? You have enough words of anguish, anxiety, pain, and death in our culture. It’s all around us. You have employees who can cut you down to subatomic particles with their tongue. But when we walk in these doors we encourage one another. We speak words of life. In our small groups we need to make a commitment that we’re going to speak words of life. What that means, when you come together in your small group and you’re going through a hard time and you can’t make sense of it – the people around you begin to say, “I know you are hurting. I know you are feeling all alone. I know you feel like life doesn’t make sense but God is good and He’s there. He loves you and cares for you. We care about you. We’re going to walk this road with you. You don’t have to do it alone.” That’s speaking words of life.
When someone doesn’t feel like they are good enough in their job, you look at them and say, “You’re a child of the King. You are good enough. You are worthy. You can do this.” You speak words of life. I talked to a guy out in the hallway at the end of services last night. He said, “It’s been a horrible month. My brother, who I loved and grew up with, died of an overdose this week. It’s been awful. But what has sustained me and kept me going is the encouragement in my small group. I went to them and said, ‘I’m numb. I don’t feel anything right now. I can’t make sense of any of this.’ They looked at me and said, ‘That’s okay. You can be numb. You are free to not know the answers. You can come and be yourself.’” They began to encourage him and cheerlead him. He said, “What has gotten me through the last month is that group of people speaking words of life to me.” This is a community where we speak words of life.
Friends, our world is so starving for encouragement that people will line up at a grocery store all the way back to the frozen-food aisle. Think about how beautiful that is and how tragic that is that they’ll go there every single day so they can get a word of encouragement. What kind of power and influence we can have in this valley if all of us said, “We’re going to encourage one another.” Even today as you leave this place as you see somebody you know or somebody you have encountered, just encourage them.
Ladies, maybe you see another woman and you like her shoes. Say, “You have great shoes.” Or, “I love your shirt.” Guys, don’t do this but ladies you can do this. Just encourage one another. Maybe you see a co-worker and say, “Great job.” Maybe you see someone hurting and you say, “You’re not alone.” Speak words of life, we all need it.
