Bridle Your Tongue
"Whoever would love life and see good days must keep their tongue from evil and their lips from deceitful speech."
Welcome Back!
I know, I know, I said that this would be a more regular thing (and I meant that), but please excuse the multi-week absence. I certainly didn’t mean to be gone for so long. Aside from settling into our new Idahome, finding a church, and upgrading from our Prius to an Odyssey, I’ve been working on attaining a better work/life balance.
It’s an ongoing process, but one that’s finally starting to see some stability. Excuses aside, I just haven’t made as much time for Further Up & Further In as I’d like (been too busy with The Beast of Bear-tooth Mountain, coming soon), and so I hope to rectify that from here-on-out.
Enjoy your irregularly scheduled program…
Bridle Your Tongue
In the past few days, I’ve been confronted with a harsh truth: I don’t always control my tongue well.
That’s probably a bit too generous, especially as of late. It’s an impossible thing, taming the tongue. And it’s even more difficult when that means stifling my grumblings, complainings, or any other unneccesary verbal frustrations about things that I can’t control.
Between the cross-country move and restarting over again, I’ve recently given myself a free pass to air my grievances whenever the feelings sweep over me. Because of that, I’ve let the general stressors of life get the better of me on more than one occasion. My poor wife has been very gracious; I couldn’t have asked for a better companion.
This past weekend, I was catching up with an old friend who lives on the opposite coast. We talked for a number of hours, and near the end of our call, we started conversing about a mutual friend who has been in a tough spot. Despite our “good intentions,” I found myself a bit convicted. We were walking a fine line between genuine concern and gossip, so I repented just to be safe.
That very evening, after the Little Miss was down for the count, Hannah and I watched a few episodes of Little House on the Prairie. We’ve been getting back into the show as of late, plowing through the fifth season. That night’s episode, titled “Harriet’s Happenings,” stuck out as particularly timely.
To keep a long story short, the town gossip Harriet Oleson (Katherine MacGregor) gets her own column in the local paper, The Pen & the Plow, only to use her unique perception of reality to effectively ruin the lives of those in Walnut Grove (while, of course, promoting her own business). What’s worse is that no matter how bad the rumors get, the townsfolk continue to buy the paper, fanning the flames of her destructive behavior.
Having had enough, Michael Landon’s iconic Charles Ingalls stands before the town’s congregation during the Sunday service and calls out Harriet’s behavior from the pulpit. More than that, he convicts his friends and neighbors for feeding into the gossip by continuing to buy said “news” paper, therefore participating in the same sins throughout the week that they claim to condemn on Sunday. It’s a powerful scene, and if it were on YouTube, I’d have linked the clip below.
It’s funny the way that God juxtaposes conversations, stories, and sermons all together. Of course, by funny I actually mean providential. We may not always be able to see the full puzzle that the Holy Spirit is putting together in our lives–oftentimes we can only see a piece or two, if that–but once it’s complete, everything seems to make sense.
That’s how I felt yesterday morning while attending our new church.
On Sunday, one of our pastors worked through the third chapter of the Book of James. I am not a minister, so I’ll be careful not to preach a sermon of my own, but as he exposited the text, it became all the more obvious how impossible taming one’s tongue can be. Without the Spirit of God’s help, we have no hope.
In explaining the destructive force of the tongue, James writes…
“For we all stumble in many ways. And if anyone does not stumble in what he says, he is a perfect man, able also to bridle his whole body. 3 If we put bits into the mouths of horses so that they obey us, we guide their whole bodies as well. 4 Look at the ships also: though they are so large and are driven by strong winds, they are guided by a very small rudder wherever the will of the pilot directs. 5 So also the tongue is a small member, yet it boasts of great things.
“How great a forest is set ablaze by such a small fire! 6 And the tongue is a fire, a world of unrighteousness.”
- James 3:2-6a
Our words have real power, and I’m not talking just about gossip. The way we respond to our hard life circumstances, to minor inconveniences, or just our lack of everyday control (because, if we’re being honest, we don’t have any anyway) is just as much a reflection of our heart as when we tell explicit lies or exaggerate the truth. The way we live matters because our lives are not all about us.
The Bible is clear that, though we may judge a person by their outward appearance–their physicality, their monetary success, or their lifestyle–the Lord looks only at the heart. The rest doesn’t matter to Him, and it shouldn’t matter to much to us either.
Of course, those other things aren’t bad per se, they’re just not nearly as important to the God of the Universe as our inward, spiritual health. This is why elsewhere in his New Testament letter, James commands the church to avoid any partiality (playing favorites). Instead, he calls us to treat all people with equal respect, no matter if they look like us or not.
Jesus himself said the following…
“The good person out of the good treasure of his heart produces good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure produces evil, for out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks.”
- Luke 6:45
Now, I don’t know about you, but that last bit is convicting.
Just like with what we eat, whatever we fill our minds and hearts with is what will eventually come out of us too.1 It’s the inward evils that ultimately defile a person (see Mark 7:20-23), so we’d best be aware of those things coming out.
None of us is perfect, and we all makes mistakes, that much is clear. James even expresses as much. Yet, it’s paramount that we understand the weight our words can have on another. It’s something that marriage has better helped me to understand, and given me a deeper motivation to work on it.
Like the Little House example, had lies, half-truths, and slander been ignored or corrected by the town, Walnut Grove wouldn’t have descended into chaos. Our words matter not just for our own sakes, but also for the sake of others.
Rounding out his message, our pastor challenged us to monitor our own vocal patterns by doing (or not doing) the following…
Do not complain
Do not boast
Do not gossip
Don’t run someone down
Don’t defend or excuse yourself2
Affirm others3
Yes, there is a time to lament and mourn, just as there’s a time to celebrate one’s accomplishments, but that’s not what he (or James) is talking about. There’s certainly a place for those things, especially in the midst of tragedy, but this challenge is meant to convict us regarding our general demeanor, heart posture, and the way in which we respond to others.
Admittedly, our pastor didn’t do so well himself. He said that it only took about 20 minutes for him to grumble after getting behind the wheel, which is probably more time than it would have taken me. The violent nature of the tongue manifests itself in different ways depending on the person, hence why James says it’s impossible to tame.
My prayer this weekend has been that the Lord would help me to better choose my words: when to speak and how to express them. Earlier in his letter, James says, “Let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger; for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God.” I want to be a man who is slow to speak and quick to listen. Not just for my own sanctification, but also because of the example I’ll be to my children.
God willing, my tongue will learn bow in submission to His will and not my own. It may take time, but all good things do.
Some Quick Housekeeping
For those who haven’t seen it yet, I recently launched a professional “Author’s Instagram” account to better share my work and detail my progress with The Beast of Bear-tooth Mountain. I’ll be sharing future Further Up & Further In news from there as well. You can follow me on Instagram here.
More than likely, some of the ideas I’ve explored–and will explore–on my Insta account will wind up finding their way here too, and vice-versa. (I’ve already got one idea in the works.) My goal is to overlap the themes, concepts, and stories that I explore on both platforms, but we’ll see how that turns out.
This Week’s Petty Picks
Little House on the Prairie (shocking, I know) is a TV series based on the book series of the same name by Laura Ingalls Wilder, and it’s a load of fun. Sure, it’s a bit dated, but honestly, that only adds to the show’s charm.
I’ve had the pleasure of being able to write about the series for Collider on a number of occasions lately (you can find those articles here), and as Hannah and I continue through, there are a lot of gems that would (sadly) never air on television today.
The entire series can be streamed for free on Amazon’s Freevee platform.
Alien Revelations is a podcast mini-series produced by the Apologia Studios podcast Cultish (a favorite of mine) that dives into the current “alien disclosure” conversation that most people seem to be ignoring. The 10-episode series examines the history of UFO/UAP encounters in America and filters them through a Christian lens.
In general, I’m a big fan of Cultish, so their Alien Revelations series had me interested from the get-go. Of course, other podcasts I listen to tackle these same topics, but what I appreciated about this take in particular is the clear and distinct timeline it presents.
You can find the first season in its entirety here.
There may be a future edition of Further Up & Further In all about how the media we consume in part reflects our spiritual wellbeing, but that’s a down-the-road conversation.
This may be the toughest one. It’s so easy to want to be understood by all and not want to come across a certain way, even if your motives aren’t pure. Not defending my wrongdoing is perhaps the most challenging of all.
This, of course, doesn’t mean affirming sin, but rather using our words primarily as a means of love, appreciation, and blessing. There’s a time and a season for everything.