The Power of the Tongue

I bet you that there have been things people have said to you that you remember vividly. Hurtful things. Cruel things. Unnecessary things. Have a particular instance in mind? I bet you do. I can think of a few myself. A lot of the time we don't realize what an impact our words have on other people. As a writer, I focus on the importance of words. Typically when people address the use of words, they address it from a negative point of view. Today, I'm going to do the opposite.

First read James 3.

Powerful stuff, isn't it? The tongue really is a powerful thing. Just as James wrote, we should not use it to praise God and curse men; we are called to a higher purpose than that. We are called to use our words for spreading the Gospel and building each other up.

I'm going to focus on the latter.

Building each other up can include multiple things, such as accountability and gentle correction, but right now I'm just going to talk about edification, or the literal building up; to put it more simply, encouraging.

I believe that we, as humans, remember kind word more than we remember the negative. In fact there have been several instances in my life where something trivial I have said has made a huge impact on someone else's life without my realizing it until later.

In junior high I used to say "Never worry about the future; it's already tomorrow in Australia." I simply thought this was a clever play on words, so I repeated it. Turns out, one of my friends took it to heart. I was spending the night at her house, and she let me read part of her journal. I was in it. It was about the start of the summer and how she missed me, but also about how I had deeply impacted her. I was shocked. I never thought that I had done anything out of the ordinary; I was just doing what I thought was proper for a friend to do. My encouraging and even my jokes made a serious impression on her.

Later in high school, one of my friends was struggling with some pretty heavy stuff. I told her about something that I had read once because her circumstance reminded me of it. Turns out, those couple words of encouragement helped convince her that taking her life wasn't a good option.

Soak that in for a minute. That's intense. Keep in mind that I don't write this to lift myself up. My desire for this blog is to push you, as my readers, on to become better for God's glory. It's not like my words are the only ones that have an impact. I can almost guarantee that something you've said has had the same impact on someone else, even if it was only a passing remark.

Now that you're aware of the power of words, I challenge you to use them to edify others. Practice the art of taming your tongue. It's hard, impossible even if you try to do it alone. The great thing is that we don't have to do it alone, we have the perfect Christ to help us out along the way. With this in mind, focus on using your words to build one another up. Don't tear people down, even in a joking manner.

Words have more power than many of us will ever know.

"Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen." - Eph. 4:29