In the evening I went down to visit
my younger brother and his family in Endicott. One of his friends, an avid
fisherman, had given him some fresh water Salmon from the North Country.
One salmon weighed over 40 pounds. We dressed the Salmon. We were like little
boys coming home after fishing trip. We had salmon for dinner. I said "what a
Generous God we serve and what a country we live in".
I hear from many of you from time to
time sharing how these daily devotions are blessing to you. I am blessed to
write these devotions and doubly blessed to share with you all around the corner
and around the globe. I heard from one of friends living in Tennessee
yesterday. She and her family were part of the large group that traveled with
us in Europe and the Holy Land in the sweet summer 2000. She is Christian
counselor and her daughter is medical doctor. One of friends living in Oklahoma
does post this devotions on my web page as a daily blog. I am so blessed and
so loved.
Proverbs 18:21 says, “The tongue has the power of life and
death.”. The Bible speaks of the throat as an “open grave” (Romans 3:13).
From my random readings I found
that an average person speaks 16,000 words a day. That’s the equivalent of a
64-page book. In one week you speak the equivalent of a 450-page book. In a
month you speak 480,000 words, the equivalent of a book of 1920 pages. In one
year you speak 5,760,000 words, which is roughly equivalent to 4 volumes of the
Encyclopedia Britannica. If we stretch that out over 70 years, the average
person speaks 403 million words, roughly equal to the entire 44-volume set of
Encyclopedia Britannica, multiplied nine times.
Today each one of us will speak the equivalent of a
64-page book. Tomorrow another book. The day after another one.
Let us Imagine if someone reads the
contents of the book we are writing with our words today. Suppose it was
recorded somewhere, written down somehow, caught on video, and then played back
on the Internet for the whole world to see. What would we learn about our
vocabulary? David Platt, a
Christian author, points out that social media increases the temptation of
careless speech:
“In a day of text-messaging, email, cell phones,
Twitter, blogs, Facebook, etc., we need to be careful. We’ve created an entire
culture that says if you have a thought, then you should immediately share it
with the rest of the world. But follower of Christ, don’t buy that line of
reasoning” (Exalting Jesus in James, Loc. 543).
Perhaps we need to pray for the gift of
silence. I remember reading about a famed linguist about whom it was said
that he knew how to remain silent in seven different languages.
James in his Epistle draws a shocking conclusion
when he says the unbridled tongue makes your religion useless. We need to keep this warning in mind at all
times, but especially when we are tired, under pressure, and when others are
trying to provoke us. May the Lord Jesus grant us special grace so that we might keep a
tight rein on our tongue.
In Christ,
Brown
