Have you ever watched people yelling at their kids or arguing with their spouse, in a public place and thought I’d never do that? Or seen someone react to a generous offer by brushing the person’s generosity aside with a curt ‘No, I’m okay,’ and think I’d never do that? Or hear someone pay a compliment to another and hear it brushed aside by the pious comment, ‘It’s the Lord doing it.’
Do you ever see Christians in the news for all the wrong reasons as mentioned in the blog I read this morning about ‘Christians behaving badly’ and think I’d never behave like that. Are you sure?
Haven’t we all had days where our behavior has not been what it should have been? Where people could look at us and say ‘And they call themselves Christian! If that’s what being a Christian is all about then I want nothing to do with it.’
I don’t have to look far to find times when frustrated by the behavior of others, I have responded more sharply than I should have. We can make all the excuses we like and we usually do e.g. ‘I wasn’t well, I was tired, other people made me so angry, and they shouldn’t have done what they did’ etc. But none of it excuses our behavior.
We are not responsible for what others do but what we do and how we react. It is not enough to say as kids do when caught arguing or fighting, ‘It’s not my fault. He started it.’ My mother’s answer when I tried that was, ‘And I’m finishing it.’ In the end it doesn’t matter who started it, what provoked our response or what the motivation behind the action was, we are responsible for our own words and actions.
That little troublemaker – the tongue can get us into all sorts of problems. Look at the warning in James 1:26, ‘If anyone thinks himself to be religious, and yet does not bridle his tongue but deceives his own heart, this man’s religion is worthless.’ It could as easily read, this woman’s religion is worthless.
Read James 3:5-8 for other insights about the tongue and the trouble it can cause. Can you still say ‘I’d never do that?’
Bible verses from The New American Standard Version
words and actions that don’t match