Can You Tame Your Tongue for Two Weeks?
How long would you survive this two-week test of your character?
What Does your Tongue Say About You?
I arrived late to a meeting of a church neighborhood group one night to find a lively discussion going on. The leader had just thrown this question out to the group:
Do we sin because we are sinners? Or are we sinners because we sin?
I will let you wrestle with that yourself. I think they are two sides of the same coin. Jesus took care of it all either way.
The leader then gave us this assignment, probably designed to help us discover the answer. He challenged us to avoid these activities during the next two weeks: gossip, blaming, complaining, deceiving ourselves or others, boasting and defensiveness. Easy-peasy, right? If you think so, try the challenge yourself.
That’s quite an assignment. I knew the hardest one for me would be not complaining. I do tend to grumble.
As we were discussing the difficulty of this assignment, someone told this story about another person who had attempted to discipline himself this way. When the two weeks were up this person’s friend, also in the group, told the group that his friend…
