James For You by Sam Allberry

Author:Sam Allberry
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781784980320
Publisher: The Good Book Company
Published: 2015-06-11T16:00:00+00:00

Powerful

To show us how powerful our tongues are, James provides us with two visual aids—horses (v 3) and ships (v 4). I’m not great with horses. I’ve been riding a few times, and each time it has been terrifying. It is only when I’m sitting on one that I realise just how big they are. I’m intimidated and they’re uncompliant, which is not a great combination. I’ll just have to take James’ word for it that they can actually be controlled. But the key is what actually does the controlling: a small piece of metal called a bit, which sits in the horse’s mouth and can be used by its rider to direct it. That whole animal can be controlled and manipulated by something so small.

We see the same idea with ships. Ships are big. Rudders are small. One of the biggest ships in the world is the US aircraft carrier, USS Eisenhower. It weighs over 91,000 tons, is nearly 1,100 feet in length, has a nuclear–powered 280,000-horsepower engine, a complement of 6,100 men and women, and carries nearly 100 aircraft. It is vast. It is like a floating city. And yet all that weight, personnel, and hardware are steered by a rudder that’s just a tenth of one percent of the ship’s size. Something so comparatively small is able to manoeuvre something so huge.

James says it is the same with the tongue. It is small but very, very powerful, and so it can make “great boasts” (v 5). I’m told it is less than half a percent of our body weight. (I’ve not found a pain-free way to verify that, so we’ll have to assume it’s true.) Yet despite its small size, the tongue has an enormous impact. Its effect on us is out of all proportion to its size. It is able to determine the very course of our lives. The chances are you can think of things you have said, or not said, that have changed the path of your life, for better or for worse.

So far, so potentially good, we might think. The tongue is very powerful; surely that can go either way. Yes, James says, it can—but it generally doesn’t. The tongue is not something we tend to use for good. That brings us to the second characteristic of the tongue: its destructiveness. Yes, the tongue can make great boasts, but none of them are good.

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