Read
28 Gossip is no good!
It causes hard feelings
and comes between friends.
9You will keep your friends
if you forgive them,
but you will lose your friends
if you keep talking about
what they did wrong.
Reflect
The potential for good exists in all people. We have been made in the image of God, yet that image has been distorted in all of us. We are not “by nature” what God created us to be. As a result not all relationships are good.
High on the list of things that make relationships go bad is gossip. We do it so easily and so frequently – and yet careless talk has enormous potential to do evil. We share something, innocently enough (or so we think) with a friend, and this gets passed on, frequently with embellishment or exaggeration. Sometimes it gets twisted. Or somebody confides in us, but the secret is too interesting or juicy to keep to ourselves. If the person finds out the results can be devastating – but what about all the times we have not been caught? Probably most of us can think of times when we failed to keep our mouths shut. This is a quick way to lose friends.
In the New Testament James writes: “It takes only a spark to start a forest fire! The tongue is like a spark. It is an evil power that dirties the rest of the body and sets a person’s entire life on fire with flames that come from hell itself.” (James 3:5b-6) Wow! Who would have thought?
On the positive side, “you will keep your friends if you forgive them” (17:9). Pause for a moment and be honest with yourself. Aren’t we all sinners? Let’s find joy in being forgiven sinners, and in the same way let’s be quick to forgive others. That means forgetting what wrong they may have done and not passing it on. In our church we always have a prayer of confession near the beginning of the service. I love this. I can look around and know that we are all, for that moment at least, all one in Christ.
Respond
O God, Father of our Lord Jesus: give us grace to be agents of peace and reconciliation in all our relationships.
Annabel Robinson
Annabel was born in Kew, near London, England. She committed her life to Jesus Christ at a Scripture Union camp when she was 16, and immediately found joy and peace. At Oxford she was active in the Oxford Inter-Collegiate Christian Union, where she met her husband, Reid. They emigrated to Canada in 1965, where she taught Classics at the University of Regina until 2007. She has two children, Heather in Oslo and Alasdair in Calgary.