Here's another meaning of that word. It means deadly poison. It means a venom, so it means two words - it's a cancer, a gangrene or it's a rust or it's a - these are good words aren't they? The Bible's actually got quite good descriptive words about our tongue. What's coming out of our life. Imagine carrying around a big bag of deadly poison see, and you're about ready to impart it to someone. You've got to not only deal with it in our own lives, but what we need to do is recognise when it's operating in someone else, and take preventative action. Okay then, so the next is venom. Now I looked up on venom, so it's the poison, so when a snake bites you - a venomous snake is a snake that's got poison. When it bites you, sometimes the bite itself is not a real problem, just a couple of punctures, but it's the venom that gets in you, and that word there, the tongue - the tongue is a deadly poison, means the tongue is a deadly venom. When a snake bites you, and there's venom in you, there's two kinds of different responses you have depending on the type of snake that bit you. One of them is the venom paralyses the nervous system slowly, so you can't actually breathe. Your system, in the end, you actually suffocate, because your whole nervous system shuts down. The nervous system is that part of us that causes us to be sensitive and aware to directions from the head, so when you have got a deadly poison working inside you, you can't actually respond to what God's saying properly at all. You're paralysed. Death is imminent.
The other kind of venom produces gangrene in a person's life, and so when a person gets bitten, what happens is the flesh begins to die all around the bite, and it keeps on and on and on. If it's not cut out, they die. Whoa! That's the tongue. Has anyone not got a tongue? All got a tongue. Okay, the thing that differs is what we're using the tongue for. So what are you using your tongue for? Are you building consciously, taking dominion over it, and using it to build, or you lose control of it? Suddenly you find you've blabbed out. You can't get those words back once they've gone out there. They're already out there doing their work. It's real hard to get them back, and after you've blabbed off your mouth, you can't seem to get the words back. Even if you go and say sorry, you can't get it back, because it's still done it's work. It's still hurt someone, and saying sorry, recognising, taking responsibility for the words, but it doesn't heal. The person's then been bitten by venom.
So here's another. James 3, Verse 6, it says the tongue is a fire. I was just looking at that stuff up in California, and they think someone may have lit it, but anyway whatever it is, this whole house is burning down because of a fire they couldn't control. Notice what it tells about the tongue. Look at the tongue - Verse 5; the tongue is a little member, very, very small. There's some have got a bigger tongue than others, but it boasts great things, and see how great a forest, the little fire starts. And the tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity. It's set among our members, and it defiles the whole body, it sets on fire the wheel of nature, and is set on fire by hell itself. Whoa! Whoa! So hell - now we find that hell has got a gate. At least one of them, I know what the gate is. Have a look in the mirror and it's found just here. That's where hell gets to work. Straight from our heart, out our mouth, is one of the gates of hell.
Jesus said the church that He's building will prevail against the gates of hell, so we've got to learn to use our mouth to build words, to have words that build. To do that, we've got to get to sort through the issues of the things of the heart. I'll give you a couple more. In Psalm 64 and Verse 7, it says the tongue fires out arrows. Ooh. Imagine - suppose it went down, and you have a look there, and you see that you come out to a field there, and you notice there's a whole lot of people, and they're practising archery. They've got their bow, fine set of arrows and they've got this compound bow, and they're just launching the arrows. Man, it's great! It's great if you stand behind the people who are shooting. [Laughter]. It's not so nice if you're at the front and you're the target. If you're the target, and they hit you with one of those arrows, you will hurt, and the Bible says, there is that speaks like the piercing. So it goes - there's woundings that go deep down into people. Gossip wounds people. It's like an arrow in them, and it goes right into the core of their being, and it begins to work away on the inside, like a snake actually. So you don't want to be in front of someone shooting.