Gossip: The 8th Deadly Sin Proverbs 18:8

Who am I? I have no respect for justice. I maim without killing. I break hearts and ruin lives. I am cruel and malicious and gather strength with age. The more I am quoted, the more I am believed. I flourish at every level of society. My victims are helpless. They cannot protect themselves against me because I have no name and no face. To track me down is impossible. The harder you try, the more elusive I become. I’m nobody’s friend. Once I tarnish a reputation, it is never the same. I topple governments and ruin marriages. I destroy careers and cause heartache and sleepless nights. I wreck churches and separate Christians. I spawn suspicion and generate grief, make innocent people cry on their pillows. Even my name hisses. I am gossip.

Fifteen hundred years ago Pope Gregory the Great classified the sins that cause humanity to stumble (the 6th century). He looked at every sin mentioned in the Bible and boiled them down to 7 categories of sin. His list of 7 sins is known as The 7 Deadly Sins. The 7 deadly sins are pride, anger, indifference, envy, greed, lust, and gluttony. The 7 deadly sins include nearly every kind of human sin imaginable. But there is a deadly sin that failed to be included in the list of the 7 deadly sins. The 8th deadly sin is gossip.

All the sins of the tongue are deadly. Profanity, insults, lying negativism, complaints, and criticism are all harmful. Gossip is a particularly deadly sin. Gossip has destroyed more people, tarnished more reputations, broken more friendships, and split more churches than any sin I’m aware of. Gossip is quickly told, quickly heard, and quickly spread. Worst of all, gossip is quickly believed. People will confess to theft, adultery, even murder. But no one confesses to gossip.

Gossip is fueled by hell’s flames
Gossip is one of Satan’s fiery arrows that he shoots at us and entices us to shoot at others. The Lord doesn’t mince words in James 3:6 when he tells us about the origin of the sins of the tongue: “The tongue also is a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body. It corrupts the whole person, sets the whole course of his life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell.”
The flames of hell ignite gossip. Satan is behind all gossip, either directly or indirectly. When we listen to gossip, we give the devil a foothold in our lives. When we speak gossip, we’re speaking as Satan wants us to speak. As the old saying goes, “A gossiper is the devil’s postman.”a

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