Rumors

Written by cycleguy on July 6th, 2018

 

Don’t you just love rumors? Of course that was said tongue in cheek.  That leads me to a question:

Can there by anything more devastating to a church than a rush to judgement and the ensuing rumor mill?

Possibly the only other thing would be doctrinal error, but even those are different animals. Doctrinal error can be counteracted with truth. But rumors? Once they start flying all you-know-what breaks loose. How do you stop it? How do you take back the words? It happens in so many ways.

A misplaced word or action.

An overheard word which is considered to be true and passed along.

An angry person decides to take it out on the other person so lies are spread.

An “assumed” situation is perceived as real.

So we jump to conclusions, make a rash judgement and then decide others need to hear and know. Doesn’t matter if it is true or not. It makes for juicy gossip.

The fledgling nation of Israel was faced with just such a thing when it was “assumed” and perceived that an altar had been erected by the eastern tribes. They were going out rogue. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed and checked out the perceived defection.

Because of misconceptions, there was also a need for cities of refuge. This Sunday I’ll be talking about the cities of refuge and about the false altar rumor.

Life can be cruel enough without misconceptions and misrepresentations and false rumors and lies being spread. Please make sure you do a gut check (as I have had to do) that you are not the one responsible for passing along damaging  information about people-true or false.

 

 

1 Comments so far ↓

  1. I don’t think there is anything in the church more poisonous than false rumors. I vowed years ago that I would never gossip about others, and God has been good to me in that department. Still, there are those times when I’m tempted and have to bite my tongue. Thanks, Lord, for being merciful!
    Blessings, Bill!