Wherefore putting away lying, speak every man truth with his neighbor; for we are members one of another. (Ephesians 4:25)

R. G. LeTourneau, an outstanding Christian businessman for whom LeTourneau College was named, made a fortune with a company that manufactured large earth moving equipment. He once remarked, “We used to make a scraper known as ‘Model G.’ One day someone asked our salesman what the G stood for. The man, who was pretty quick on the trigger, immediately replied, ‘I’ll tell you. The G stands for gossip because like tale-bearer this machine moves a lot of dirt and it moves it fast.’”

The trouble with gossip is not so much that it is spoken as an intended lie, but that it is heard as if it were absolute truth. Abraham Lincoln had a favorite riddle he used to put to people: “If a man were to call the tail of a dog a leg, how many legs would the dog have?”

The usual reply was “five.”

“Wrong,” Lincoln would say with his wry smile. “The dog still has only four legs. Calling the tail a leg doesn’t make it one.”

Just because a tale may have been repeated many times by so-called “reliable sources” doesn’t necessarily make it a truth.

God of Truth and Justice, may Your Holy Spirit guard my mouth against falsehoods and the spreading of gossip. May the truth be always in my heart and on my lips.