"Oh, be careful little mouth what you say..."

"For the Father up above is looking down in love, oh be careful little mouth what you say..." How many of us sang this song as kids or have taught it to their children, but don't think about the meaning behind the words and practice this themselves. The power of the spoken word goes way beyond what people understand.
Let's look at just the neurology (brain chemistry) behind speech and what you say and how it effects you. The things that you say to or about other people and the speech you use with yourself trains your brain on a daily basis on how you want it to think about any and every topic you deal with. When you think about something (like a particular person) your brain is like a filing cabinet, it opens the drawer related to this person, pulls out the file with their name on it, reads it and says.."Ohhh yes, we don't like this person for this or that", it closes the file and sends a signal back down to the front of your brain and then you have a reaction or a response to seeing or hearing this person. This reaction happens with every single thought about every single thing every single second of every single day. Every second you have 3 trillion bits of information coursing through your brain, 3 TRILLION!!! The brain is processing everything you do and everything you and those around you are saying and is storing a memory to that. Here in lies the problem. The amazing and scary thing about your brain is that it is moldable. You can alter what you think about a certain topic or person, for good or for bad. And the body doesn't know the difference between you saying something to yourself and hearing someone else talk about themselves or something else around you. So grandma's old addage "You are who you hang around.." is neurologically correct. You will implant nerve synapsis based on the ways people are talking around you. So if you're around someone who says that they themselves are ugly, and dumb, and no good at anything, and talks negative about pretty much everything, your brain doesn't know the difference between them talking about them, and them talking about you...so it assumes that's how you feel about you. When I used to travel and shoot professionally, my mental coach (ex-olympic gold medalist in rifle shooting) used to tell me that for every negative thought you had, you had to tell yourself 5 postive thoughts to reverse it. Negativity is POWERFUL!! Satan likes nothing better than for God's people to do nothing. And the quickest way to do that is to have them feeling so down about themselves and about each other and to talk to each other about it and to feel more and more depressed that they don't feel like witnessing or ministering to anyone!!
In James it talks about the power of the tongue and how it is like the rudder on a ship, a "small thing that makes grand speeches. But a tiny spark can set a great forest on fire." James 3:5-6. The smallest things we say without thinking can really wreck a person's life....
With a new son I was laughing with Cindy the other day, but everyone always freaks out about someone smoking around their kids, or cussing, or something blatant, but then they'll let someone sit there and speak negative, discouraging things over them or someone else and we don't do a thing about it. The body can detox the cigarette smoke, but it takes alot of work to get over what someone says to you.
So be deliberate in what you say or what you allow others to say to you or about you. Because what you say is a "small spark that can set a great forest ablaze...".

JB