James tells us not to bless God with our tongues while we go on sinning with our tongues. You are coming now to sing, to pray, to say amen, to fellowship with the saints. This means you must pay attention to your words.
You have frequently heard that you are not to impute motives when you hear that others have perhaps talked about you. But we also need to be reminded from time to time to let every word we speak be for the edifying of the hearer — and this edification does not include giving him or her some morsels of gossip, or the latest courtship news, or who is doing what, when and how.
Now it is quite true that those who are offended by gossip are almost always very poor judges of whether or not it is occurring. False charges of gossiping abound, and the whole thing is sometimes even a subject of gossip — “Can you believe how these people talk about each other? Why, I heard . . .”
At the same time it must be said that run-of-the-mill gossips are also very poor judges of whether or not it is occurring. We are coming before the Lord God of heaven, and we will be speaking in His courts. What have we been speaking outside His courts?