Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript – James 3:1-12

We return to the epistle of James today. We’ll be looking at the first half of chapter 3 talking about the tongue. You have that picture on the cover of your order of worship. I would encourage you to take that home as we go through today’s sermon. We’ll see the relevance of it. But we’re going to be looking at God’s word. We just had a beautiful psalm right about meditation on the created order and our proper response to it being words which we come together to do today every Lord’s day and corporate worship.

James 3:1-12 addresses our tongues. Please stand for the reading of God’s word: James 3:1-12—The Tongue and the Course of Your Life.

My brethren, let not many of you become teachers, knowing that we shall receive a stricter judgment. For we all stumble in many things. If anyone does not stumble in word, he is a perfect man, able also to bridle the whole body. Indeed, we put bits in horses’ mouths that they may obey us, and we turn their whole body. Look also at ships, although they are so large and are driven by fierce winds, they are turned by a very small rudder wherever the pilot desires. Even so, the tongue is a little member and boasts great things.

See how great a forest a little fire kindles, and the tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity. The tongue is so set among our members that it defiles the whole body and sets on fire the course of nature. And it is set on fire by hell. For every kind of beast and bird of reptile and creature of the sea is tamed and has been tamed by mankind, but no man can tame the tongue. It is an unruly evil full of deadly poison.

With it we bless our God and Father, and with it we curse men who have been made in the similitude of God. Out of the same mouth proceeds blessing and cursing. My brethren, these things ought not to be so. Does a spring send forth fresh water and bitter from the same opening? Can a fig tree, my brethren, bear olives, or a grape vine bear figs? Thus, no spring yields both salt water and fresh.

Let’s pray. Lord God, we desire to be transformed by the power of your word. We want our speech to be better. We want, Lord God, to be single-minded in our devotion to you and single-minded in the use of our tongue to affect the purposes of your kingdom that the course of our life may not suffer shipwreck on rocky shores or end up in a destination that is not your kingdom. Bless us Lord God by the power of your holy spirit as we look at your word that our words may be transformed in Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.

Please be seated.

Well, welcome to the mouthouse. The mouthouse. You ever heard that term? Well, it goes back at least to Luther. And Luther said the church is not a penthouse. It is a pen house. It’s a mouthouse. It’s a place where speech pervades and the essence of it is communication using words and speech to one another. That phrase mouthouse was actually picked up in the Puritan movement and then in colonial America. The church in Boston that was the basis for all kinds of American history of independence and other political events was a meeting house and it was also referred to in contemporary literature as a mouthouse.

And so this country was sort of birthed in a mouthouse, in a church where people would come together, hear the word of God, be transformed by that word, have their speech to one another reflect that word of God and his spirit, and then those discussions would apply themselves to the events of the times in which they live. And so their discussions of political or commercial or other events would be occurring in like manner in the context of the mouthouse, which is the church.

So we want to talk today about speech. And the reason I’m bringing this up is that pretty frequently—not always, but frequently—people can read this text of James and simply see it related to their own personal speech. And while that’s true, and we’ll talk about that today, I think it’s also true that it’s talking about the mouthouse. The section begins in verse one with a description of not many teachers should be found. Well, that’s teachers in the context of the church.

So what we want to do today is look at this text and think about speech. Now, we’ve already seen speech in the Epistle of James, one of the three elements of true religion. Do you remember what they are? You should. I’ve reviewed it a couple of times, preached on it. Write it down. This is how you take notes, children. If you want to know the three things at the end of chapter one that James says is true religion, the first is bridle your tongue, which doesn’t mean stop talking, right?

If you think about it, a bridle—we’ll read that in a couple of minutes here about a bit and bridle and it directs things. So have your tongue broken to harness the harness of Jesus. And then secondly to visit widows and the fatherless in their distress, which means to help them. Visit doesn’t mean just paying a social call. So that’s number two. And number three to keep oneself unspotted from the world. And we’ll see today and we’ve already read in this text that the tongue defiles the whole body. And the word is like a stain. It puts a spot through the whole body. And so it’s also related to not being defiled by the world.

We think of that usually in terms of the big sins that we so frequently focus on, but really that means avoiding the ways of men and particularly the ways of men in dealing with our difficulties. Remember that who James is writing to is we can think of it as a group of people, a ship, a church, a number of churches, and they’re out there on very stormy, very stormy weather. They’re on a rough, choppy sea. Okay? Why? Because the address tells us they’ve been dispersed because of the persecution. And we can see historically that they’ve been dispersed because of the persecution. And so they had to flee Jerusalem.

And then don’t think that was the end of the matter. Because the Jews who refused to bow the knee to Jesus Christ and his grace and mercy chased these folks wherever they went and would arrest them, as we know Paul participated in, et cetera. So they’re out there in choppy waters. And what he’s telling us here is that one of the key ways to navigate through the choppy waters, get to a successful destination is the proper use of the tongue. And he tells us the same thing. Sometimes we’re in smooth waters. Sometimes we’re in choppy waters individually and as a church. And what he’s telling us here is these people—he’s repeating to them—the significance of their speech in terms of what’s going to happen.

Speech is a reflection of our character. It’s kind of one of the things that’s obvious in this text and what our Savior said in the gospels. It’s a revelation of who we are. You know, the idea of the text is not to change your speech without changing your thoughts. And in fact, it’s kind of like almost impossible. Your speech will be a reflection of your character, a revelation of you, and also a betrayer of you.

God’s speech is what formed the world, right? He spoke the world into existence. His speech, if you think about it, is how you came to salvation, right? Psalm 19 quoted in the New Testament. God’s speech forms the body of Christ, right? God’s speech also keeps the body of Christ well disciplined. The only—you know, governments might shoot you or throw you in jail. What churches do is they speak something about you. If you don’t repent of your sins, you know, they go to you, try to help you and repent, repent. The worst thing we can—the only power the church has in terms of negative sanctions is speech, words.

But if we remember that words created the world and words really were behind the new creation in Christ—he is the word—then what we’re saying is we have the most powerful weapon in the world. And the question is, what are we doing with it now?

The way we’re going to approach the text, it’s pretty simple. No outlines, but you can write one, right? So there’s just one command basically at the beginning of this section. That’s verse one. And it’s pretty simple and it’s got a pretty simple reason attached to it. And then after that, what he does is he gives a series of positive descriptions of the tongue. Okay? And then following that, he gives a series of negative effects of the tongue.

So you’ve got a command buttressed with an understanding of the positive use of the tongue and then the negative difficulties of the tongue and then finally at the end he kind of wraps up the positive and the negative talking about blessing God and yet cursing our fellow man or our brother in the church—I think in context. So it’s kind of a summing up of positive and negative and it’s calling us to root out whatever negative we’re involved in.

So that’s kind of the flow of it: a command, positive, negative, and then a closing—I think ecclesiastical—example of blessing God in worship that brings together the positive and negative aspects or powers of the tongue. Okay, so we begin with the single command.

My brethren, let not many of you become teachers, knowing that we shall receive a stricter judgment.

Now, that’s pretty straightforward. It doesn’t really take much work to figure out what that means. But immediately it puts the whole context here in an ecclesiastical setting, right? I mean, what he’s saying is in the churches I’m writing to, not many of you should be teachers. Now, remember we finished up last week the last half of chapter 2—faith without works. There was a heresy being spread about by bad teachers that said you could just make a decision for Jesus, go nail that decision on the post in your backyard. No matter what else you ever did in your life, your salvation is secured.

And that same heresy is at work today in America. I think less so than it was 30 years ago, but it’s still out there. Why was that out there? Probably because he’s following it up with this verse. Because there were teachers who shouldn’t be teaching. They were unqualified or undisciplined men and they were leading the congregation ashore. The ship would suffer shipwreck if he didn’t do something about this. He, being James.

What he says is not many of you should be teachers. Why? Because we incur a stricter judgment. Now, he’s going to go a different direction with the rest of the 11 verses. We receive a stricter judgment because the tongue is such a powerful force for good or evil. And so God wants his ministers of the gospel to be quite disciplined in how they use speech. So that’s what he’s saying here.

So it puts it in the context of the body politic, so to speak, the ecclesiastical body. And we can make application though in our own lives. Like your family is a ship, right? Your household and you go through choppy waters. And so one of the important things is that whoever’s at the helm—the head of the household, the dad if you have a dad in your home, or the mom if there’s no dad, or the mom and dad together—we could say as well, that they do a good job steering the ship, which means that they do a good job with their tongues. So this has implications for us personally.

If you think of your business as the ship, or the politics of the culture as the ship of state from common reference, well then this means when our country’s in difficulty, good leaders, your business, same thing. So it has lots of application, but the immediate context is established as an ecclesiastical one, one in which he’s talking about the church.

As we go through this text, we’ll see that some portions of it really don’t work if we’re just talking about us as individuals. You know, if you control your speech, it’s really not true that you can control everything in your life. There are people who don’t talk much but are pretty wicked people. So it seems like that’s a statement that really is only properly understood in the context of the church of Jesus Christ.

Now, immediate application of this verse, right? We need to be patient, dedicated, and focused as we search for an associate pastor who may well replace me over the next five or ten years. Very significant. Because this text reminds us that this ship—you know, this church—is governed and directed by men and by the men who teach and preach. That’s primarily going to be your full-time pastor guy. And his speech is exceedingly significant to whether we stay on course or not, what course corrections are made, what the destination is, and whether we’re going to suffer shipwreck as a church or not.

So you see, it’s quite important in terms of understanding this text as we approach the pastoral search. Pray, have patience, but pray for the pastoral search activities. We’re having a Google Hangout talk with the guy this Wednesday night. The three elders are—you know, there’s—we’re not going to have quickly find someone to put into the slot and then suffer difficulties because of it because we believe this verse. Teachers are exceedingly important in the life of the church.

This is also, by the way, why, you know, Bible studies are typically overseen by the church to make sure that not just anybody who wants to ends up teaching, because that’s dangerous. Heresy spreads. There’s a lot of liberty and latitude in that. But that’s why the church has an interest. Let’s put it that way. That’s why the church institutionally has an interest in the Bible studies that are going on in the context of the church.

As we’ll see this developed, particularly in this next section, the tongue’s positive value to the church:

For we all stumble in many ways. If anyone does not stumble in word, he is a perfect man, able also to bridle the whole body.

Now, that “perfect” there is this word that we’ve seen before in James. It means mature, right? Like Jacob—James’ name is Jacob. Jacob was a perfect man, a mature man. And he’s saying that the way to achieve Christian maturity, one of the significant ways, is to be able to control your speech, that you don’t stumble in word. You know, it’s interesting because if you think about all the preparation we do for trying to make ourselves better people, better Christians, the stuff we put our time and energy into, how much time and energy do we put into actually how we speak, the words we say, and the way in which we say them?

Well, this text says, you know, that should be up there near the top of the list somewhere. For a young man to think about his speech and develop into maturity by taking care of what comes out of his mouth. And as it says, he’s able also then to bridle the whole body.

Well, again with that ecclesiastical setting in verse one, what it means is a pastor or series of pastors have a very significant effect and can bridle the whole body. They can keep the whole church directed in a particular way. Churches don’t just happen and they have kind of a life of their own and you replace the preacher and really not a big deal. No, this says that the way you achieve that kind of control in a positive way over the whole body is through speech.

Verse three:

Indeed, we put bits in horses’ mouths that they may obey us, and we turn their whole body. Look also at ships, although they are so large and are driven by fierce winds, they are turned by a very small rudder wherever the pilot desires. Even so, the tongue is a little member and boasts great things.

So there were two means of conveyance when this is written. You know, conveyance—instead of just walking—steerable units they were horses and they were ships. And so in both cases they’re a representation again of the church. Now the ship is a common representation of the church in history. The horse not so much, but again it’s a useful illustration for James.

What does it mean? Well, he’s going to tell us he’s going to warn us about sins of tongue. But first, he’s going to tell us the incredibly positive influence it has, the strength that it has for good or evil. But by implication, if we use it correctly, the horse gets where it’s supposed to go and the ship ends up at safe harbor. And that’s done through a very little member—the bit in the horse’s mouth—and you’re turning it and such, or you’re wooing it or whatever it is. And the rudder, a little thing on a great ship that turns it.

And so a bad helmsman, a bad tongue, a man who guides the ship of state—that is, the church of Jesus Christ, that particular local church or a group of churches—his tongue is very significant in terms of whether the ship reaches safely the destination that the ship is supposed to meet.

Now we’ve got front page illustrations of this, do we not? You don’t have to think very far. They come up all the time. The latest is the horrific tragedy in South Korea with the ferry. And because a good helmsman wasn’t taking care of guiding that ferry where it was supposed to go—because there wasn’t a good helmsman and he wasn’t doing his job and the captain was distracted and a rookie guy is at the helm or the rudder—what happens? Hundreds of people die a hellish death. I mean to drown in the midst of the sea, body of water, even though it was not very deep, in murky dirty water. I mean, this is, you know, kind of a biblical picture frequently of hell.

And so hell is the result. Now those people—I’m not, you know, those people of course, many of them were Christians, I’m sure, being in South Korea—and they’re ending up in heaven. But the illustration that it gives us is a sound one. Wrong guy using the wrong speech, ship can sink. Bad things will happen.

And of course these sorts of illustrations have been true for many years as long as you’ve been alive. Back a number of years ago there was the oil tanker up in Alaska, because they weren’t careful in the navigation of it. You know, people weren’t killed, but the environment was not taken proper care of by those that are given dominion over it, which are men.

So we’ve got examples here to remind us. And this is why, you know, your elders take the responsibility we have very seriously to guide the ship of state, the horse as well, right? So one of the requirements, one of the things that God wants us to be is meek. And meek was a Greek term used to break a horse to its master’s control—a trained, broken horse, not a weak horse or one that had been broken down in terms of strength. But the strength of the horse in a meek person is put under the control and dominion of Jesus Christ. Jesus and the Holy Spirit is that bit in our mouth. And we’re to be meek, submissive to him.

Now, that’s the power that then is given to us over our families, our businesses, our church, whatever it is, to direct them and guide them as they have tremendous strength and capability. But in the face of opposition, fierce winds, difficult times, choppy waters, you know what happens is the ship can be brought to safe harbor correctly. So this is what [he’s saying]. Just yesterday—

Now, something important to say here is he’s not really given us, you know, what that speech should look like much. Okay? And so it’d be easy to assume to bring in our meaning of what we think good speech is. But as you read James and his admonition to us about our speech, he’s the model to these pastors, right? He’s the pastor to the pastors. And if we look at his speech as we go through this epistle, we’ll see a model of the proper way to guide and direct a church or a group of churches.

And James is no blushing violet, right? I mean, he can speak very forcefully and strongly. He can raise his voice. He can, as we saw last week, talk about people who are kind of idiots. He can do those things and still be an exemplar to them of speech.

Just yesterday, or this week, I got a postcard from a pastor in Virginia and I had been part of a group of four or five guys to go back there and work through a significant church problem and I had an opportunity to—I was asked to preach and I preached on Joshua 22. And you know, the way real men speak—and without getting into it—I think that sermon’s online or one based on Joshua 22. But this man here, we are I don’t know, ten years later or something, and he sends me a postcard said he was thinking again about that sermon. And I know it impacted him a lot at the time. And his church is in some choppy waters now ecclesiastically with the denomination. But he, you know, expressed his appreciation for that Joshua 22 sermon. And it’s an example of how real men speak and how real men and women speak and how difficulties are worked through so that the ship gets to its proper destination.

So we’re to guide the course in life of the ship—the church—to its destination. That’s the idea of the positive effect of the tongue. And to keep it from shipwreck.

Now then he goes on to talk about the negative effects of the tongue. Right? So the tongue—and there’s kind of two categories here. First, the tongue’s great destructive power. He says:

See how great a forest a little fire kindles.

So here the example is fire and how just a little spark, a little fire, and a whole forest can be burned up. And the tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity. Now that word “iniquity” is better translated “unrighteousness.” It’s like “not righteous.” So iniquity can kind of fool you. It might sound like one thing, but what it’s saying is it’s “un”—that the tongue is a world of unrighteousness.

Now that’s important. You know, we’ve said from chapter one that just like us, the churches were hungering and thirsting for righteousness, God’s justice in the world. They want to know how to deal with people that are persecuting them, right? They want to know how to do that. And what James seems to be telling them is, “Well, I’ll tell you the way not to do it. Don’t just let your tongue be uncontrolled because your tongue—the effects of the tongue, unbridled, not being submissive to Jesus Christ, who gives us a new tongue, right—will not produce righteousness. Angry speech, condemnatory, denunciatory speech, backbiting, slander, attacks on those that persecute us with our tongues. This doesn’t produce righteousness because the tongue is a world of unrighteousness.”

So he’s warning them, you know, that their tongues are contributing to the problem they actually want to solve, which is: how do we see righteousness affected in the context of our lives? The tongue is so—you know, he’s not denying things are bad. And with you this week, you may have choppy waters, but don’t think you’re going to get through it, okay, just by blurting out bad speech. Because when you do that, you add to the choppiness. You add to the problem. You add to the unrighteousness rather than affecting righteousness.

The tongue is so set among our members that it defiles. That word may be better translated stains. Stains the whole body. So it kind of, you know, it doesn’t just a little blotch. The whole body tends to take on the stain of the tongue. And it sets on fire the course of nature. And it is set on fire by hell or Gehenna. Okay. So it says that it sets on fire the course of nature—the wheel of life, maybe a better translation, the wheel of life or the wheel even of birth, because that is the word that’s kind of related to this here.

So what it’s talking about is your life, your ups and downs, your sunrises and your sunsets, you know, the circle of life. Except it’s not cyclical and it’s not non-moving. There’s a progression to it, but it’s a progression that kind of goes through cycles, upward. Well, the whole course of your life—in other words, the course of your life can be destroyed by your tongue. The course of your life can be set on fire by your tongue. It can be a course of unrighteousness, dissatisfaction, trouble, pain, sorrow. And you’re going to have some of that stuff anyway, but you’re going to add to it with an improper use of the tongue.

That is the tendency. That is your fallen tongue at work, setting the course of your life, your mornings and your evenings, your ups and your downs, your work through the life that God gives us, setting it on fire. And why? Because it’s set on fire by hell, the source of this.

So the tongue has great difficulties attached to it, great destructive powers, great positive powers to direct the course of our life and the course of the church, but great destructive powers as well. We all know this if we have any kind of years behind us, that we’ve used our speech at times in ways that have been destructive, to set on a little brush fire in our course of life. Hopefully we put it out. Repent.

Now, Jesus in Matthew 12:36 says, “I say to you that for every idle word men may speak, they will give account of it in the day of judgment.” So you know, I’m being applying this, I think, properly so to the church. But clearly, our Savior broadens that focus and would cause us to think about the broadness of the focus. The course of life seems to be more about each of us individually. And our Savior says that every idle word we speak we will give an account of that—of that idleness of word, of that word.

Matthew 15:18: those things which proceed out of the mouth come from the heart and they defile or stain a man. So again this has great personal application to us, to not sin in our speech and to be bridled by the Holy Spirit so our righteousness will not be lost by an improper use of the tongue.

Now to buttress that point, James 3:18, a little later in this chapter—we’ll talk about this next week—but in the discussion of wisdom from above, he says, “The fruit of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace.” So how are you going to get to the justice and righteousness of God in a culture? You’re going to be trying to make peace. And we’ll see next week that the wisdom from above is filled with, you know, patience and good works and that sort of stuff, as opposed to fiery rhetoric that drives up the heat level of the conversation.

So fire—now it’s set on fire by hell. What does that mean? Well, hell was, descriptively or in terms of a literary device, the place where people would suffer in hell eternally. And it was specifically the place that was envisioned as the eternal dwelling place of Satan in various forms. The word used here is actually Gehenna, which referred to a ravine outside of Jerusalem. And people would take their trash out there and they’d throw it down there and there’d be a fire going. It was like the dumps that we used to have when I was a kid. Don’t have much anymore. You’d go to the city dumps and there’d always be a little fire going there. There’s always smoke because they’d be burning up the garbage.

And Gehenna—hell—is a place where Rushdoony has talked about this, where nothing is related to anything else, right? If you go to a garbage dump and there’s like a doll here and a piece of broken furniture here, it’s—there’s no order to it. It’s disordered completely. And it’s the dwelling place of Satan.

So what happened? Why is the tongue such a bad thing? Well, it’s set on fire by hell itself. And he’ll continue this theme in the very next couple of verses. But tongue, you know, fire and tongue, which is a common theme in the Bible, can actually be a good thing. You know, I was at the Spurgeon Fellowship a couple weeks ago and the guy was talking about various Old Testament verses that he’d rediscovered or discovered for the first time since he changed his approach to the scriptures and began to see the significance of the Old Testament. And he looked at the verse about Joseph telling his brothers that you intended it for evil, but God meant it for good. And the speaker rightly says that’s history. Men are intending things for evil, and God is using those things for good.

As Doug Kelly told us years ago here from our pulpit, God uses sin sinlessly to affect his decree. And the greatest example of that is men, you know, in their sin and iniquity, nailed Jesus to the cross. But God was using their sin sinlessly. They meant it for evil, but God meant it for the greatest good in the created order, right? The salvation of the world.

So you know, even though we may have fires in the context of the church—Paul says, are sort of necessary. He says in 1 Corinthians 3: “If anyone builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw—some good things, some bad things here—each one’s work will become evident or clear. For the day will declare it, because it will be revealed by fire, and the fire will test each one’s work, of what sort it is. If anyone’s work which he has built on it endures, he will receive a reward.”

He goes on. The point is—and he’s not talking about just the eternal, the closing day. There is a day when great problems happen, when the storm waters rage and the wind blows fierce and demonic activity seems to be going on, and churches blow up in a conflagration and people start getting really upset with one another and bad speech is entered into. But Paul seems to be saying that while that’s not good and James is warning us against it, God will use even that to affect the purposes of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Because what he does is he makes manifest what’s underneath the surface.

Are you a living tree? Have you changed jerseys? As I said last week, have you—in approaching the scriptures and Jesus Christ—have you said, “I’m not going to rely on my own ways anymore. I’m going to rely on Jesus Christ and his scriptures. I’m going to trust in him for everything in my life.” That’s changing jerseys.

And a lot of people in churches, or at least some of them, haven’t done that. They’re just sort of sitting there. They’re trying a little bit of that and a little bit of this—for Jesus on Sunday for an hour. They want to feel religious and that helps them to do whatever they want to do the rest of the week somehow. And when churches burn up, when you get a fire in a church, everything’s revealed. And those people, their work doesn’t endure. But the people that are, you know, silver and precious jewels, they get refined by fire.

So even these great warnings about the dangers of the tongue—if we understand our scriptures, even in that, we see the gospel of God at work, using the worst of sins of men to destroy churches or other people’s lives. And somehow God uses that sin sinlessly to affect his decree. That’s gospel. That’s good news.

All right. Then he talks a little bit more about the origins. He’s already said it’s from hell. And in verse 7, he says:

Every kind of beast and bird of reptile and creature of the sea is tamed and has been tamed by mankind, but no man can tame the tongue. It is an unruly evil full of deadly poison.

Disorderly evil, replete with lethal poison. Now, if you think at all about biblical imagery, what’s he doing here? What’s he saying? Well, he’s going back to Genesis 1, Psalm 8 that we responded saying today. Genesis 1, though—these various creatures of the world—and God gives man dominion over the world, dominion over the creatures. And they learn how to tame the different creatures. And now today everything—well that’s horrible. No, it’s not horrible. Men are supposed to exercise dominion. That doesn’t mean they can use whatever they want the animals for. They’re under the harness, the bridle, the steerage of the Holy Spirit for the well-being of the environment and culture, but to bring it to maturity.

We’re supposed to tame wild bees. And this is what he’s using as an illustration. So it’s a creation illustration. And then when he says then that the tongue is full of deadly poison, well, immediately we think of the tongue, right? The deadly poison is the venom of snakes, right? And the Bible frequently, in Romans 3 and the Psalms, talk about how, you know, the fallen man is like a snake curled up ready to strike. It’s got, you know, poison, lethal poison, venom in its tongue.

And so the snake is what the imagery is here. And of course, what happened in the garden? The snake bit, right? The venom came out of him, reflecting his improper relationship to God and hatred of him. And from then on, our tongues are forked. Our tongues are like devil tongues. That’s what we’re born with. If you don’t change jerseys and you don’t apply the grace of God’s spirit to your forked tongue, that is what you will be. That’s your nature. Okay? It’s in your nature. It’s what you’re going to do. And that’s what he’s saying here.

The reason the tongue is so deadly—it’s set on fire by hell. Well, really by the one who created, or not created, hell, but who will abide eternally in hell—the Devil. Because he’s the one that by what? Words brought the world down, right? Brought it down.

Now, God again uses sin sinlessly. And the end result of this is the demonstration of the sacrificial life of God who gives his own life so that we can live, sending his only beloved—his son, second person of the trinity—dies on the cross for us. So there’s a great purpose for it. But the point is here, we’re of our father, the Devil—the father of lies—okay, in our fallen nature. And if we just kind of go with the flow in our lives, that’s who we’ll be like. Okay?

And the Bible, James here says, look: if you’re going to try to achieve righteousness and you’re going to try to avoid shipwreck and end up in the safe harbor instead of in the bad place, if you don’t want to be, you know, part of those hundreds of people drowned in the bottom of that river in South Korea, if you don’t want to be part of that kind of thing, well then attend to your nature and your new nature in Jesus Christ and do some work. Apply yourself to it, right? You’re going to have to, because your nature is to use your tongue for very sinful purposes.

So the origin here goes back to the idea of the creation itself, man’s creation, the original fall—which is a fall involving the tongue—and as a result of that, then this evil forked tongue is entered into the world. And that’s what he talks about next, right? He talks about forked tongues next.

He concludes: so he’s given us the command—don’t have many teachers. He’s given us the positives—what the tongue can do, how important it is. And he’s given us the negatives—how destructive it can be and its origin—the fall of man and ultimately the father of lies, Satan. And then he kind of brings it all together with this two-fold, back and forth kind of positive-negative thing that he describes in verse nine.

So we have here positive and negative. Verse nine, and the final point of the outline, point number four. Verse nine:

With it we bless our God and Father, and with it we curse men whom have been made in the similitude of God—the image of God, right? And which is again bringing forth this creation imagery that he’s just talked of. Out of the same mouth proceed blessing and cursing. My brethren, these things ought not to be so.

So I guess there’s an implied command there not to be like that. As he reaches the end, another command, or at least an implied one: don’t be double tongued.

Does a spring send forth fresh water and bitter from the same opening? When it says “send forth,” it’s like gush out. Does a spring gush out good water and bad? Can a fig tree, my brethren, bear olives, or a grape vine bear figs. Thus, no spring yields both saltwater and fresh.

And there it is. That’s the end of it. That’s how he concludes it. So he concludes it by saying, look: you’ve got double tongues. In our own nature now, as Christians, we’re to put off the old man, which means put off the tongue that was a result of hell and that doesn’t achieve righteousness. And to put on tongues and speech that’ll guide our own life in a proper course to safe harbor, that will guide those that we have authority or influence on. And ultimately, the first application of this text—or the actual teaching of it, the thing that will get the church to be effective as a ministry of the body of Christ—is to put off the old tongue, put on the new tongue in a very self-conscious way.

I’m amazed that we don’t have more, you know, more studies going on or positive helps to the congregation—my fault I suppose—but to exercise this, to train yourself in your speech. Now we talk about it, you know, as an ancillary matter all the time, but this is central, I think, to the life of the Christian now, following the Jesus Christ the word, who is the way, the truth, and the life.

And so he ends with this, and it’s actually kind of a—he’s back to kind of a positive thing, isn’t he? The imagery now is reminding us that the tongue can give water to the world, right? And even fire can be used by God to affect his purposes. So fire and water—images of the tongue today. And water is to be fresh. And notice, you know, that brackish water, if you put bad water in good water, bad water ruins good water. Okay. It’s why they trained that 38 million gallons out of the reservoir up there in Portland. I don’t know if they should or shouldn’t have, but that’s what they did because a little bit of bad stuff can affect 38 million gallons of water if it’s the wrong stuff.

And so that’s what can happen here. And again, the call is for us to say, hey, we have words, we have mouths out of which can gush lifegiving water into the world around us, creating peace and righteousness. You know, even under persecution, we don’t strike out in anger against people. We may liturgically utilize the Psalms that ask for God’s judgment to bring people to repentance or remove them from the earth. But what do the Beatitudes tell us? It says that we’re to, you know, not revile those who persecute us. You know, we’re not to strike out against them, but we’re to say good things.

So he gives us a reminder at the end: the great power of our tongues for positive. And even the weird tree stuff he does, it’s all good stuff, right? The anomaly is a fig tree producing olives or whatever way it goes. But all those things—figs, olives, grapes, right? They’re all good things. And our tree is to be united in dispensing good fruit out of it. The tree being our lives and our tongues.

So he even ends on kind of a positive note, even while he’s warning us not to give into the double tonguedness that is—who our fallen father Satan, the father of lies, was. So the text takes us to a very simple point at its beginning. You know, don’t have a bunch of teachers. Don’t make a man a teacher in the church if you’re not sure what he’s going to say or if he’s not tested and tried. Not that he’s a bad guy, but teaching is difficult and teaching controls, directs, and influences the life of the church, particularly in troubled times and choppy waters.

But the tongue always does that. And he reminds us—as we take that advice seriously to drive it home deep into us—in our own lives. And he calls us to recognize the great power for good that tongues have, the great difficulty for bad, the great destructive force of tongues. And also he reminds us then of the need to have a singularity of purpose in using our tongues to glorify and honor God.

So the course of our life, the life of the church, all are very much influenced by the use of our tongues. Our teachers are small interactions of speech as well. This is the mouthouse. So what the pastor says to you, you’ve already used your tongues a whole bunch today, right? And you’ve done it in a very disciplined, trained way every Lord’s day.

One perspective of what we do is it’s drill to use our tongues to bless God and not to end up cursing our neighbors and getting mad and saying angry things at each other, right? Or things that’ll undermine each other’s reputation, to slander one another. We go through that drill every Lord’s day. He drills us. And you’ve used your tongues.

The church is a mouthouse, not just in the preaching of the word, but the Psalms we sang, the hymns based on those Psalms, the recitation of scripture, all this stuff is training to let God’s word fill our mouths so that we can gush out fresh, lifegiving water to others.

The tongue is a barometer of our spirituality. It is a reflection of the image of God. He spoke things into existence and our tongues are a reflection of our image-bearing capacity of God to affect good.

One comment: Peter said this about the double nature of our speech. He says, “The good set of mind does not talk from both sides of its mouth. Praise and curse, abuse and honor, calm and strife, hypocrisy and truth, poverty and wealth. But it has one disposition. One disposition. Uncontaminated and pure toward all men. There is no duplicity in its perception of its hearing.” That’s what we’re called to be. People that have those kind of tongues.

Choose. Right. The end of every sermon, there’s a choice to be made. What are you going to do? How are you going to approach the offering? And the choice is not heaven and hell. Well, it sort of is, but you’ve already been placed. You’re in the ship. You’re on your way to eternal relationship with God. So it’s not as if you’re on the dock—most of you at least—waiting to see what you’re going to do. You’ve already been granted heaven through the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ.

The question is: the choice for you is will you experience that? Will you embrace that? Or will you instead turn aside by not controlling your tongues and choosing hellfire? Essentially, choosing the destructive force. The choice is clear. Lifegiving water or very destructive fire. That’s the choice we have as a result of today’s text.

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for our tongues. We thank you for the wonderful way they image our being made in your image. Father, we thank you that this is really a key, perhaps the highest key, to the exercise of our dominion in the world—is our tongue, which we among all creatures have the ability to use.

Bless us, Father, as we choose today to continue to work on disciplining our tongue and using it properly. Bless us, Father, as we seek an associate pastor for this church who would bring his tongue as well to help move our ship of state in a positive direction. And we pray, Lord God, that you would bless us with a man who is committed to your scriptures as the source and the content of his words to us.

Now, we’re going to engage in a lot of conversations. Father, we’re going to do the same thing we do every Sunday. We’ll have some Q&A. We’ll have dinner together. We’ll talk to each other. And in those small interactions, would you, Lord God, be kind to us and gracious and give us speech that is edifying to one another and not destructive in our small conversations as well.

We ask this by the wonderful name of our Lord Jesus Christ, who’s given us new tongues to praise you. Amen.