James: Controlling the Tongue (3:1-12)

Hello, I'm Pastor Craig, and thank you for tuning in to New Sun Churches Podcast.

We're a gospel center church in Port Mary, Ontario, claiming the true and life-giving word of Jesus as we love and serve our neighbors.

May God bless you today through his life-giving word.

Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness.

For we all stumble in many ways, and if anyone does not stumble in what he says, he is a perfect man, and also able also to bridle his whole body.

If we put bits into the mouths of horses so that they obey us, we guide their whole bodies as well.

Look at the ships also, though they are so large and are driven by strong winds, they are guided by a very small rudder wherever the will of the pilot directs.

So also the tongue is a small member, yet it boasts of great things.

How great a forest is set ablaze by such a small fire, and the tongue is a fire, a world of unrighteousness.

The tongue is set among our members, sustaining the whole body, and setting on fire the entire course of life, and set on fire by hell.

For every kind of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature can be tamed and has been tamed by mankind, but no human being can tame the tongue.

It is a restless evil full of deadly poison.

With it we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in the likeness of God.

From the same mouth come blessing and cursing.

My brothers, these things ought not to be so.

Does a spring pour forth from the same opening, both fresh and salt water?

Can a fig tree, my brothers, bear olives or a grapevine produce figs?

Neither can a salt pond yield fresh water.

This is the word of the Lord.

Heavenly Father, we now come before you to hear your word, to hear you speak directly to our hearts and our minds.

Father, um, at times your word is uh hard to hear.

At times your word is uh convicting, at times your word is uh encouraging.

And Father, help us to not run from things when they are hard when we hear your word, but to uh press into it and to meditate on it.

Uh and Lord and Lord, we just come to you now to hear you speak to us in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Please be seated.

So who has said something before you wish you didn't say?

Who here has uh had something said to them that they wish that wasn't said to them?

I thought I was the only one.

And uh if you it's interesting when we think about it, we can reflect on life and think of moments, uh, things have been said to us that have that have stayed with us.

There's moments in our lives where we can think of things we've said to people that has stayed with them, if we have, I'm sure, if we ask them.

And politicians at the same time, who've been caught on the hot mics, mics that are still left on when they're not at the podium anymore, probably wish they could take back what they've said as well.

Um and here we're continuing our sermon series on the letter of James.

And he's gotta remember, he's writing to a church that's been dispersed around, that's facing suffering, that's facing persecution constantly, it's that's facing the temptation to become more like the people surrounding them, to not be less set apart but living with amongst them.

They're stretched on every side.

And James is writing to them.

And he writes to them a concise letter.

It's not a big, not a big letter, it's really small if you really think about it.

And he hits all these topics, all these hard-hitting topics.

He talks about testing your faith.

He talks about hearing and doing the word.

He talks about not showing partiality amongst each other.

He talks about faith that isn't stagnant, but that is visible, that works, that we talked about last week.

And now we come to the topic of taming the tongue.

And Lord have mercy.

Because we're all we all can think of moments in our lives where we've used our tongue unwisely.

One of my favorite um old TV sitcoms is Frasier.

Not the new one, the old one.

Um and the thing with Frasier, he's uh he's a he did really well at Harvard, he's a psychologist, he did really well at Oxford.

So he's got uh, he has a big ego behind him, and he's also a radio show host.

So he likes hearing his voice talked a lot.

And the thing with Frasier is that he's known for always getting involved in everyone's business, and he's known for always having to give his own opinion.

And the common line that's always said by people around him is that you just need to shut your big kazoos.

I thought about titling the sermon that, but I didn't think about it.

James writes, when James writes this letter, and when most of the writers of the New Testament write, they have in their mind the church, and they also have in their mind the individual.

Because Christians need the church.

They need it, they can't live without the church.

And at the same time, Christians can't just live with the church and not have the individual communion with God.

So he writes that.

He's writing to them in this with this mindset.

And he's writing to them here by saying, what comes out of your mouth shows where your heart is.

What comes out of your mouth shows where your heart is.

It shows what you value most.

And our words matter.

They matter greatly how we use them, how we use our tongue.

Our words matter, and we'll look at it in three ways.

Our words carry direction, our words carry power, and our words carry transparency.

Our words carry direction, our words carry power, and our words carry transparency.

So let's take a look at what James has to say.

Chapter 3, verses 1 to 12.

You can see it in your bulletin, or if you have your Bible, which is really helpful because you can see what we just talked about last week, and then you can also see what we're gonna talk about in two weeks, because next week it's World Mission Sunday.

So we're gonna take a break from James.

Because James, before coming to this part of his letter, has talked about faith that works, visible faith, what you do with your faith, how you interact with people.

People can see the spirit within you.

But at the same time, now we come to the tongue, and that's a building on the faith that works.

Because how we use our tongue also shows our faith and how it works.

So, verse one not many of you should become teachers, my brothers and sisters, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness.

Now, James opens this section with a warning to teachers.

And to define teachers, we can think about it in this many ways.

It could be pastors, it could be small group leaders, it could be children's ministry leaders, and etc.

Anyone who teaches God's word will be held to greater strictness, greater judgment.

That's what James is opening with here.

And for the sake of this letter, James is more focusing on the pastor, the leader of the church.

That's what he's talking about here.

And you might be thinking, why start with this?

The thing is, pastors, leaders of the church, influence the culture and the direction of the church.

And James is going right after it, right away, before he talks about more on the individual level of taming your tongue.

He's building off of chapter 1, verse 21, when he says, Therefore, put away all filthiness and rampant wickedness, and receive with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your souls.

See, James is talking about here is that the leader of the church needs to have God's word implanted in them.

And if they don't, there is great judgment for it, as he talks about.

They must receive the implanted word, which is able to save your souls.

And as Sam Albury says, obedience to God's word is transformational.

If you following God's word will change you.

If a leader isn't changed of the church, there's great judgment for him.

If a pastor teaches his words and not God's word, his soul's in jeopardy.

And he also risks running that risks running the risk of those who listen to him being led astray.

So I'll be reflecting on this, I was thinking about the idea of the pulpit.

The thing about the pulpit, which is so I found so interesting, I've got to do some Google Images, is that the pulpit is referring to the pulpit of a boat, which is at the front of the boat.

I was thinking about a way to describe it.

You know in Titanic?

When the two main characters are at the front, which is like Jack and Flying?

That's the pulpit.

That's that's and the idea of the pulpit in the church is that God's word is the leading of the pulpit, that it leads the church.

And the thing that's interesting when you start doing looking at images of certain pulpits around the world, people have really taken it to heart.

There's some pulpits that actually look like the front of a ship, the front of a boat.

And they've used wood where it's weathered.

So you can see they've used wood that's been weathered by the sea as an imagery that's been weathered as it breaks through the culture, breaks through the ideas of the people surrounding them.

So what James is writing about here is that the leader of the church needs to be preaching God's word, which breaks through everything.

It breaks through all the other things that claim to be truth, because God's word is the only truth.

And the thing is, if God's word isn't preached from it, the church will lose direction.

Because James is writing at the corporate level, the church level, and the individual level.

And the thing is, pastors have done horrible things in the name of God's word.

And I'm not here to defend them.

A good friend of mine used to work for this apologetics ministry, R Z-I-M.

He used to work for Rabbi Zacharias.

And the thing with Ravi Zacharias is that he was a man who was considered great in the Christian world.

He was a man who traveled the world to teach apologetics, to have debates with people about faith, things of the Bible.

And then it came out a couple years ago during COVID that after he died, he did horrible things.

And he would justify it with God's word.

I'm not here to defend them.

But look at James' word in verse 2, because he explains this and he goes deeper into it.

When we're thinking about these things, for we all stumble in many ways, and if anyone does not stumble in what he says, he is a perfect man, also able to bridle his whole body.

James is using a rhetorical thing here.

He's showing that no one, no one can tame their tongue.

No one is perfect.

When he says stumble, he means sin.

That's what he's talking about.

See, everyone stumbles, and if they say otherwise, as John says, they deceive themselves and the truth is not in them.

Everyone stumbles.

There's no way around it.

And that's why pastors must never be put on pedestals.

They must never be put in the spotlight, in a sense.

And that's why me and Creighton, we need you to pray for us.

Because it's a habit, it's a desire of the human heart to always want the spotlight.

But the thing with a pastor, the role of a pastor is to be forgotten and God's word, the gospel, to remember, to be remembered.

Now James illustrates this more deeply in the next verses.

Verses 2 to the half of verse 5, he says this for we all stumble in many ways, and if anyone does not stumble in what he says, he is a perfect man, able also to bridle his whole body.

If we put bits into the mouths of horses, so that they obey us, we guide their whole bodies as well.

Look at the ships also.

Though they are so large and driven by strong winds, they are guided by a very small rudder.

Wherever the will of the pilot directs, so also the tongue is a small member, yet it boasts of great things.

If you notice here in those two illustrations, there's the word guide, guided, and the will and the will of the pilot.

What's going on here is that James is talking about, he's using these illustrations to show, that the way we use our words reflect the way we guide our lives, what guides us.

If our words are not based in God's word, they will guide us in the wrong direction.

We come to forks in the road.

If we reflect back on life, there's certain moments in our life where we've had to make decisions and things that we've done, decisions about which direction to go.

And the directions are always, just one word can change the direction of your life.

One word can do it.

On the church level, we need to avoid trying to seek prestige with our words, trying to seek, uh, trying to seek acceptance, trying to seek the desire to be clever, the desire to move up the ladder.

We need to elevate God's word.

And that's what taming the tongue is.

Taming the tongue is not about just being silent and censoring ourselves.

Taming the tongue is finding the base, where we find the base that comes out of us.

James uses a, um, when you read James, you can see that he channels Jesus' words a lot.

And we're going to look at the gospel in a second, one of the gospels in a second.

Now the God now, our words carry direction, but our words also carry power.

Our words carry power.

Verses 5b to 6.

How great a forest is set ablaze by such a small fire.

And the tongue is a fire, a world of unrighteousness.

The tongue is set among our members, staining the whole body, setting on fire the entire course of life, and set on fire by hell.

When I used to do wilderness canoe guiding way back in the day, there was a moment when it was really windy, and someone lit a fire, and the spark went up, just a little spark went up and started a forest fire.

Not a massive one.

We were on a point of a lake, and it started to spread a fire all over the place.

And the fire started to spread through a root system.

And we had to quickly, um, we had balers in the canoes, and we like a man should get the fire out, but it was starting to spread wildly.

James uses that illustration here because his writers live in a very dry place, or his readers live in a very dry place.

There would have been there's dry brush everywhere, so any spark would be quick to make fires, brush fires.

And how we use our tongue can change everything.

It could end relationships, how we use our tongue can encourage people, it could also discourage people, it can destroy relationships and reputations.

And on the more political level, the upper level, how we use how we use words can cause wars.

The tongue is such a small thing, as James writes, but it causes such great destruction as we've witnessed in our lives growing up, and as we see in the news constantly, day after day.

And I bet most of us here carry scars of things that have been said to us.

Why is that?

Why do words have such power over our lives?

Well, James says that in verse 6.

He goes into detail on it.

He gets very direct in this part of the letter.

It's very direct.

And remember last week how I talked about why we have the sermon graphic as chisels.

Because God's word chisels away at us to create something beautiful.

It creates, it makes us holy.

Because the whole point of the Christian walk is to be holy because God is holy.

And that goes through a lifetime of being chiseled away by God's word.

See, we speak our, as he says, we speak our whole lives.

Our tongues are with us, our whole lives.

There's no way to get rid of them.

From when we're born to when we die, our tongues are speaking in some capacity.

And they stay with us.

He talks about, they plague us.

They plague us the whole time.

And he calls it the fire, it comes from the fire of hell.

It's pretty intense.

It's pretty intense what James writes about here in this part of the letter.

See, the thing that he's talking about here, if we reflect on his letter and reflect on the Bible and what it says, is that we still have our old selves within us.

We still have our old hearts.

Our old selves battle with our new selves, with the spirit that's within us.

We're constantly battling with it.

In Romans 5, Paul writes about how he does the things he doesn't want to do, he wants to do, and he wishes he could do the things that he wants to do, but his flesh is constantly at war at each other.

That's what James is referring to here when he says it comes from the fire of hell, our words, our tongue.

It gets used in that capacity.

It's intense.

But look what he says in the next verses.

Because there's actually hope in the next verses.

Verses 7 to 8.

For every kind of beast and bird of reptile and sea creature can be tamed and has been tamed by mankind, but no human being can tame the tongue.

It is a restless evil full of deathly poison.

Now you might be thinking, where's the hope in that?

The hope in that is that we can't find our own salvation in ourselves.

We have to look elsewhere.

And we'll get to that.

But in the meantime, for my birthday this year, we got to go to Medieval Times.

I don't know if I talked about it before in a previous sermon, but we went to Medieval Times.

And there's a point, it was actually really fun.

I highly recommend it if you uh have never been to Medieval Times.

You should go and do it.

It's fine.

You get to eat with your hands and everything.

It's a good show.

But there's a moment during it when the horses are taking a break.

They have a falcon, um, I forget what they call them, a falcon, falconry person, the person who uh tames falcons comes out and starts doing a show with the falcon.

And the falcon's flying around and flying around, and he looks really tame as he's flying around.

And then all of a sudden he just flies up into the ceiling and he's gone.

And the guy tries to get the falcon down and it just stays up there for the rest of the show.

See, things look good when they're tamed.

But if it slips up, it looks terrible.

And that's the you could you notice the moment in the show.

They kind of killed the moment, the excitement for a bit until they started doing sword fighting and then it came back right away.

But that's the thing, we can try to tame our tongues, but it's impossible.

James writes about here.

It's impossible to tame the tongue.

You may um try to do it and you might do well at it for a while, but it's impossible.

You will slip up.

It shows something that's at a deeper level within us, trying to tame our tongues.

Our tongues show us what's in our hearts.

Point three, our words carry transparency.

Verses 9 to 12.

With it we bless the Lord, our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in the likeness of God.

From the same mouth come blessing and cursing.

My brothers and sisters, these things ought not to be so.

Does a spring pour forth from the same opening both fresh and salt water?

Can a fig tree, my brothers and sisters, bear olives or a grapevine produce figs?

Neither can salt, not neither can a salt pond yield fresh water.

Now, normally when we think transparency, we think it's a good thing.

We think of transparency on a level of a government.

We want transparency in all they do.

It makes us have trust in the government when they're transparent.

We want transparency for churches and nonprofits.

We want to know where the money goes when we give to a nonprofit or a church.

And we want transparency in friends.

Because we want to be able to tell them things that we struggle with.

But if they're not transparent themselves, we don't trust them.

So transparency normally is a good thing.

But the thing is, but here, our tongues betray us.

Because when we use our words, they are a window into our hearts.

Our words are transparent about what's in our hearts, a mirror in, or a window into our hearts.

With it we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in the likeness of God.

Outside of Ottawa, there's this beautiful place called Gatno Park.

I'm sure many of you have been to it or have heard of it.

And there's a lake there called Pink Lake.

And the thing that's so unique about this lake, people come from around the world to study it.

A normal lake, every year the oxygen and the areas that are not oxygenated are mixed together.

But this lake can't do it.

Just the way it was formed, it just can't mix.

Oxygen can't mix with the other parts of the water.

So it's actually separated.

There's a part that has no oxygen, and then there's a part that has oxygen.

And it creates this really cool looking thing.

But just to use that illustration and the illustrations that James uses is the spirit and sin, our flesh, can't mix.

Our hearts can't mix.

In the Gospel of Matthew, in chapter 12, verses 33 to 37, Jesus says this either make the tree good and its fruit good, or make the tree bad and its fruit bad.

For the tree is known by its fruit, you brood of vipers.

How can you speak good when you are evil?

For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.

The good person out of the good of his good treasure brings forth good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure brings forth evil.

I tell you, on the day of judgment, people will give account for every careless word they speak, for by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned.

See, even Jesus hammers it home here that our words mean something.

The way we use the tongue means something.

But this shows us at the same time, James says it, it's impossible to tame the tongue.

It shows us we need to find help some other place.

See, our hearts are inclined to corrupt our tongues.

And this shows us how helpless we are.

See, the beauty of the gospel is that we are so helpless that it shows us how much we need Jesus in our lives.

And it shows us how much God loves us.

James is writing to a people who are pressed hard, who probably say things they probably shouldn't, just like how we do in situations where we feel pressed or we feel like someone has wronged us.

We say the wrong thing, and our tongue betrays us.

We can never tame the tongue on our own.

What comes out of your mouth shows where your heart is.

See, the only thing that can save us is giving up ourselves and coming to Jesus.

Do we have the hope?

When we come to God's word, we find hope.

See, God's word gives direction.

God's word carries power.

God's word is transparent.

It shows us his heart for us.

It shows us his love for us, which is found in Jesus, which is God's word made flesh amongst us.

He dwelt among us.

See, we have to let the living word shape our heart.

We have to let the living word give us salvation.

We can't do it on our own.

No matter what we do, and that is what James talks about all through his letters, no matter what works you do, no matter what words you say, you need Jesus.

You need to come to Jesus and say, Lord, I need your help.

I need to rest in your finished work of the cross because I cannot do it on my own.

And James is here to chisel that right in, to chisel the exterior things off of us so that we can come to Christ daily.

Let's pray.

Heavenly Father, Lord, your word is hard.

It is hard at times to come to it, to wrestle with it, to have it chisel away at us.

Father, we just ask that you would constantly draw us to yourselves, that the Spirit would work within our hearts, Lord, so that we could become more like you.

And I pray us in Jesus' name.

Amen.

We hope that you've been blessed by God's Word today.

If you live in the Port Perry area, we hope that you'll come and worship with us in person on Sunday at 10 a.m.

If you'd like to learn more about Newsong Church, we'd love to connect with you.

Please find our contact information at newsongportperry.ca and reach out to us.

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If you feel called to support our ministry with a financial gift, please go to newsongportperry.ca slash giving to make your contribution.

Go in peace to love and serve the Lord.