James 3:1-12 February 9, 2003
Taming the Tongue
The Power of Words
I love you, you’re important to me, thank you so much, how can I repay you, you look really nice today, I like your new haircut, great job, this place wouldn’t be the same without you, I’m proud of you, you are irreplaceable,
I hate you, you disgust me, I wish you had never been born, I wish I were dead, you make me sick, I want a divorce, nobody cares about you, I’ll never speak to you again…
Sticks and stones can break my bones… but words can break my heart
Words are a powerful thing
The power of the tongue – 2-5
James says that the tongue, or the words that come out of our mouth, is the most powerful thing in our body. He compares it to other small things that have great power.
If you have ever stood beside a workhorse like a Clydesdale, they are huge and powerful animals, but they are led and controlled by this little bit in their mouth connected to a harness
The great ships that sail the seas are controlled by a relatively small rudder, Ocean tankers are turned around by a little piece on the stern!
A whole ancient forest can be taken down by one little misplaced spark that turns the whole world on fire.
These are small things that have great power – and so is the tongue.
The tongue of a great leader can turn a whole country around Churchhill’s rally cry in WWII, Martin Luther King, jr.’s “I have a dream” speech. For the good, Hitler’s speeches for evil, Kruschev’s “We will bury you” for fear…
Our words can bring about loving relationships, and it can end them.
The tongue has power over our own lives: James says in verse two that if we can only control our tongues, the rest of our body is easy!
The tongue has great power, but also great danger!
The Danger of the tongue – 6
The tongue also is a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body. It corrupts the whole person, sets the whole course of his life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell. …8b It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison.
I think we all know when our tongues have got us into trouble. There are some people who say that they only open their mouths to exchange feet. But there is more to this than just saying the wrong thing: the tongue can do great damage.
There is a story of a woman in a village who maliciously gossiped about another lady and her family in the village. One day she found out that she was wrong about this lady and her family and had a change of heart. She went to the village’s wise man and asked how she could take back all the wrong she had done. The wise man told her to go home and kill her chickens and pluck there feathers and put them into a bag. After this she was to go back and see the wise man again, but on her way back she was to scatter all the feathers she had plucked from the chickens.
The lady did as she was told. When she got back to the man, he told her, " now go back and pick up all the feathers that you have scattered. " The woman was astonished at such a command and said, " By now the wind has carried the feathers through out the village and beyond." The wise man then told Her, And so it is with your careless words. They are like the feathers scattered in the wind. You can not retrieve them. " With that the woman with a broken heart because of the words she had spoken went her way, determined from that day forward to Watch her words.
It is not just gossip that does damage – hate, lies, coarse language, abuse outbursts of anger, malicious talk, bragging, breaking confidence: it all comes out of our mouths if we let it. Great evil can be done with our words.
The difficulty of the tongue – 7-8
7All kinds of animals, birds, reptiles and creatures of the sea are being tamed and have been tamed by man, 8but no man can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison.
This is the problem – the tongue can do such huge damage, but we are unable to control it. It’s easier to tame a lion than it is to tame your tongue – that is saying something since a lion is just a big cat!
I think that on reflection, we have all walked away from situations wishing that we could take our words back – we responded in anger, we were hurtful, we told a story that was supposed to be kept secret… We may even think that we are a fairly controlled person, but there are times when our tongue gets away from us.
The tongue is impossible to tame.
All the same, we are called to tame it.
The call on the tongue – 9-12
9With the tongue we praise our Lord and Father, and with it we curse men, who have been made in God’s likeness. 10Out of the same mouth come praise and cursing. My brothers and sisters, this should not be.
He gives two images that explain why it should not be that both blessing and curses come out of the same mouth.
1) You can have both fresh water and polluted water come from the same spring. A spring is either good or bad.
2) You can’t have olives growing on a fig tree, you can’t have figs growing on a grape vine. Trees bear fruit in their own kind good trees bear good fruit, and bad trees bear bad.
This is not the only place where the image of a tree is used to talk about the words that come out of our mouths, in Matthew 12, Jesus is talking to the Pharisees and he says
33"Make a tree good and its fruit will be good, or make a tree bad and its fruit will be bad, for a tree is recognized by its fruit. 34You brood of vipers, how can you who are evil say anything good? For out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks. 35Good people bring good things out of the good stored up in them, and evil people bring evil things out of the evil stored up in them. 36But I tell you that people will have to give account on the day of judgment for every careless word they have spoken. 37For by your words you will be acquitted, and by your words you will be condemned." - Matthew 12
And again in Luke 6, Jesus says
43"No good tree bears bad fruit, nor does a bad tree bear good fruit. 44Each tree is recognized by its own fruit. People do not pick figs from thornbushes, or grapes from briers. 45Good people bring good things out of the good stored up in their heart, and evil people bring evil things out of the evil stored up in their heart. For out of the overflow of one’s heart the mouth speaks.
So, we are in this dilemma. First, we are told that there is no way to tame the tongue, it is impossible, and then we are told that this should not be – that if our hearts are pure, so should our words be.
I would say that we can solve our dilemma by understanding the gospel’s work in our lives.
When we come to Jesus, and give our lives to him, he takes us, forgives us of all the wrong things that we have ever done and he gives us his Holy Spirit to live within us
Ezekiel describes what happens in this way in 36:26-27; “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws.”
Jesus uses the same imagery of the Holy Spirit being a spring of water with in us when he speaks with the woman at the well in John 4:13-14 "Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life."
This is an amazing thing, because the Spirit enables us to obey God and control ourselves like we never could – he miraculously helps us to control even our tongues!
The problem is that although there is this new Spring of fresh water in our life, the old spring that gives polluted water is still there as well.
Paul talks about these two sources in our life as the Spirit, and the sinful nature. He says in Galatians 5:16-17,25
So I say, live by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the sinful nature. 17For the sinful nature desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the sinful nature. They are in conflict with each other, so that you do not do what you want. … Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit.
Later in 6:7-8 he says : Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows. 8The one who sows to please his sinful nature, from that nature will reap destruction; the one who sows to please the Spirit, from the Spirit will reap eternal life.
We have this choice with our mouths – do we go to that new spring, with water that leads to eternal life, or do we go to the old polluted stream to find our words?
You may remember the story I told a little while back about the old native man what described this problem to a younger man. He said “I feel like there are two dogs fighting within me one good, and the other bad.” The younger man asked “which one wins?” the elder answered, “The one that I feed.”
I asked then and I’ll ask again, Which dog are you feeding? You can tell which dog you have been feeding by what comes out of your mouth!
Graham Cooke in his tape on Stillness has another way of talking about this. I’ll ask Fred to play that portion of the tape.
Graham Cooke Quote from “Stillness” tape:
transcript of tape:
Stillness releases an unbroken communion. And as we read scripture we get a fix on God’s heart for us, so if you want to turn to 1 Thessalonians 5, we read this to you, just from verse 16: "Rejoice, sometimes, pray occasionally, in the odd thing give thanks, because this might be God’s will for you." That’s the bible according to Homer Simpson. I Thessalonians 5:16 4 reads: "Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, in everything gives thanks, for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus. Don’t quench the Spirit. Don’t despise prophetic utterances. Examine everything carefully. Hold fast to that which is good, abstain from every form of evil." Some of the key elements for moving in the power of the presence of the Holy Spirit - one is rejoicing. We enter His presence with praise, not petition. It’s really important that you have, if you are building and creating, a pathway of praise, which renew our hearts in the Lord. A pathway that is so well worn you can tread it without even thinking. There is an instinctive, intuitive response in you to give thanks for everything. Doesn’t matter what it is.
I was in my first car crash in America a few - couple of months ago in February in California, one of my best friends in America, a wonderful guy called Tim Bickerson. I live with Tim and his wife. I have a property that they give me on their own land, and that’s where I live when I’m in America. It’s a wonderful place. And Tim just lets me use any of his cars that he has and he has this brand new Jaguar convertible. It’s got global positioning, it’s got everything, you know. And it’s his favorite car and we were going to a restaurant, and he said, "I’m going to drive the Lexus, why don’t you drive the Jag?" So I’m thinking, ‘You want me to drive your baby?’ And he said, "Well, it’s God’s baby before it’s mine." So I as looked at him, and it was prophetic and I don’t know why I said, "Tim, this could seriously, you know, affect our friendship." And he looked me right in the eye and he said, ‘That’s just a piece of tin on wheels - it’s never going to affect our friendship." So we’re driving down the road and this woman pulls out of this mall in front of Tim. He manages to swerve around her and toots his horn and she is giving him a mouthful of obscenities and the various hand signals. And then while she’s looking down the road at his retreating vehicle, cursing and swearing, she treads on the gas pedal and goes straight out - looking one way - goes straight out that way and smashes into this jaguar. And I’ve got my daughter in the front seat, and my wife in the seat behind. And so, she wrecks the car. And what was interesting was immediately as the collision was about to happen, 3 people in the jag all started worshiping God. That an instinctive. I would have expected it of my wife, my daughter was like the first. She just out of her heart - just ‘ oh I thank you Lord Jesus that you’re with us right now. I worship you, for all that you’re going to do, for all that you are and everything.’ And so the smash happened and eventually the car stopped and I turned to Sophie, and I said, "Are you okay?" She said, "Ya, I’m fine." "Heather, you okay?" "Ya, I’m fine." I get out, I walk around the car to this woman and she’s cursing away like, you know, a maniac, and I said, "Are you okay?" She said, "I’ll sue you for every penny you’ve got." I said, "That’s fine sweetheart, but are you okay?" She said, "You’re not American are you?" I said, "no." She said, "I’m going to sue you for every penny that you’ve got. They’ll believe me because you’re a foreigner and an alien." I said, "Well you know, I’ve always been a foreigner and an alien." Cause I’m thinking I belong to a different, you know, ecosystem that you do. I looked at her and I said, "Well it’s always been my experience that truth will out. So let truth prevail." Suddenly, it’s like from out of nowhere, 12 people came who’d witnessed the accident, who saw what had happened and who stayed around long enough to talk to the California highway patrol.
What was interesting for me, was just what came out of my daughter’s spirit. It wasn’t fearful - it was just worship. It was just - she rejoiced because she knew that God was with her. And so she just began to respond, ‘I thank you so much that you are with us.’
What a great story- what a great daughter! But I love the phrase that he uses “a pathway of praise so well worn you can tread it without even thinking.”
It is like we have two pathways in our psyche – a path that leads to the spring of the Holy Spirit, and a path that leads to the old polluted spring of the sinful nature. We need to make the path that leads to the things of the Spirit the well worn path and not the path that leads to that old nature. That way when a crisis or temptation happens – our mouths don’t go running down the path that leads to destruction, but it goes down the path that leads to peace.
There is a trail that I ride my Mountain Bike on up near our cabin. The section that I ride is a lot of fun and difficult all the same time, but it is short. The map shows a longer loop that you can go around, but I’ve never been able to find it. The map isn’t lying, its just that the trail has not been traveled enough and kept up, so the forest has taken over and you can’t even find it any more. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if in our lives we took the path of the sinful nature so little that we couldn’t find it anymore. So that even in the worst, most provoking or tempting circumstances, what comes out of our mouth is always straight from the fresh water spring of the Spirit? The warning in this image is that if we constantly avoid the path of the Spirit, pretty soon it becomes hard to find.
That is why Paul warns us in Romans 8:13-14, “For if you live according to the sinful nature, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the body, you will live, because those who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God.”
How do we create that well-worn path to the Spirit? How do we train our tongue to go down the right path in every circumstance?
Go straight to the source.
Jesus says that it is from the overflow of the heart that the mouth speaks, therefore if we don’t like what is coming out of our mouth – we need to ask God to purify our hearts. Maybe you are here today and you have never given your life to Jesus, and maybe your mouth has got you into a whole heap of trouble. The way to begin is to Invite Jesus to take over your life, and give you that new source to live by, so that what comes out of your mouth is good because you heart has been made pure by God!
Praise & Thanksgiving.
Open your mouth and sing praises to God and thank him at every opportunity. Find the smallest things to thank him for, praise him for his character in every situation. It will wear down the right path for your tongue.
Tongues
God has given some of you the spiritual gift of tongues – the ability to speak in a language that you don’t know naturally – use your gift to beat down the path of the Spirit – pray in tongues, sing in tongues. Because it is a Spiritual gift that deals with this unrully part of use, use it for all its worth – beat down the path that leads to the Spirit.
Give up ownership of your words
Commit that the words coming out of your mouth will belong to God not you.
Peter writes in 1 Peter 4:11 “If anyone speaks, he should do it as one speaking the very words of God. If anyone serves, he should do it with the strength God provides, so that in all things God may be praised through Jesus Christ. To him be the glory and the power for ever and ever. Amen. “
Silence
Learn the Spiritual Discipline of silence – give up speaking for periods of time, go on silent retreats – the best way to kill the sinful nature is to starve it – if you have most difficulty with your tongue, give it a rest for a while and learn silence.
Abraham Lincoln said "It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt"
Calvin Coolidge said "I have never been hurt by anything I did not say"
Lets learn to control our tongues, lest build that well-worn pathway of Praise so that what comes from our lips is both pleasing to God and to the people around us.
Offer ministry.
