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Good morning, everyone. If you don’t know me, my name is Zeke. I am a member here at Red Village, and I’m on staff with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. So, I work with college students at UW Madison, seeking to reach the campus with the gospel and equipping students for a life of sharing the gospel, studying scripture, and pursuing God both during their time in college and afterwards. I’m excited to bring you God’s word this morning as we continue in the book of James.
This week, I’ll be leading us through James 3:1-12, continuing right where we left off. In this section, James continues in his proverb-like style, speaking largely of the tongue and the dangers of our words. This idea of the mouth being an aspect of self that can bring about destruction would not be unfamiliar to James’ audience. It is a theme woven throughout the Hebrew Bible. In Proverbs 11:9, it is written, “With their mouths the godless destroy their neighbors, but through knowledge the righteous escape.” And in kind, Proverbs 18:21 says, “The tongue has the power of life and death, and those who love it will eat its fruit.”
All of this talk of the tongue builds upon the foundation James laid in chapters one and two, that our faith and the condition of our soul is shown in our works. Please follow along with me as I read God’s word for us today.
James 3:1-12: “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, 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 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, staining the whole body, 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 the 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.”
Pray with me. Dear God, thank you for this text. Pray that you would take these strong words to heart. Help us to understand how you hope us to apply this to our lives. Jesus, I pray that you would use my words to help transform our lives. Help us to take this proverb very seriously. In Jesus’ name, amen.
James begins this section with a warning: “Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness,” just as it is today. Teachers, speakers—maybe we can now include influencers—are often held in high regard, of a higher status and class than the simple common man.
People pursue positions of authority because of the status, power, and money it can bring. That absolutely applies to status in the church, and power and influence as a spiritual role model and leader. This is the first group of people we can call disqualified from the role of teacher: those who are doing it for selfish gain.
In Mark 12, Jesus said, “Watch out for the teachers of the law. They like to walk around in flowing robes and be greeted with respect in the marketplaces and have the most important seats in the synagogues and the places of honor at banquets. But they devour widows’ homes and, for a show, make lengthy prayers. These men will be severely punished.” This type of false teacher is a classic example of the shepherds from Ezekiel 34—those who eat the sheep when they were sent to serve the sheep. But this is not the way that we have been called.
In Mark 10, Jesus said, “You know that those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all. For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.”
The second group whom James is addressing as people who should not teach, or at least not now, are those who stumble in many ways with their tongue. I don’t mean people with a stutter or who are poor public speakers. I mean people who have limited control of how they use their words and stumble and sin with their tongues inside teaching roles, but more importantly, when they sin and stumble outside of teaching roles.
These two groups are very different. The first is a group seeking spiritual leadership and using it to make themselves great. The other might be someone more sincere, wanting to serve God, but struggling in many places of sin that lead others astray. What these both have in common is they are failing, or at least struggling, to live out their faith by their works. How can someone be an example and a teacher to others of faith if their works fail to show their faith? How can someone teach if they do not yet understand themselves?
Here’s an example: I work with college students. We have around 20 student leaders, and with my student leaders, we are very intentional to seek to live holy lives and to weed sin out of our lives. This isn’t just because it’s good for our souls and in our journey with God, but the way that we live deeply impacts our followers. It’s much easier to excuse sin when those in authority are engaging in the same sin.
Madison, and especially UW Madison, is a very sinful place, and so loving the lost people while seeking to live out a holy life can be a very confusing and countercultural thing. The students who come to Madison are usually excited to engage in the party, drinking, and hookup culture on campus. For those who are either already Christians or those who become Christians and join InterVarsity, it’s very important for them to see a group of students who are leading and honoring God by not drinking underage, not getting drunk, not swearing, not having sex before marriage, or crossing physical or emotional boundaries with significant others, and other works of holiness that are a product of their faith.
This helps these new students, young Christians, to follow an example early on of what it means to live a life as a Christian and will save them a lot of grief from having to root out these areas of sin once they are more deeply set. This obviously isn’t always how things go. Myself and all of our students are works in progress. We’re deeply broken. But it is a culture that the students and I are seeking to create.
So, beloved church, if you are seeking to be a teacher, you must first check your heart and the way that you will impact others with your life and leadership. We will be judged with a greater weight. This isn’t something trivial. Jesus said in Mark 9, “If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them if a large millstone were hung around their neck and they were thrown into the sea.”
That’s a very weighty thing, not something to treat trivially. I believe that all Christians should seek to lead others to faith and in their faith. But it is not a light appointment. In verse 2, James clarifies that his expectations of leaders is not one of perfection. No man is perfect besides Christ and Christ alone. This is not a call to claim that pastors and teachers are perfect, or that they should be perfect, but simply to say that they must be striving to live and teach like Christ and bearing fruit in their pursuit of that.
The tongue especially should be a focus as the most difficult part of oneself to tame. That will be what we focus on for the rest of this section. So, in verses 3 through 5, we get two examples of how the tongue impacts the whole body. First, James compares it to the bits in a horse’s mouth. A horse weighs around 1,000 pounds, but it’s the two-pound piece of metal that you place in the mouth that controls the whole horse. With this, the horse goes from being wild and going wherever it pleases to being productive, doing work, or taking its rider where they wish to go. Such a small thing directs the whole direction and action of the large horse.
Second, James compares it to the rudder of a ship. A ship would have been by far the largest transportation vessel at the time. However, despite their size and the massive effort of rowing or sails needed to propel them, and the strength and weight of the ship needed to hold it together, their entire course was directed by only a small piece of wood manned by one person. In the same way, our tongues have an impact far beyond their size.
When we bridle our tongues and seek to live a life honoring God with our words, we are like the horse with a bit in its mouth; we can lead where we should go so we can serve our Master in heaven. When we have the self-control to follow Jesus with our tongues, it allows us to steer the ship that is our life in the direction Jesus is calling us to. Our tongue can boast in its impact over our life.
When we don’t bridle our tongue, it can lead to disastrous effects. It is no one’s desire to be on a ship traveling in turbulent waters with no direction or means of steering. In the same way, no one wants to be on a wild horse with no reins and no ability to control where it goes. Both of these sound like something we would all obviously avoid, but we so often allow ourselves to live this way with our tongues.
In verse 6, James describes the impact of a loose tongue, like a spark starting a forest fire. The effects can be disastrous in how it destroys our life in ways we could never foresee. James goes on to say this fire is set by hell, that is, Satan himself, who uses the words of man to bring great destruction.
In Mark 7, Jesus says, “What comes out of a person is what defiles them. For it is from within, out of a person’s heart, that evil thoughts come: sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance, and folly. All these evils come from inside and defile a person.” Jesus states that it is not the things outside of someone that defile them, but that which comes out of them. This is very similar to the way James seems to boil down the sin of a man into the tongue alone as the bringer of evil into the world.
In verses 7 and 8, James reiterates his point from verse 2, that no man can be perfect with their tongue, or else they would be perfect in all ways. Unlike the beasts of the earth, air, and sea, the tongue of man cannot be tamed. It is a restless and unyielding thing. As the author says in verse 8, it is evil and a deadly poison. His description almost feels otherworldly. It is beyond the bounds of human control and reason. The source being hell brings some clarity to this idea.
Now, what are exactly the evils that we do with our tongue? James has been rather vague up to this point, mostly speaking broadly and with imagery. But here in verses 9 and 10, he brings greater clarity. “With it we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in the likeness of God.” This runs all the way back to Genesis 1, that God created mankind in his own image.
James is pointing out the main evil of the tongue to be the cursing of the image bearers of God, that is, cursing and harming people with our words. This once again goes back to the idea that faith without works is dead. If we claim to have faith, we should honor God with our lips. Our words to the image bearers of God should reflect that same love. After all, in Matthew 25, Jesus did say, “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these of my brothers, you did it to me.” This is one of the core things that shows our brokenness, our sin against each other.
In Matthew 22, Jesus is asked what the greatest commandment is, and he states, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment, and the second is like it: you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” This summarizes the law and is seen in violation by man from the beginning. The first sin, to eat the fruit, was to sin against God, not loving him and his commands. The second sin, the murder of Abel, is a sin against man, the image bearers of God. And now we see this reflected again.
The loving of the Lord may be fulfilled in word, but its lack of sincerity is shown in the violation of the second greatest commandment: cursing one’s neighbor. In verses 11 and 12, James closes out this section with a few more pieces of imagery. This ties back to Jesus’ parables of a tree and their fruit. “Therefore, by their fruits, you will know them.” If we are using our tongue to praise God, and at the same time we are seeking to bring forth both fresh and salt water, this cannot happen, and we must know that our praise is false and our freshwater spring is nothing but a saltwater spring filled with lies.
If our faith is without works, it is dead. If our praise to God is without love for neighbor, our praise is worthless. If our tongue spouts curses to God’s image bearers, our rudder is steering us toward destruction, and hell is our captain. This should not be how we live. We should not be two-faced. Instead, we should love God and love people, bearing the fruit worthy of our Savior’s redemption in our lives. We should bless the Lord and also bless his image bearers.
The tongue is a powerful tool. It is what lured Abel into the field where Cain killed him. It’s what brought about the ideas of building a tower to heaven at Babel and throwing Jacob into a well, selling him into slavery. It is what was used in order to start wars and quarrels. The tongue is used to create division in the church, the people God chose to be unified, for by our love others would know him. Our tongues tear apart families, friends, marriages, and destroy lives.
However, the tongue was also what spoke the law to the people of Israel in the desert and what the psalmists used to bring their praises to the Lord. It is what the prophets used to call people to repentance and how Jesus spoke life to the people of Israel. God has used the tongue for good: building the church, bringing life, theology, hope, and above all else, it is the tongue that preaches the gospel to the ears of the unbeliever.
I thought about bringing up C.S. Lewis’ second book of the space trilogy and the deep conversations between the queen of Perelandra, Weston, and Ransom, and the way the tongue is used. There are so many ties to the image of God in Mandev and the fall of man through the cursing and deceit of an image bearer and the use of the tongue to teach and bring good, and the struggle and weight of the role Ransom has to bear. However, it would probably take way longer to explain than it would add to this sermon, and I don’t want Jay to ban Les Mis as well as C.S. Lewis examples in the same sermon series. But if you have read it, think about the theme of tongue and words throughout the books. And if you haven’t read it, you should.
So, what then shall we do? I’m going to split this application into two parts based on the greatest commandments I was referencing earlier. First, how can we love the Lord our God with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength? How can we use the tongue for good to honor God?
The first way that we can honor God with our tongues is to confess with our mouths that Jesus is Lord. James twice pointed out the failure of man to be perfect with his control of his tongue. It is a hopeless ordeal to strive for this perfection alone. To fulfill this would be to love your neighbor and to love the Lord, which would mean a perfect fulfillment of the two greatest commandments. We can never and will never be able to do this with man. It is impossible. We will continue to bring evil and deadly poison into the world with our tongues, but by the grace of God, all things are possible through Christ.
Unlike us, Jesus bridled his tongue and perfectly fulfilled the two greatest commandments: to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and to love your neighbor as yourself. Jesus lived a perfect life, loving others and honoring God, and ultimately laid down his life for us in the greatest act of love possible. He did this so that if we believe in him, we will be saved. When we put our faith in Jesus, his perfection of the law is credited to our account. Now we can find healing in our relationship with God and some restoration with men.
But in the age to come, we will be made perfect. We will no longer wrestle with the evil of our tongues, and the sin and shame brought about by our fallen world will be totally removed. We cannot be perfect in this age. We stumble in many ways, but because Christ accounted his perfection to us, we get to be made perfect in heaven. In the age to come, if you have not yet come to Jesus, recognizing all the ways you fall short of perfection, all the ways you sin against God and man—the bearers of his image—I would encourage you to consider this as you continue to see the brokenness in your own life, the damage your own tongue causes, and the brokenness in the world around you.
Do you want to continue to rely on yourself to bring restoration? Or are you willing to trust in the only one who can bring true healing and restoration, Jesus? We need to recognize our need for a savior and the salvation Jesus has to offer. Only then can we honor God by confessing with our mouth that he is Lord.
The second way we can honor God is by submitting our tongues to God. We can do this in a few ways. First, in holiness: when we seek to make our talk more honoring to God, we bring him honor with our mouth. We can give up crude language and seek to use our mouth in ways that please God.
The second way we can submit our tongue to God is by submitting it in his mission and seeking to use your tongue for his glory instead of your own. I’ll explain this more when I talk about love for neighbor.
The third way that we can honor God with our tongues is by worshiping God. We do this through musical worship as we sing praises to him and as we proclaim the good truths about him. We do this in our prayer, as we praise him for all he does for us and how deep his love is for us. Worship is so significant in how we honor God with our lips as it helps us to meet God and know him more. Through musical worship, we get to grow in our understanding of God and his character as we also praise him.
I’m so glad that we get to do that each week here at Red Village. I would also encourage you to engage in prayer worship to God. One of the key elements to prayer in the Bible is praise of who God is and his love for his people, his promises, or praise for his faithfulness. We often lose this in our prayers. Today, often the biggest challenge we receive about how we should pray is to just not treat God like a vending machine. So, we supplement our requests with a few thanks for this or that. But prayer can be so much more than that.
The magnificent Mary’s prayer from Luke 1, following the news of her pregnancy with Jesus, is a great example of how we can pray and worship God in our prayers. Let me read it for you and then give a few thoughts.
“My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked on the humble estate of his servant. For behold, from now on all generations will call me blessed. For he who is mighty has done great things for me, and holy is his name, and his mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation. He has shown strength with his arm. He has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the mighty from their thrones and exalted those of humble estate. He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty. He has helped his servant Israel in remembrance of his mercy as he spoke to our fathers, to Abraham, and to his offspring forever.”
This prayer mainly engages with praise and thanksgiving. There’s nothing wrong with prayer requests. Actually, God really, really wants us to make our requests known to him because he loves to give us good gifts. But there is really something beautiful about this young, faithful, unmarried woman who was just told that she was pregnant with the long-awaited Messiah and has to travel many miles to get counted for tax purposes. Her betrothed is thinking about divorcing her, and her first response is to praise God.
I wish I were more like this. When we are faced with challenges or adversity, I wish that I responded more first with praise and thanksgiving for the good that God is working.
Okay, second category of application: how can we use our tongues to love people? How can we praise God by loving our neighbor as ourselves?
The first way that we can use our tongues to love people is through encouragement. This one is pretty simple, but we still often can flake out on it. I don’t mean to encourage someone by complimenting their haircut or their new socks, although that isn’t bad by any means. It’s a lot deeper than that. Often, this comes in the form of exhortation or encouraging someone to continue pressing on in the faith and in their faithfulness to Jesus.
This can also just be fulfilling Romans 12:15: “Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn.” We can come around people and encourage them in trials, or it could be building someone up and helping equip them for serving God.
The second way we can love people well is by admonishing our brothers and sisters in Christ. To admonish is to reprimand or to correct. This might seem like it isn’t love, or at least by the standards of the world. It’s very hard to do, and sometimes it’s very hard to accept. But I think as a church, we could grow a lot from seeking to call out sin and the lack of faithful works that we see in the lives of those around us.
This isn’t cause to be mean or degrading. But when we see sin in the lives of a friend of ours and we feel the Holy Spirit stirring us up to confront it, we should not hold back. Often, the easiest insight into our lives and our sin is from the people God has placed around us. We must rely on them to point us back to Christ in our blindness to our own sin.
This doesn’t just apply to things people are doing wrong, though we can admonish one another as we exhort them towards sharing the gospel or towards spending time in scripture and prayer. These things are much needed in a huge way that we often don’t use our tongues for good in loving one another because it’s very hard to do.
It is hard to look at a friend and tell them that they need to be meeting with Jesus and making that more of a priority. It’s hard to tell someone you care about that you feel like they need to be more intentional about loving their neighborhood and to no longer make excuses to not advance the gospel. It’s hard to confront a friend about an area of sin in their life that you know they are ignoring.
Now, we must examine ourselves too as we do this and spend time in prayer all throughout, and remember that we are seeking to love them well. That means probably not just saying it bluntly and out of thin air. Seek to engage in deep conversation and care for your friend while also inviting them to admonish you in areas you need it.
Colossians 3:12-17 frames this idea in the context of Christian community very well: “Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another. And if one has a complaint against another, forgive each other. As the Lord has forgiven you, so you must also forgive. And above all these, put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God. And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.”
The third way that we can love people with our tongues is through our witness. In Romans 10, Paul writes, “How then can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them?” We are those who have been sent to preach the good news to all people of all nations. Jesus showed us the greatest love by laying down his life for us so that we might find new life in him.
It is because of his love for us that we are able to love others. And so, we should love others by revealing the love Jesus has for us to the lost. Once again, this can sometimes not feel like love, as it may make others uncomfortable or invite them into something they don’t feel like they need. But this is the greatest love that we can show them, and all people have a great need for it.
No level of discomfort or awkwardness should be remotely equal to our desire to see them in paradise with us. This is our greatest mission, our greatest call to use our tongue in this way, and the best way that we can love people.
Red Village Church, let us seek to be a church that uses our mouths to bless the Lord and bless his image bearers. Let us be a church that believes, submits, and worships the Lord our God with our mouths and honors him in this way. Let us be a church that not only encourages one another but also admonishes one another when we need to so that we might be ready on the day of Christ.
Most of all, let us seek to be a church that is filled with faithful witnesses of the gospel. Let us be unashamed to use our mouths to preach the good news of Jesus to the lost.
Pray with me. Dear God, I pray that you would work powerfully in us. Pray that you would tame our tongues, take something that is wicked and broken within us, and make something beautiful out of it. Only you can do that. Lord, I pray that you would help us individually and as a church to love you, Lord, with all of our mind, our soul, our heart, and our strength.
Lord, I pray that you would help us to love our neighbor as ourselves, to admonish and encourage our brothers and sisters in Christ, and to witness to the lost faithfully. Jesus, please be with us. Help us to understand these truths and apply them to our lives. Lord, I pray that any folly or wrongness in my tongue in this sermon, that you would put it away, that your gospel, your truth, would ring true, and that would be what lands on the hearts of the people here. In Jesus’ name, amen.