Welcome back to our Bible study on the book of James.
I’m Lori Brown and I’ll be your host today.
We’re going to be covering chapter 3 in this podcast and we’ve talked before about how in chapter 1 James lays out what he’s going to talk about for the remainder of the letter.
He talks about trials, enduring suffering, wisdom, the rich and the poor, God’s generosity, not being double-minded, being hearers and not just doers and also managing our tongues appropriately.
He lays out all those issues and then he painstakingly goes through and touches base on each of those again in the following chapters
In chapter three he delves deeply into the tongue and then caps off the chapter discussing two kinds of wisdom so we’re going to talk about both of those things today.
But let’s read chapter three as we get started
So that’s all of chapter three. It’s not that long of a chapter, just 18 verses.
And James really comes out swinging here in the very beginning about the tongue.
It’s not the first time he’s talked about the tongue in this letter. I counted at least 7 times in the book of James where he writes about the tongue, and he writes about it in every single chapter.
So it’s definitely important.
There’s about 25, maybe 30 verses out of 108 verses in James. So roughly 25% of James is spent addressing how we speak to one another.
James leads off by saying that not many of you should become teachers and that always makes me nervous because I love to teach.
But he says in verse 2 look all of us make mistakes when we’re speaking, who doesn’t make mistakes when they’re speaking? The tongue can be our downfall really but he’s saying anybody who makes no mistakes in speaking is mature. And I think that’s what we’re all aiming for, we’re aiming for maturity in our faith walk, and maturity in our faith walk means we bridle our tongue.
We watch what we say.
We pay attention to the words that come out of our mouth.
This is really one of the hardest things for us.
And remember, James is addressing communities around the Mediterranean, around Asia Minor, and reminding us of what the tongue does in community. It can stain the whole body. It wields great power, and we should pay attention to that power.
He writes that the tongue is like a small fire that turns into a big blaze, a small rudder that steers a big ship, a bit in a horse’s mouth that can turn a big horse around. It seems no one can tame the tongue, with it we bless the Lord and with it we curse people.
And when we hear that kind of language, remember that’s double-minded language, the kind of language that we saw in chapter 1 where James implores us don’t be double-minded, don’t be in Christ and in the world, don’t curse and bless. It makes no sense.
Don’t be in Christ and in the world.
Don’t be a fig tree that’s trying to grow olives.
Instead, be a fig tree that produces amazing figs!
We can’t have our tongue being in Christ and our tongue in the world.
And sometimes, you know, the world really dictates how we talk.
I remember once when my daughter, she was in elementary school, she was pretty young, and she had picked up this habit of being a little bit snarky, and I didn’t like it. But I also didn’t think she understood what she was doing so I sat her down one day and I said hey you know the words that are coming out of your mouth are really kind of hurtful and I don’t like the way you’re talking to me and I don’t think it’s very nice and she just gave me this really confused look like she had no idea what I was talking about. So I told her okay I’m going to talk to you exactly the way you talk to me.
And in that moment I completely mimicked her in what she sounded like and what she said. And when I did, her eyes got really big and they filled with tears and she began to understand the way she was talking and the impact that it was having on other people.
She couldn’t hear it herself when she was speaking, but when I parroted it back to her, she understood immediately.
She just had picked up some negative ways of speaking, whether it was from friends or school or the playground or Disney, or whatever.
And I think for us that are trying to follow in the path of Jesus, sometimes we don’t realize how our words sound to other people.
It’s not a bad thing to get checked on this, to ask someone, hey, how did that come across when I said that thing like that?
Because what we always want to be doing is having our speech seasoned with salt, right?
The kind of thing that edifies other people.
And then we also have to be willing to apologize when we’ve said the wrong thing.
We can never take back what we’ve said, and that’s the most dangerous thing about the tongue. We can never take something back. We can try to restore by repenting, by apologizing, by changing our behavior, and making a commitment to that person to change our behavior.
But we pick up these ways from the world, and we need to ask ourselves, is that in alignment with what I read in Scripture?
Is that in alignment with the way I saw Jesus live his life?
We don’t want to be blessing and cursing at the same time.
So if we are in Christ, then our words should be consistent with us being in Christ.
And we have to ask ourselves, how will my words best represent the fact that I say I’m a follower of Jesus?
And if it doesn’t line up, then we shouldn’t say it.
I know that’s a lot easier said than done. I’m not great at it. I’m a little fiery sometimes and I like to share my opinions and it doesn’t work awesome in a lot of situations. So I’m really trying to work on this in my own life too.
James says the tongue is a restless evil full of deadly poison.
If we think of that, a restless evil, like an evil that’s constantly lurking, never satisfied until it can destroy something.
So we have to bring our tongue under the control of Christ.
I don’t want my tongue to be this evil instrument in the world that’s so restless that it won’t have any satisfaction until it tears someone down.
I don’t want it to be so full of poison that people will feel sick to their stomachs when they’ve been with me.
Like they feel like they’ve been dealt a death blow when they’ve been with me.
So let’s bring our tongue in alignment.
Let’s bless the Lord with our tongue and bless one another with our tongue.
This is super important in the realm of community.
Remember, these are small, growing, but persecuted churches, groups of believers who, the only way they’re going to make it, the only way they’re going to survive and stand in their faith, and the only way they can show the love of Jesus is if the community bears witness to Jesus.
And that includes how they talk with one another, and how they use their tongues and their words in their community.
The goal is to encourage one another in the community of Christ, to use our words to build one another up. We want to be, as James said in chapter one, quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger.
We’re seeking an inner transformation that leads to outward change,
and that’s what Jesus offers us personally and collectively, inner transformation of our minds, of our tongues.
We don’t want to be double-minded in our thoughts or with our tongue.
That’s not God’s wisdom.
Starting in verse 13, James talks about two different kinds of wisdomf: God’s wisdom and earthly wisdom.
And he writes, if you’re bitter and envious, if you’re selfishly ambitious, if you lie about the truth, that’s not wisdom that comes from God.
It’s earthly.
We know what that kind of wisdom looks like. We can walk out our front door and walk around town and see it in a million places.
But wisdom from above, God’s wisdom, is pure, peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, no partiality.
Our words and our wisdom should look contrary to the world.
James says in chapter 1 that God will give generously all the wisdom we need to endure whatever suffering we experience in our communities.
Earthly wisdom will never sustain us.
It cannot feed our spiritual person.
It will lead to envy and strife and selfish ambition.
We need God’s wisdom and we need to use God’s wisdom in our words.
I think our society right now is so fractured and people have broken into different camps, political, faith, identity, whatever camp, and we are easily swayed into these camps.
And we think anybody who’s not in our camp is automatically our enemy,
But they’re not really our enemy. Our enemy is that we are at war within ourselves.
We’re not being transformed internally when we break into camps. We’re just reinforcing camps.
And God says, you can’t use your tongue like that.
You can’t use your tongue for evil if you’re going to be a follower of Christ.
And we’re kind of without a leg to stand on here because even if we’ve broken into camps and we’ve said other people are our enemies, well, guess what?
Jesus says, love your enemies because that’s the way of Christ.
Here we have in chapter 3 a stern warning from James, really, to pay attention to our tongues and to seek God’s wisdom in how we use our tongue,
in our community,
in our families,
in our friendships
and to make sure that we’re not trying to be fig trees that are growing olives.
But instead we’re trying to be fig trees that are growing really big juicy delicious figs that could be a blessing to the people in our world!
That about wraps it up for chapter 3.
Go out and be amazing fig trees!!
See you next time for chapter four.
Thanks!
