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The Power of The Tongue
MSG
Introduction:
Words are powerful.
They can build up, encourage, and motivate.
Words can also tear down, hurt, and cause horrible scars.
Years ago I visited a college friend at his home.
On campus we had enjoyed a significant sharing of personal values and philosophies, much of it through discussion of literature, history and music.
When we met at his home, he wanted me to hear a certain Mahler symphony that expressed some of his aspirations toward the attainment of love and peace.
We listened together in silent pleasure, caught up in the music and our high ideals—until, at a particularly moving point in the symphony, my friend’s mother broke the spell by entering the room and asking a mundane question about supper.
Her innocent interruption received a fierce verbal rebuke from her son.
How dare she spoil the exquisite music!
Startled and embarrassed, she retreated from the room, but the damage to our mood had been done.
The damage to our illusions had also been done.
My friend and I talked about the incident.
What good were ideals of love and aspirations to “self-actualization” if we could not control our tongues enough to speak respectfully to other human beings?
The spirituality was only a feeling, an illusion, if it could not purify our behavior in the practical matter of what we said.
Exactly so, writes James.
He returns now to a theme he introduced in 1:19 and emphasized in 1:26, to provide his most complete explanation of this issue—controlling our tongues.
George M. Stulac, James, The IVP New Testament Commentary Series (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1993), .
• , “Life and death are in the power of the tongue, and those who love it will eat its fruit.”
How we communicate matters to God, and He keeps a record of our words.
Jesus said:
• , “I tell you that on the day of judgment people will have to account for every careless word they speak.”
James draws our focus on the tongue, a little thing that has the power to dispense both blessings and curses.
The
The Power of the Tongue is revealed through the following major functions
I.
The Tongue Functions As A Gauge
With his now familiar and kind address my brothers, James begins with a specific instruction that not many should become teachers.
His concern is not to give career counseling.
Rather, he is addressing those who aspire to positions of authority in the church.
Church leaders are his primary focus now.
And what is on his heart is a sin to which leaders are vulnerable—the sin of pride.
The NIV reflects this emphasis by rendering the words “become teachers” as “presume to be teachers.”
James’s point in the last half of 3:1 (that teachers will be judged more strictly) is driven home in the first part of 3:2 (reminding them that everyone is vulnerable because we all stumble in many ways).
It is a warning not to think one has attained an unassailable spirituality.
It is a serious reminder to be humble.
Further discussion of the role of teachers in the church will begin in 3:13.
The fact that James mentions teachers here but does not specifically return to the topic until so much later does not have to mean this is a later addition to the text, as Davids allows (1982:135).
A continuing flow of thought makes sense here.
James has been prescribing humility implicitly and explicitly in 1:5, 1:9–11, 1:13–15, 1:16–18, 1:19, 1:21, 1:26 and 2:13.
Nor is this to be the end of the matter.
The reader can glance over chapters 3–5 and find, in the diverse applications, the unifying intent to warn against arrogance and instruct in humility.
James evidently saw those in authority to teach as being particularly in danger of spiritual arrogance, which would be expressed in impure speech.
He therefore introduces his address to teachers and then proceeds to develop his message with care and detail.
All of this is immediate confirmation that in his emphasis on deeds in the preceding passage James is still realistic about the persistence of sin and is not expecting perfection in holiness.
It is also confirmation that the theme of humility, especially as expressed in speech, is fundamental to James’s teaching about Christian living.
Humility is a trait we must examine, search out and cultivate if we claim to take this book of God’s word seriously.
As the foundation for this particular character development, James confronts us with two inescapable facts of life: judgment and failure.
These are the two facts, therefore, that an expositor of this passage should establish in order to disciple young Christians in humility.
James has already warned that we are not to judge (2:4) and that we will be judged (2:12).
Now he adds these two points.
First, there is a greater strictness of judgment for ones who teach.
This could be based upon Jesus’ statement in Matthew 7:2.
It means that a teacher is obligated to teach what is true and then to live up to what is taught.
God expects more from church leaders and holds them accountable for what they teach his people.
This biblical principle is exemplified in Ezekiel 34:1–10, where the unfaithful leaders of the nation are condemned for being neglectful and abusive shepherds of God’s people, and God declares that he will “hold them accountable.”
See it again in Matthew 5:19 and 18:6, where Jesus gives warning to anyone who teaches others to sin.
See it repeated in Luke 12:42–48, where Jesus’ parable is about a manager “whom the master puts in charge of his servants to give them their food allowance at the proper time.”
The Lord’s instruction culminates in this principle: “From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked.”
Second, there is failure by all of us.
This failure James describes with the verb stumble (ptaiō, used before in 2:10).
This verb has the literal meaning of “stumble” or “trip,” but it is used as a figure for making a mistake or sinning.
(James will repeat the verb in the last half of 3:2; Romans 11:11 and 2 Peter 1:10 are the only other New Testament uses of this verb.)
James is saying, “Remember, you are subject to judgment even more if you try to teach others; and you are highly vulnerable in that judgment because we all sin in many ways.”
The tongue is a spiritual meter.
If we can bridle it, we can keep the entire body in check.
It is the gauge for our maturity.
Our faith will never register higher than our words.
The tongue is a spiritual meter.
If we can bridle it, we can keep the entire body in check.
It is the gauge for our maturity.
Our faith will never register higher than our words.
II.
The Tongue Functions As A Guide
We have found James’s style to be full of imagery, previously using a wave of the sea (1:6), a wild flower (1:10), a crown (1:12), childbirth (1:15), lights and shadows (1:17) and a mirror (1:23), and already using a horse’s bit and a ship’s rudder in the current passage.
Now he adopts a new image appropriate for his topic: fire.
The effect of this choice of image can be shown by comparing it to another possible image.
If he had compared the tongue to an ax, he could have portrayed quite vividly a destruction of a large tree by a small tool.
Instead of such an isolated act of destruction, however, James chose to portray a spreading destruction.
An ax destroys one tree at a time; with our tongues, one act of evil starts a destructiveness that spreads beyond the initial act.
What kind of spreading does James have in mind?
It is easy to envision the spreading of evil through a church family because of gossip, slander and criticisms.
If Paul had written this passage, we might expect him to employ his image of the church as the body of Christ to describe the injury done to other lives by one person’s impure speech.
But James’s reference to the body appears to be in the Jewish sense of the whole person rather than a figure of speech for the church.
His focus is more on the destruction of the impure speaker’s own life.
We can envision how this might be so.
Spread gossip, and people will not trust you.
Speak with sarcasm and insults, and people will not follow you.
Yet what is especially on James’s mind is not the reaction of others to your speech but the spreading of sin from your speech to the rest of your life.
Be hateful with your tongue, and you will be hateful with other aspects of your behavior.
If you do not discipline and purify your speech, you will not discipline or purify the rest of your life.
A true exposition of this text should be severe, uncompromising and authoritative in its condemnation of this evil, faithful to James’s language, which is neither mild nor restrained.
With a rapid succession of images prompted by the devastation he sees, James says the uncontrolled tongue
☐ is a world of evil—a whole world of wrongdoing and wickedness, “a vast system of iniquity” (Hiebert 1979:215).
The phrase implies a multitude of forms that our impure speech may take.
☐ corrupts the whole person—an image of a staining and defiling spread of sin from wicked speech into all other behavior.
The contrasting pattern, using the same term in the form of a negative adjective, was in 1:27—keeping oneself unstained or unpolluted by the world.
☐ sets on fire the course of one’s life—now depicting the tongue’s wickedness as a conflagration spreading through the time span of one’s life as well as the diversity of one’s behavior.
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