The Power of Speech


Sermon by Cory Brock on July 4, 2021 James 3:1-14

Well we take a break from 2 Peter this morning and we’re going to have a look at James chapter 3, which is a very famous passage about our words, about the way we speak. And it’s a part of a book, James, that’s often been called “the Proverbs of the New Testament.” It’s a book of wisdom. And it’s about how the Christian faith has to lead to a transformed life and that we believe, we believe here that the Gospel changes all of us. It changes every bit of what we are from inside out, from top to bottom. And James takes up the fact that when we have been justified by faith, what do our lives need to look like? What does a transformed life need to look like? And the word for that in the Bible, one of the words, is Christian wisdom. Wisdom is the word that James is talking about here. And if you look across the Bible, a lot of times the word, “wisdom,” another way of translating it is the word, “skill.” Wisdom is the skill of living life well, the way that God intended. It means fearing God and believing in Jesus and loving God’s commandments and conforming all of who we are to the way of righteousness, to the path of righteousness, and avoiding the path of foolishness in all of our decisions. And James 3 is about wisdom, Christian wisdom in our lives; having a transformed life in the way that we talk and the way that we speak. So let’s have a look at it. We’ll pray and then we’ll read together from verses 1 to 14. Let’s pray.

Our God, we come and ask for help as we seek that You, Spirit of Christ, would transform our words. And so we ask for that in Jesus’ name, amen.

Let’s read verses 1 to 14 together from James 3: 

“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 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, 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 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.

Who is wise and understanding among you? By his good conduct let him show his works in the meekness of wisdom. But if you have bitter jealousy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not boast and be false to the truth.”

This is God’s holy Word.

James tells us here that words, the ability we have as human beings to speak, to use language, is fundamental to what it means to be a human being. And so we’ve got to see several of the lessons here because speech is so important. So let’s see three things. First, we’ll see the potential of speech – what our speech can do. And then secondly, the origin of speech, of language. And finally, the elements of wise speech – how do we seek to become wiser, better speakers in this life?

The Potential of Speech

So first, the potential of speech. And we’re asking the question here, “What can our words do?” And that’s really what this passage is centered around. And James tells us exactly the answer in verse 5. He says “the tongue is small but it boasts of great things,” meaning it has great potential and immense power. And you say, “Well James, what do you mean by that?” And he explains it with three different metaphors. It’s always great when the Bible provides the illustrations so we don’t have to come up with them. And James does that. He gives us three different illustrations to explain exactly what he means. He says first that it’s like the rudder. The tongue, the mouth, language, human words, is like the rudder of a ship. You know the rudder of a ship is small, but the rudder can turn a gigantic ocean liner and it’s got immense potential and immense power. Or it’s like a little bitty metal bit that we put in a horse’s mouth, attached to the bridle. And you know the bit is so small but if you put it in a horse’s mouth, the bit is so small you put it in a horse’s mouth and you can turn a giant horse. You can control the horse. It’s got immense amount of power.

But the most important metaphor he uses here is, he says that our words are like small fires. He says, “small fires.” And I think that – this is the first century; I think he probably has in mind here the fire that a journeyman, a traveler, a pilgrim makes along the road when they are camping. And when you go camping and you make a fire, a small fire, if it’s controlled and if it’s set within its boundaries, it is light in the midst of the darkness. It is warmth on a cold night. And it can feed you; it can cook food whenever you are hungry. And that means that controlled fire, fire that’s bounded in the correct way, can be an instrument of life. It’s life giving. And on the opposite side – and he is talking about the negative here – he says if the fire is left uncontrolled and you don’t put rocks around it and you let it get to the tall grass and it runs up the tree, the campfire becomes a forest fire and the forest fire becomes a city fire and the nation burns.

And that means that James is, with these metaphors he is making a negative point very explicitly and a positive point implicitly. And the negative point is that when our words are untamed and unchecked and unbounded by righteousness, by faithfulness, they have the power of destruction over the world. And we know that because if you look, we look at our history and we know that wars are most often not started by violence first but by ideas. And ideas become speech and speech creates war. And we know that society is built on the possibility of communication and language and that every single relationship is created in the midst of being able to communicate with one another. And when we can’t trust words, when we can’t trust the words of our neighbors and our leaders and our colleagues, we know that society begins to crumble; it begins to break down and relationships begin to break down because language, human words, are at the foundation of everything. James goes so far as to say in verse 6 that words can set, not just forest fires, but he says “hell fire.” He uses the word, “gehenna” for “hell.” He says our words can be like hell fire, even. He takes it that seriously.

But implicitly, there is a positive side to it and it’s subtle, but it’s in verse 2. In verse 2 he says, “If anyone does not stumble in what he says, he is a perfect person, able to bridle his whole body.” And he’s saying that if you are a perfect person then you speak perfectly, but also, perfect speech makes perfection. Perfect speech cleanses and makes things perfect. In other words, he’s saying that while our mouth, our words have the possibility of hell fire, of destruction, at the same time he’s saying it also has the power of life, the instrument of life. And he’s saying, on the one hand, words are the power of heaven and they’re the power of hell. And they can minister in both of those ways.

Now all of this, James has often been called “the Proverbs of the New Testament” and that’s because James is drawing so much of his thought directly from the book of Proverbs. There’s an Old Testament background to this idea of the fire, of life and of death. And Proverbs 18:21 says precisely, it says, “Death and life, death and life is in the power of the tongue.” So Proverbs puts it in an axiom, in an aphorism, and then James comes and all of James chapter 3 is him saying, “Let me exegete Proverbs 18:21 for you and say that the tongue has got the power of heaven and hell in its very depths.” The gospels – Jesus Christ comes and gives a long diatribe, a long talk about our speech in Matthew chapter 12. And let me just read you the one verse conclusion of Jesus’ speech about our words. He says, “I tell you on the day of judgment people will give an account for every careless word that they speak, for by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned.” Oh boy! On the day of judgment we will give an account for every careless word that we speak, he says.

And that background is an explanation for what’s going on in James chapter 3 verse 1. You know you read James 3 verse 1 and he says, “Avoid becoming a teacher in the church.” He’s talking about in the church and he’s saying, “Not many of you need to be preachers, teachers, in the local church because you know that those who teach will be judged with greater strictness.” How does that connect with the rest of the passage about our words? Well he’s appealing here to Jesus’ words in Matthew 12:36. And Jesus says on the day of judgment you will be held in account for your careless, foolish, sinful words. And James is saying that’s why if you can get out of being a preacher, get out of it, because you have the power of speech, of speaking words of blessing or curse to so many people every week – week in and week out – there’s danger in that! He’s taking Jesus’ warning seriously.

The Origins of Speech

Now secondly, the origins of speech. That leads us to ask the question – and this is exactly what James takes us to – “Why are words so powerful? Why is our speech so serious?” That’s the question here. And he gives a hint at the answer in verse 9. He says with our mouth, “we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in the likeness of God.” And at the very end of that, he says that human beings, when we speak ill and curse other human beings, we’ve got to remember that they were created in the likeness of God. And what is James doing there? Just like he exegeted Proverbs 18:21, he’s saying, “I’m thinking about page 1 of the Bible here. And on page 1, Genesis 1:26, we learn that God made humanity in His image, after His likeness.” And you see, one of the things – James is giving us a piece of theology here. He’s saying, “What does it mean to be made in the image of God?” And James is saying you’ve got to look at Genesis 1:1 and ask, “Well what did God do at the very beginning of history?” One of the first things He says to us, the first thing He says to us is we were made in His image. What does God do first in all of history? He speaks. He communicates. His Word goes forth. And that means that James is saying it is at least the case, at minimum, that to be the image of God – humans, men and women, we are the image of God – to be the image of God is to be a speaker like God is a speaker. When we communicate, we are like God.

And we can ask, “Well what does God do when He speaks?” Things come out of nothing. He creates life. He sustains life with His words. You, you human being, are like God whenever you are speaking. And you are never more like God than when you are speaking words that give and sustain life. And that means that we push back against what it means to be made in the image of God whenever we speak words that burn like reckless fires.

Now the great illustration of this in the Bible is from Daniel chapter 4 – the story of Nebuchadnezzar. Nebuchadnezzar was the most powerful man in all of history up to that point, and one of the more powerful men in history even up till now. And Nebuchadnezzar, after having conquered so many kingdoms and building his great palace in Babylon, it says that he steps out onto his porch one night and he says this – “Is this not Babylon the great, which I myself have built as a royal residence by the might of my power and for the glory of my majesty?” And Daniel tells us that as soon as the words left his mouth, the words of selfish ambition and self-centered glory, that he was driven away from human kind to dwell with the beasts to eat grass like cattle, to grow hair like a bird, to grow nails as long as bird claws. Now James, he appeals to Proverbs and he takes us back to Genesis 1, and I think that he has this moment in mind when he says in James 3 verse 7, “Every beast and every bird, every reptile, all the sea creatures, we human beings have the power to tame the creatures, the beasts, but we cannot tame our tongues.” And he had to have been thinking of Nebuchadnezzar because as soon as sinful speech, the speech of selfish ambition, went out of Nebuchadnezzar’s mouth, God gave him the life of a beast. And what it’s saying is that sinful speech makes us beastlike. We are made to be in the image of God. We are communicators like God is a communicator and we are never more like God than when we speak words of life. But when we speak words of death, the Old Testament is saying, by illustration, we become like beasts. We desecrate, we lower, we are not fulfilling what we have been called to be – the image of God in the world.

And that means that sinful speech, to put it simply, is dehumanizing. When we speak sinfully, it dehumanizes the self and the people that we talk about. It dehumanizes our own selves because we act in a way that is less than the fullness of the image of God. But look, when we gossip for example, we speak of someone as if they are less the image of God than we are. We push them down to build ourselves up. And to put it in a theological framework, we desecrate the image of God in them by lifting ourselves up above them. And that’s gossip. And we’ve all sang the song, ages ago in our earlier lives, “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.” And James is saying, “Sure, words might not break your flesh, your material, but they will make you beastly. They can crush and kill the soul of both self and neighbor by pushing down the fact of the image of God.” We were made to speak like God speaks. We were made to talk like God talks. We were made to be creators and life givers with our speech. And when we speak in ways that are sinful, we dehumanize ourselves and others.

Now, to close this second point, in Matthew 12:36 Jesus says, “For anybody who has spoken a careless word in their life, you will stand before the living God and give an account for the words you have spoken.” And when we read that, we have to say, “What am I going to do with myself? What am I going to say before the living God when I am asked to give an account for the careless words that I have spoken?” Have you ever, ever broken a relationship with sinful, foolish, unwise speech? Have you ever damaged another person with a careless word, even if they didn’t know about it? Have you ever done it? And James tells us in verse 8 that there is nobody that can tame the tongue; not a single one of us can do it. We are all there. Matthew 12:36 – what are we to do with that? How can we face a verse like that?

And 15 chapters later, in that very same gospel, Jesus Christ is going to be beaten by the Roman whip to the point of disfigurement. Isaiah 53 says it. It says that He will be like a beast. He will be treated more like an animal than a human. It says in Isaiah 53 that human beings actually had to turn their faces away because of what He underwent for us. Jesus Christ is the most human human being that has ever lived and He was dehumanized for our ghastly, beastlike speech. And even more than that, we can say that when God spoke the world into being, we learn later in Colossians and John 1:1 that Jesus Christ, the Son, is the very Word that went forth from God the Father. He is the speech of God. And when He came into this world and He spoke to us, God the Father spoke to Him; God opened the heavens and opened the pathway to communication with His Son and He said, “You, this, everybody look. This is My beloved. This is the one with whom I am pleased.” And Jesus, remember, He went out into the wilderness with the beasts to pray and communicate with God His Father. There’s never been a relationship between God and a human being like there is between Jesus Christ and the Father, but when He went to the cross, and it says that He was forsaken, He heard nothing but utter silence because of our careless words, because of our loud voices. The communication was silenced. He was cut off. He was sent into the territory of the beasts, out of the land of the living, for us.

And we have to ask, you ask, “Can my speech really set ablaze a forest in a city?” And oh man, my words and your words lit the sacrificial fire upon which Christ was burned. James says our words can be hell fire. Our words became His hell fire. He died, He died for them, and it is so that, it is so that when we read a verse like Matthew 12:36, God can say, pronounce in words, speech to you, “I regard your words as righteous and not wicked, because when I look at you, I see Him.” God can overlook the fact, the truth, because in Christ our words are pronounced righteous and holy and justified, no matter what we’ve said in our past. Jesus Christ went through all of this so that we might be purified in our speech rather than judged. And so this message, this Gospel, the Gospel transforms every bit of who we are, and right here, the Gospel is applied directly to the way we speak. And the Gospel is for anybody who has ever spoken a careless, sinful, or hurtful word. Jesus says – What are you to do with Matthew 12:36? Jesus says, “Look at the cross and don’t do anything, and receive and repent and know that your speech has been judged in the fires of His death that we created but did not have to walk through.”

The Elements of Wise Speech

Now thirdly and finally then, let’s ask, let’s turn from justification to sanctification and ask, “What about the elements of wise speech?” James gets into this a little bit in our passage, but let’s look at that. How do we become better? How do we seek wiser speech and more faithful speech in our lives? And let me say three brief things about it.

The first thing is that you can look at this passage and James summarizes all the different potential things that you can talk about. In verse 8 and verse 9 in particular, he says, we can bless God and we can curse people. There are only two things that we can talk about with our words. Two things – God and creatures – because that’s the only two things that exist. Either you talk about God or you talk about something God made. That’s all that there is to talk about. And the Bible tells us over and over, it tells us right here in James 3:9, that bad speech can be appointed towards God or towards His creatures, and bad speech towards God, curse towards God, is summarized under the word in the Bible, “blasphemy.” Blasphemy is any time that we talk about, we apply careless words to God’s name. It can be flippant or cursing, but all of it, careless words applied to the name of God. One domain of speech – God; that’s called blasphemy.

But then the domain of speech that we apply to anything God made, God’s creatures, the Bible has all sorts of words for different ways that we can sin in the way we talk about creation and about the creatures of God. I’m just going to list about half of them for you quickly. We can lie, gossip, slander, flatter, rash talk, profane talk, complaining talk, murmuring, boasting, bitter speech, harsh words, false teaching, cruel words, insult, ridicule, perversity, and even the Bible lists silence as one of the sins of speech. There’s lots of different ways to sin in the way we talk about God’s creation. At the same time, on the flip side, God comes in James 3 and in Ephesians 4 and in John 14 to 17 and other places, and says that there is also a paradigm for wise speech, a clear, easy to remember way of always saying, “Is my speech righteous? Is it good?” And Paul gives it to us in Ephesians 4:15 directly. He says, “Always speak the truth in love.” And so the paradigm of wise speech, according to the Bible, is that speech should always be a unity between truth and love.

And James gets into that also, subtly. And this is the second thing, by the way, of 3. James also gets into that subtly in James 3:14. If you have a look at James 3:14, here is what it says. “If you have bitter jealousy” – he’s talking about speech – “and selfish ambition in your heart, then don’t boast or don’t even talk and be false to the truth.” The paradigm is truth in love, but do you see what James is saying here? That the Bible has a more multivalent and full reading of what truth means than we often do. And here, the nature of spoken truth is not being presented as just the type of moments where we might take a judicial oath and be asked, “Speak as accurately as possible. Don’t worry about anything else, but just speak pure accuracy; exactly as you saw it.” And there are moments for that in our lives, but that is not what the Bible means when it talks about speaking the truth. Speaking true truth, which is speaking truth in love, is not just speaking accuracy. And we all know this of course, because have you ever said the accurate thing at the wrong time to your spouse or to your friend? And speaking the truth is not just accurate representations, but it’s accuracy combined with motivation of agape, of the love that Jesus Christ has for other people; a self-sacrificial love.

You see, James says here if you are going to speak from a domain of selfish ambition, even if it’s accurate, then that’s not the truth; that’s not really truth. Truth telling, true speech, is accuracy combined with the motivation of agape, of the love of Jesus Christ for another person. And so we can speak accurately, but it matters so much when we say something and how we say something, but ultimately why we say something. And what James is saying is that speaking the truth in love is a matter of the heart; speaking from a righteous motivation.

An example; an example of this. We can speak incredibly accurately to a friend about another friend’s failures, but if we do it from a place of selfish ambition, then that’s gossip. But at the same time, we can speak to a friend accurately about another friend’s failures and we are doing it because I love this man, I love this woman, and I’m trying to bring you in so that we can plan together how we’re going to encourage them and lift them up and help them in a time of suffering. And that’s righteousness. That’s good! So accuracy is not enough. Motivation is everything. We can speak accurately directly to a person in good confrontation, they need to be confronted, but if we do it from selfish ambition then the Bible calls that spite; no love, but spite. We can speak accurately – and this is what James is talking about in 3:14 – about ourselves to another person, telling them exactly something that we did, but if it’s from a place of selfish ambition, the Bible calls that boastfulness and self-absorption, accuracy isn’t enough. It has to be combined with agape love, the self-sacrificial love of Jesus Christ.

Last thing, and we’ll turn to the close. The famous example is from Proverbs 27:6 of this. This is the flipside. If we speak the truth without love to somebody, that can be spite or gossip. But here’s the flipside in 27:6 – “Wounds from a friend are faithful, but an enemy multiplies kisses.” Truth without love breaks relationships in harshness, but an enemy comes to you and kisses you on the cheek with their words. And what is that? That’s the sin of flattery. And the sin of flattery is speaking love without the truth. And both come from a place of selfish ambition. Both are unrighteous. One is accurate without love, and the other is love without accuracy. And we can go in either direction. True speech speaks accurately for the sake of another person’s good.

And so we’ve got to close with this. I’m just going to rattle these off. Some things to think about that I think James implicitly offers us here to develop wise, faithful, growing, healthier mature, Christian speech. The first thing is this. Remember Matthew 12:36 and that your words can be forgiven. The Word Himself who died for you, if you turn to Him today, He died for your words. And that means that if Christ has loved us all the way to the point of becoming beastly, taking on our beastly like words for us, we have got to be quick and willing to forgive the careless words that have been spoken to us in our lives. Because Jesus came for us before we ever asked for forgiveness and died for our words, and so we’ve got to be quick to forgive other people their ghastly words.

Secondly, that’s justification – sanctification. We’ve got to take our words, we’ve got to actually then turn and say we’ll be more and more and more serious about the way we speak. And that doesn’t mean without humor and without playfulness and fun. That just means we have got to say that words have deep gravity to them – the power of speech. God tells us that our words are grave. John Webster was an immense and very great British theologian who I was able to meet a couple of times when we were living in Scotland. And he passed away suddenly and too early just several years ago. And he wrote in his final year of life, a paper that I got to hear him present called, “The Sins of Speech.” And this is what he says about the gravity of our words. He says this, “What is said may not be unsaid. Speech sets up meaning in this world, which may not be retracted. It can be recanted and withdrawn and renounced and forgiven, but it may not be unsaid, because that which has been said is irreversible. If I am called a fool by somebody, I am now one who has been once called a fool by that person in this world, which is now a place where I have been called a fool.”

Our words are irrevocable and they have to be taken so seriously. Words are sticky, and sticks and stones may break our bones, but – we can be forgiven for our words but we’ve got to be serious about them too. And our words are sticky and they can last and they can create memories and they can create things that are very hard to get over. And so Christians, we have got to take them so, so seriously. Words are forgivable, but they can have consequences even after they are forgiven.

Thirdly and finally, there is a paradox in this passage. I mentioned it earlier; it’s in verse 2. James tells us that perfect speech makes a person perfect, in a sense, but this is a chicken and an egg moment because we are told that in the Bible, “Out of the heart, the mouth speaks.” The condition of your heart, the condition – a healthy tree, right, does not bear good fruit. So the heart has to be righteous for speech to be righteous, but James also says, and your speech, righteous speech makes righteousness. And even though it sounds like a contradiction, both of these things are true at the very same time. When we have been justified by faith, God has given us definitive sanctification. We have been made righteous and able to follow the Lord with our words, and at the same time, we know that the more we cling to patterns of righteous speech, the more that actually shapes our hearts in righteous directions.

And the reverse is true. I like to think of this point as the plasticity of the heart because the word “plasticity” has been applied more and more to the neurosciences over the past couple of decades. And neuroscientists will talk about the plasticity of the brain – that through memories and habits and all sorts of things, you can rewire, you can reshape the neural pathways of the brain to think differently, to be more apt to certain abilities. And so the heart is plastic as well. It does not change easily, but it does get reshaped over time, slowly, and it can be changed by seeking righteous speech.

And so the last word. We have then got to say, “What are my patterns of speech? Am I awake to the particular sins that I struggle with when it comes to my speech?” And is it slanting? Is it boasting? Is it flattery? Is it gossip? Is it little lies? Is is speech for the sake of controlling others? We have got to be awake so that we can fight so that we are not shaped, our plastic hearts are not shaped over time more and more by unrighteous speech but by righteous speech. We have got to then turn to the Word Himself, Jesus Christ, and be in communion with Him so that His words can shape our words.

And the final word, we’ve got to think then of wise speakers in our lives that we can surround ourselves with. Paul says, “Emulate me. Copy the way that I speak because I follow Christ.” Paul, the apostle said that, and every single one of us can probably think of a person that we know in our lives that have really been transformed in the way they speak by the Gospel. And you know, when you throw out those subtle little gossips, they don’t pick up on them. They won’t take them; they won’t grab hold of them. They won’t go there. And we’ve got to be in relationship with people who speak the truth in love and who will say, “I’m going to help you speak the truth in love. I will call you out. I will talk to you about your speech.”

And so Jesus Christ, there is hope for us, there is hope for us, there is hope for change on the horizon if you are a careless speaker like me. When we see Jesus Christ, the one who was burned by the wildfire of our speech, not dead but standing, not with His arms out like this on a cross but with His arms out like this saying your name, “Come to Me. I have died for your careless words. And now follow Me and be My disciple with the way that you talk.”

Let’s pray together.

Speak, O Lord, Your words into our hearts that we might not sin against You. But Lord, when we do, when we speak careless words, and we will, we know and confess that we have an Advocate, You, Jesus Christ the righteous, and so we appeal to Your name for forgiveness. And we ask that You would give us the power to wield this instrument of language for life and not for death. And we ask this in Christ’s name, amen.

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