Bite Your Tongue
The story is told of a young man who had just started his new job in the produce department of a grocery store, when a woman came up to him asking to buy a half head of lettuce.
As politely as he could, the young man said that “In this store, we don’t sell half heads of lettuce, we sell whole heads of lettuce.” The lady was remarkably persistent—obnoxiously so. And so in the end, he did what any young produce department grocery store lad would do, and said, “Well, let me go talk to the manager.”
The young man shuffles off to find the manager in the back of the store, not realizing that the woman is following him some distance behind. He gets to the manager, and says in frustration, “I’ve got this crazy old woman out there who wants to buy a half head of lettuce.
Seeing the look of consternation on his manager’s face, the lad realizes all of a sudden that the woman is standing right behind him. He turns and quick as a whip and says, “And this nice lady wants to buy the other half.”
Later that day, the manager complimented him on his very quick thinking, and in the course of the conversation said to the young man, “Where do you come from, where is your home?” “Well,” said the young man, “I’m from Toronto, home of beautiful hockey players and ugly women.” The manager’s face dropped once again as he said, “I’ll have you know, my wife is from Toronto.” Quick as a whip the young man turned around and said, “And what hockey team did you say she plays on?”
Ah yes, the power of the tongue. With it we praise God, says James. And with it we curse men. Out of the same mouth come praise and cursing. He says, “My brothers, this should not be.” Who of us hasn’t found himself in a situation where we have suffered from foot in mouth disease? Who of us hasn’t been in a situation where we have said things that we desperately wish that we had not said, and that somehow or another we could take back? And who of us hasn’t been the recipient of words spoken in haste, spoken in anger? Truly the tongue can be a source not only of great comfort, but also a source of incredible pain.
And interestingly enough, James, as he continues to develop this subject of what it is to live out your faith in Christ, doesn’t begin with immorality and adultery and drunkenness and the great worldly sins that we might think of. He begins by talking about the sins of the tongue. He says in Verse 26 of Chapter 1, “if anyone considers himself religious and yet does not keep a tight rein on his tongue, he deceives himself and his religion is worthless.” And in Chapter 3 where he develops this theme in the verses that we have read an even greater specificity and detail, he says in Verse 6, “The tongue is also 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.”
As we look at these two passages in conjunction with each other this morning, I want us to note four observations that James makes about the tongue and it’s power. And here’s the first: the tongue is but a small member of our body. James 3:5, the tongue he says, “is small part of the body.” I don’t know if you have every really thought about it, and it’s kind of a gross thing to suggest, but if you were to cut out somebody’s tongue, how much do you think it would weigh? Well the average male tongue weighs about 70 grams, which is about 2 1/2 ounces and for a woman the average tongue weighs about 60 grams, or a little bit over 2 oz. I will resist the temptation to find a lesson in that.
The tongue is but a small part of the body, but it serves three very important functions: It helps in the tasting of our food, though most of our tasting is a function of smell, as anybody who’s ever had a clogged nose can testify. It helps in swallowing food and of course, it is a very important part of speaking. Cut out somebody’s tongue and you deprive them of the ability to speak.
You’ve heard the phrase tongue-tied—we often use it sort of symbolically in the context of a person who blanks out, and doesn’t know what to say in a given situation. But being tongue-tied is actually a physical condition whereby some people’s tongues are fastened to the bottom of their mouths and without surgery they can never learn how to speak properly. As a matter of fact, there is a disease called Macroglossia that manifests itself in tongues that are too big and that then have to be trimmed back surgically. Sounds like a very unappetizing type of operation to me.
While we are on the subject of tongues, did you know that the world’s longest tongue, now this is serious, this is in theGuiness Book of World Recordsis 9.2 centimeters long?
The honour belongs to a chauffer in the UK. His name is Steven Taylor, and he can stick out his tongue 9.2 centimeters. Now you may not think that’s much, but you try it.
The tongue says James, “Is but a small member of the body.” Nothing compared to the size of your head, nothing compared to the size your feet, but he goes on to say, “Despite it’s small size,” and this of course is his whole point, “it has an unusual power. Likewise the tongue is a small part of the body, but it makes great boasts.” It has a power disproportionate to its size.
And then in James, Chapter 3, in rapid succession, gives us three very colorful word pictures to try to capture the importance of this small sized organ in our body. First of all he compares our tongue to a horse’s bit. He says in Verse 3, “When we put bits into the mouths of horses, we make them obey us. We can turn the whole animal.” A bit as you know, is a metal cross bar, usually it’s metal, that you put in a horses mouth above his tongue. It’s tied to his bridle and in turn it is tied to his reins, and when a horse has been trained and conditioned, that’s how you control the horse. And a little tug on the rein, this way or that way and the whole big horse has its direction changed because of the bit.
Then he goes on to say another example is that of a ship’s rudder. He says, “Or take ships as an example. Although they are so large and our driven by strong winds, they are steered by a very small rudder wherever the pilot wants to go.” Here’s this big ship, it’s driven by strong winds which is similar to the strong passions that drive our lives, but he says, it is controlled by that small rudder on the back by which the pilot can change the direction of the boat at will. And then he says, “it’s like a spark of fire. Consider what a great forest is set on fire, by a small spark.” You may not remember this news story, but back in the summer of 2003, a man by the name of Mike Barre, failed to properly extinguish the butt of his cigarette on the sidewalk behind his house, just north of Kamloops, B.C. That improper extinguished cigarette butt started Forest Fire.
That forest fire, by the time it was done, burned 260 square kilometers of forest and woodlands. It destroyed dozens of homes and businesses and ended up costing the province of British Columbia $31 million to put out. For that, Mike Barre was dragged into court, found guilty and fined $3000.
As the song that we used to sing years ago, “Pass It On” reminds us, it only takes a spark to get a fire going. And so James uses these examples, the example of the bit, the example of the rudder, the example of the spark starting a fire to indicate the inordinate amount of power of the tongue to set in motion things that are highly destructive. And who of us hasn’t been guilty at one point or another of speaking out of turn and starting a forest fire.
I love the story of four preachers who got together in an accountability group on a regular basis. One day, one of them said to the others, “You know we encourage the people in our churches to confess their sins and their weaknesses to one another and to pray for each other. We can’t really ask them to do that, if we are not willing to set the example ourselves. How about in our meetings when we come together we share our weaknesses, our sins, our secret vices with each other..” They talked about it for a little while and they agreed that this is what they would do. The first pastor shared his besetting sin. He says, “There are times when I am tired and weary and I gravitate, I go to view racy movies.” And they all nodded their heads in sympathy for the dear brother. The second one says, “You know, I like to kick up my feet and get out the biggest cigar that I can and sit there and smoke it in the comfort of my living room.” And the third one says, “Well, I have a problem with gambling. I like to play the lottery, I keep hoping that I’ll get a big winning for the Kingdom, but really I am just driven by greed, and I acknowledge this as being wrong and my sin.” Three out of the four went around, and now they all had eyes on person number four and said, “What about you?” “Well,” he says, “I don’t want to talk about it.” The other one said, “We confessed to you our secret places of sin and our secret shame and you really need to do the same.” So they kept on twisting his arm and finally he said, “Alright, I’ll tell you what my secret sin is. I like to gossip, and I can’t wait to get out of here, tell the whole world your secret sins.” What a great forest is set on fire by a small and tiny spark.
So why is it? Why does the tongue have such inordinate power to its size? Well James says it’s because the tongue is part of a larger cycle that gets fueled by hell itself. Notice again how he puts it in Verse 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.” I don’t know if you noticed it as we are reading it together, but he is talking about a complete cycle, a circle in which the tongue plays a very important role. Let me just quickly walk you through it: “The tongue,” he says, “is also is a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body.” All through Scripture, particularly common to Hebrew thought there is a personification of sin in parts of the body. The reason for that is that our bodies have been created as agents with which to love God above all and our neighbour as ourselves. God’s intention of course, is that our bodies should be empowered from above by the power of the Holy Spirit so that we can serve as vehicles of God’s love and God’s care. That’s where God is going in His Kingdom, but because we live in a fallen world and all participate in Adam’s sin, our bodies have become instruments of, according to the Book of Romans, of wickedness. And that wickedness, biblically speaking, is like it’s concentrated in the parts of our bodies.
Nobody has to work at doing wrong, it comes to us naturally. And so our hands our naturally given to evil, our feet are naturally given to going in the wrong direction. Our sexual organs are often drawn into inappropriate expressions of sexuality and our tongues are evil members in our bodies in the sense that apart from the grace of Jesus, they have a life of their own, and they just want to chatter about evil. Hasn’t that been your own experience? Haven’t you ever found yourself in situations where you said to yourself, “You know, I’m going to bite my tongue. I’m not going to let people suck me into conversation. I’m not going to find myself in situations where afterwards I can kick myself because I want to pull the words back into my own mouth, but I’ll know that I can’t.”
And then you get into a conversation, your blood pressure begins to rise, you are now biting your tongue so hard that the tip is almost coming off and it’s like your tongue can’t wait to participate in evil conversation and evil chatter.
“The tongue,” he says, “is a fire. A world of evil among the parts of the body.” And then he goes on to say, “it corrupts the whole person.” The Greek word for corrupt there is “Spaloosa” and it means to stain or to defile. And the image here is, think of it as a poisonous snake biting you, or you ingest some kind of a poisonous substance and it is now in your stomach. Why do we take our children to the hospital to get their stomach’s pumped if they’ve gotten into the wrong thing? Because poison, once it’s enters into your system, has a way through the bloodstream of traveling into every part of the body, and before you know it you wake up dead. The poison has done its job.
Well, that’s the way the tongue works says James. “It corrupts the whole person.” That is to say, it has a power to draw the rest of you into sin. And again, a lot of us have mostly experienced that, we get caught up in conversation that we don’t want to get caught up into. We get angry, our blood pressure begins to rise, our mind begins to race and before you know, your hands and your feet and your whole body are geared towards evil because the tongue has corrupted you. It has spread from one part to the other until the whole piece now becomes an instrument of unrighteousness.
Then he goes on to say, “It sets the whole course of his life on fire.” Now that word course in Greek is the word trochoss which can also be translated wheel, sometimes it is translated as cycle. The picture here is an engineering term in terms of clockwork. One thing feeds another. It is a cycle that is set into motion. Our tongue not only brings poison to our own experience. It also poisons everybody around us because there is life and death in the power of the tongue. And the reason for that, James goes on to say is because, “it itself is set on fire by hell.” Our tongues in and of themselves can be yielded either to God as instruments of righteousness so that we can use it to bless people and to speak good things into people’s lives and to honor God, or it can be used as an instrument of evil—it can be fueled and fed by hell below. Satan has a vested interest in playing on our insecurities, on playing on our perceived places of injustice. He tries to engage us so that our tongues can become a vehicle of his unrighteousness and the destruction that it produces all over the world is beyond imagination.
Let me read you a woman’s account of the power of the tongue, in her Junior High days. It’s a true story. She says, This is a story about death, the death I experienced over and over again in the three years I spent in Junior High. I was 11 when I first started Junior High and I learned two things there: Number one, never to trust anybody about anything under any circumstance, they will always hurt you especially when you need them most. And number two, never trust yourself. I can’t say I had any friends in Junior High, we walked all over each other, we lied, we spread rumors, we were victims of rumors, we faked camaraderie and compassion. And we did whatever we had to do to survive in a war zone. Everybody was the enemy. I wanted to fit in more than anything. Not with the normal kids, I never wanted to be normal. I wanted to be different, but I wanted to be accepted I hung around with kids who all wore black, who spoke of suicide, they all wanted to die, wished they were dead, some felt they already were.
In seventh grade I had just one friend left, she was my best friend. I always seemed to fail, everyone always left me and I was terrified of abandonment, so I never let anyone get close to me. But I let her in, even after my other friends had turned on me. One of them had gotten expelled for smoking pot and she was convinced that I had narcked her off even though I hadn’t. Where I come from, it’s worse to be a narc than a murderer.I still had one friend, my best friend, I confided everything in her. I told her about how I had been cutting myself and she said she did it too. It was something we shared as sick as it may sound. We would cut up our wrists, our legs, and other body parts with razor blades, and kitchen knives because blood was life. And bleeding reminded us that we were alive, it relieved the pain by distracting us from the reality of our lives. The reality that we were alone.
It was also a way to get attention and scare people off at the same time because we didn’t know what we really wanted. Well we got a little drunk at her house one night, we were kind of joking around and I kissed her good night on the forehead. It was all perfectly innocent. It wasn’t about being gay or wanting her in some way. It was just a joke, sort of a good night dear, mothering thing. I left the next morning and she never spoke to me again. Unfortunately she spoke to almost everybody else. Pretty soon they were all calling me names, the stories only got worse. That was it. I had no one. I tried to kill myself six or seven times that year. I was quite serious about it. I sat alone in my room all night and cut myself up. I had never known such betrayal. I was devastated, I was humiliated.”
Such is the power of the tongue.
Now if you think that kind of thing only happens in Junior High, if you think it only happens out there in the world among the bad people, think again. Because even in Christian families and Christian communities we have people who struggle with all of those same issues. “How easily the tongue is a world of evil among the parts of the body. How it corrupts the whole person, sets the whole course of life on fire. And is itself set on fire by hell.” And even as it is much easier to prevent a forest fire than to put one out, it’s much easier to prevent the damage done by unbridled and undisciplined tongues than it is to undo it, only eternity will tell how many people cry themselves to sleep at night because somebody has spoken, not words of love and righteousness into their lives, but words of judgment and words of destruction.
So James says the tongue is but a small member. The tongue has an unusual power. And for that reason he says, “In Christ we must learn how to bridle it.” “If anyone considers himself religious and does not keep a tight rein on his tongue he deceives himself and his religion is worthless.” Notice how he’s back to the horse image. If you have ever ridden a horse or had him drive your wagon or your cart, how do you slow a horse down, or how to do you make him stop. Well you pull back on the reins, because normally speaking as you pull his head back, then he cannot keep on going forward unless he is in such a panic that no amount of pulling can pull his head back.
I remember years ago when I was a youngster in the Netherlands growing up on the farm, my oldest brother Peter had a marvelous horse that was his pride and joy. He used it in a lot of riding competitions, and it was a very spunky, high-tempered Arabian. I’ll never forget the day when the horse had been pulling a wagon or a cart through the streets of our little town when all of a sudden the horse panicked. Talk has it that it got spooked by the awnings of the store on that street that all of a sudden came rolling down. Whatever was the case, the horse took off, the driver could not hold it back on the reins. When it came to the end of the street, it was a 90 degree turn with a building on the corner. The horse could not negotiate the turn and hit the corner of that building square on with his chest and I remember that horse laying there on the ground with a huge gash in it’s chest because of having hit the store window and the corner of that building. Well, eventually they got it sewed back up and I think that horse lived, but I’ll never forget that sight and remember so clearly what happens when you don’t rein in a high-spirited animal.
And what an example of what happens when we don’t rein in our tongue. “If anyone considers himself religious yet does not keep a tight rein on his tongue, he deceives himself and his religion is worthless.” How do you do it? How do you bite your tongue? How do you overcome that propensity towards evil? How do you stop striking the match that makes the fire that burns down the whole forest? Someone has come up with a very handy little acronym that I think is a marvelous way to remember how to try to bite our tongue. It’s the word “Think.” Think stands for, is it True? My experience with gossip, is that almost all gossip has an element of truth in it, but it gets perverted. Everybody adds just a little bit to it, changes the story slightly. By the time it gets to the end of the cycle it can have almost no bearing on what was being presented. Good case in point, we had a congregational meeting on our building proposal two weeks ago. And a number of things were shared and a number of things were said. And you hear some of the stories that come back, there is often a distortion to what the real facts are, though they are clearly presented and clearly spelled out. Now that’s unavoidable and it’s not the end of the world, that’s why we have two meetings. That’s why we have a lot of opportunity to engaging in discussion. But before you open your mouth, before you feel led to pass on the latest tidbit of information to somebody else, ask yourself the question, “Do I have my facts straight? Is what I’m about to say an accurate reflection of the true situation?” Of all the people in the world, God’s people ought to be the most conscientious about not bearing false witness against their neighbour. Is it true?
Is it Helpful? Will it help someone in their Christian life and in their journey? It may be very true, but not everything that is true is helpful. As a matter of fact, there may be things that may be true that you pass on to somebody else, that will get somebody else all riled up and it will hinder rather than help their journey in Christ. You are going to be held accountable for that, as we’ll see in a few moments. Is it helpful?
Is it Inspiring? That is to say, does it lift people to a higher plain? Does it make them more life Jesus, does it make them more Godly, does it make them more determined to bear fruit for Jesus?
Is it Necessary? That is to say, is it an important component, so that somebody else will know how to do life and know how to respond appropriately to the situations of life that he or she finds themselves into?
And then you ask yourself the question, is it Kind? That is to say, is the motivation love, is the purpose to help someone to move forward and to build and establish the Kingdom of God? You see, I would never say that nobody in Christian circles should ever talk about anybody else, or talk about them behind their back. Because God, as it happens, does a lot of talking in the Bible behind people’s back about people. But the question is one of motivation. Is it true? Is it helpful? Is it inspiring? Is in necessary? Is it kind? If it doesn’t pass the test, then zip your mouth and keep it shut.
You say, “I don’t know how to do that,” well neither does anyone else. James says how difficult it is to tame the tongue. But Jesus came into the world precisely to help us do that more and more. That’s why James now goes on to say not only is the tongue a small member with unusual power and we need to learn how to bridle it, but now he goes on to really lay down the clinture. And he makes the observation that our ability to bridle our tongue is the validation of our religious faith. Listen again to Verse 26 of Chapter 1. “If anyone considers himself to be religious and yet does not keep a tight rein on his tongue he deceives himself and his religion is worthless.”
The Bible doesn’t often use the word religion, but it does upon occasion, James does and so does Paul. And religion in the Bible is used to describe the sum total of our walk with God—our relationship with Him and the way that we express that relationship. The way we pray, the way we go to church, the way we read our Bible, and the practice of religion according to Scripture, that is to say, our confessional walk with God through faith in Jesus, in the power of the Holy Spirit. Why do we do what we do? Because we want to walk with God and we want our lives increasingly to reflect His character and His nature so that we can fulfill His destiny that we should be a kind of first fruits of all of creation for the glory of God.
Now James tells us that religion can be acceptable in the sight of God, and Lord willing, we’ll come back to that at some point and look at that in more detail. That is looking after widows and orphans in their affliction and keeping yourselves unspotted from the world, that’s where your religion ought to take you.
But it also says in this passage that there is such a thing as religion that is worthless, that is to say, it’s not doing the job that it ought to be doing. And the thing that he identifies then in this verse as the one characteristic that defines religion as worthless, is troubling indeed, because he says it focuses on your ability to bridle your tongue. “If anyone considers himself religious, yet does not keep a tight rein on his tongue, he deceives himself and his religion is worthless.”
That is to say, let me spell it out one more time. If you consistently suffer from diarrhea of the mouth and you start all these fires that do all kinds of damage, then it doesn’t matter what you confess you believe, it doesn’t matter what you testify to, that Jesus has already done in your life, there is something in your religion that is not doing what it ought to be doing, your religion is worthless, your life is not bearing the kind of fruit that God’s says it ought to be bearing.
I don’t know about you, but I find that a heavy dose of reality. I mean, I would have thought that maybe some big sexual sin, or some big political scandal or you know, immorality or adultery, but no, it’s your mouth, zip it, bridle it up, keep it under control. And before you think that this is just James getting carried away with poetic license let me remind you that Jesus in the Gospels, teaches exactly the same thing. He says, Matthew 12
“I tell you that men will give account on the day of judgment for every careless word they have spoken. For by your word you will be acquitted and by your words you will be condemned.” Why? Because out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks. And if you really love Jesus and if you are really in relationship with God the Father through faith in Him and the power of the Holy Spirit lives inside you, then there is a internal functioning of the Holy Spirit that is trying to teach you and to help you to curb your tongue. Haven’t you ever noticed in your life where you want to jump out into a situation, and you are tempted to lash out and speak all kinds of things and yet on the inside there is a check that says, “Don’t do it and don’t go there.” Under the new covenant, that’s how God changes us. I’ve been around long enough to know that you can give people a thousand rules by which they are to control their tongue and the next time they are in a dire situation, what is inside will come out, for out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks. The transformation has to take place on the inside. But that’s why we have Jesus and that’s why on that final day we are going to be tested by every idle word that we have spoken.
Now can any of us do this perfectly – no. James makes a strong point in Chapter 3 that all manner of wild animals have been tamed and domesticated, but nobody has fully been able to tame the tongue. And he says those of you who teach are going to be held to a higher standard of justice because God requires more of you. And nobody, not even the best of us will be able to control our tongue all the time and in every situation. So it’s not a matter of perfection and it’s not a matter of never saying the wrong thing, but it’s a matter of recognizing that if I am in Christ, He wants my tongue and I must learn to yield it to Him and as I learn to yield it to Him, it will be increasingly be empowered from on high by the power of the Holy Spirit so that I can speak words of encouragement and strength and empowerment. And if I’m going to start fires let they be fires of the Holy Spirit that accomplish the purposes of God as opposed to starting fires that just devastate the landscape. And that can no longer be called back.
Want to end this morning with one more story. A man whose life was given over to gossip was convicted of sin and he went to see his rabbi. And he said “Rabbi I’ve talked a lot about you to all the wrong persons in the past and I’ve done a lot of damage. What can I do to make it right?” The rabbi was a wise man, and he said, “Here are two feather pillows. I want you to take them to the market place and take these scissors and cut them open and shake out the feathers.” So the man said to himself, “That’s not hard to do,” so he went out and did it. He came back to the Rabbi and he said, “I did what you told me to do, now what should I do next?” “Well,” he said, “you go back and you find all those feathers and stuff them back in the pillowcase.”
It’s easy to start a fire, much harder to put it out. So let us by faith in Christ learn to zip it up, rein in our tongues.
