James chapter 3, if you would. James chapter 3. We are continuing our study here. And Luther, if you recall, famously called the book of James an epistle of straw. He did not value it very highly. And I guess, and finding, I found the quote where he did that. It was in German. My German is pretty rusty. It basically was comparing you know the place in the Second Corinthians where it talks about building on a foundation wood hay and stubble gold silver and precious stones and the stubble burned up the stones remaining. He was using that same analogy to talk about Scripture and he placed James in the straw category. So it was yeah it was sort of an interesting thing and I understand what he's saying if I were stranded on a desert island. and only had one book in the Bible. I think I'd rather have Romans than James, just between you and me. The depth of theology is just not here. The structure that Paul, you think about it, was a Western man. He grew up in Tarsus, up in Cilicia, up in the Gentile world. And he tended to think like a Western man. James, as you can sort of pick up from this, is pure Eastern. He's Oriental. in his thinking patterns. This, as we have noted, becomes the New Testament version of the book of Proverbs. It's a collection. It's the closest thing that we have in the New Testament to wisdom literature. And it's constructed about like the book of Proverbs, which means there's not a lot of connections, not a lot of organization. It's just sort of all thrown together. We'll see that in a minute. We're in James 3 tonight. We're continuing the subject of the tongue Not that anybody here has any problems along those lines, but just in case, we want to cover this. James 3, verse 6. We're breaking into sort of the middle of the discussion here. He says, And the tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity. So is the tongue among our members, that it defileth the whole body, and setteth on fire the course of nature, and it is set on fire of hell. For every kind of beasts, and of birds, and of serpents, of things in the sea, is tamed, and hath been tamed by mankind. But the tongue can no man tame. It is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison. Therewith bless we God, even the Father, and therewith curse we men who are made after the similitude of God. Out of the same mouth proceed blessing and cursing. My brethren, these things ought not so to be. Does a fountain send forth at the same place sweet water and bitter? Can the fig tree, my brethren, bear olive berries, either of vine figs? So can no fountain yield both salt water and fresh. Let me see if we can get my PowerPoint up here tonight. And we'll sort of work our way through what we've talked about. Again, as I mentioned, this is the closest thing we have to what we find wisdom literature of the Old Testament. And notice, to give you an idea of how things are just sort of very loosely connected, it's not that one thing tends to flow out of the other. It's hard to find a unifying theme to the book. But notice that we started this chapter with the admonition of how we treat someone who is rich, who comes into the assembly, that we do not defer to him and treat the rich man one way, the poor man the other. Then we immediately jumped to the place of works as it's connected to justification. And then we immediately jumped into this subject of the management of one's own tongue. So notice those things are just, if you can see a framework here, let me know. I don't see it. It's just like these are disconnected topics. It's just like a collection of things being thrown somewhat together. And the closest thing, well, the theological section is that part about justification and works. The rest of this deals with very practical matters, in this case, our speech. Consider the importance of the tongue. That's the first thing that jumps out at us here. Your tongue is small in size compared to the rest of the members of your body. It's nowhere near as big as your arm. Nowhere near as big as your leg, nowhere even big as your head. The tongue, if we just think of its size, it is a very insignificant part of the body, so we would think. But notice, it may be small in size, but it has huge effects. True? He says it's like, and gives two illustrations from nature. And by the way, I ran into somebody, he said James has more illustrations from nature in one chapter than Paul does in all his writings. Indeed, there are numerous natural things that James points out. And so one of those things, he says, it's like the bit in the mouth of a horse. Now, a horse is pretty powerful, especially a big horse. And the fact that you can get on the back of the horse and control the direction of the horse, control the horse with a bit, is a pretty remarkable thing when you think about as small as the bid is compared to the size of the horse. Well, that's exactly what he's saying about the tongue. Its size is betraying because it has effects all out of proportion to its size. Or he likens it to the rudder, the till, the, what's his word, the hem of a ship. This huge, huge ship is steered by a fellow, one guy, turning a rudder turning the tail just a little bit in one direction, a little bit in the other. The entire direction of the ship, this huge heavy ship, is controlled by this small little movement. And so, likewise, he's saying the tongue has that much of an impact on our life and the lives of those around about us, all out of proportion to its size. Maybe some of you got a big tongue. I don't know. But most of us, our tongues are rather small proportionally. to the rest of us. Everybody agreed so far? Anybody have a comment? Why do you suppose James is starting or taking this line of reasoning? That's a good observation. Joe says people tend to gloss over verbal sins as if they're no big deal. What James is saying is, no, this is a big deal. This is a huge deal. All right? Yeah, Al? With your tongue. The tongue, we say sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. That's just a big lie. It is words that hurt the most in life. And we may not assassinate someone with a bullet, but we may assassinate them with our words. And so yes, they are brutal weapons. And so for that reason, James is pointing out the smallness of the organ and yet the impact of the words And notice he goes on to say that the perfect man is the man who is able to control his tongue. I think. Where am I? All the way back to two. Yeah, that's why I couldn't see it. The same if you can control your tongue. Now, by perfect, he doesn't mean sinlessly morally perfect, but he means mature, full grown. The fellow who is in control of his tongue has been mastered control of his flesh of his body. The tongue is the last thing to come under his dominion. It's the main thing that he's going to wrestle with. And it's rare that a man can subdue it. All right. Notice now in verse six, he switches from these other metaphors, the bit, the ham, to the fact that our speech which is generated by our tongue, then is like a fire. And he uses several expressions, and I'm telling you, he gets pretty brutal. In fact, this last statement of verse 6, it is set on fire of hell. That's Gehenna. In other words, it's hellfire that is produced by the speech generated by the tongue. Well, why is it like fire? Well, number one, it's like fire in that it is as destructive. as fire. At least when a tornado hits your house, you've got pieces lying everywhere. But with a fire, there's nothing left but ashes. There's nothing left. Right? In other words, everything is consumed. It's gone. And so speech is like a fire in that sense. It is just as destructive as is fire. Then the other thing about fire that is likened to our speech, our tongue, is the fact that it spreads like fire. and there is language here in Greek in verse six that. One one commentator likened it to this he said it's like a wagon wheel with blaze rags tied around the perimeter of the wheel of their own fire and that wagon wheel is rolling down through a dry pasture and everywhere it goes you see it's just starting new fires as it rolls down through this dry grass it ignites the fuel And so the idea is, it's not only is our speech like fire, but our speech is like a fire in that it spreads evil. We could talk about gossip. What is gossip? Speaking ill of another, even if it is true. There is one school of thought, if it's true, I ought to be able to say it. But what Joe is saying, we should guard our speech. We don't want to speak unnecessarily evil of anyone, if we can keep from it. There are times we can't keep from it, times we must speak. But for the most part, the idea of gossip is exactly that. It is speaking ill of another, casting another in an ill light, impugning others' motives, impugning their actions. And as such, the problem with gossip is the way it spreads. of y'all all have played the game no doubt where you hear something you want to hear and you got a pass it on to the what what they call it game telephone that they put it on e-mail that i have to put it forward forward you know nobody calls anymore but uh... uh... yeah of how things get distorted how things get exaggerated the more they're told how they get further and further and further from the truth the further down the road you go and certainly gossip is exactly that There are numerous stories from antiquity, one of which I think it was Socrates, that a man, one of his friends came running up that was going to give him the goods on one of his friends, something his friend had been caught in, and Socrates stopped him and said, and we often hear this in various ways, is this necessary? Is it necessary? I know this. Is it helpful? Is there anything that I need to know that this is going to happen? And he went through about three or four questions like that and said, if not, then Don't tell me. If it's not going to help, if it's not something I need to know, if you're just spreading information, then don't tell me. That's it's a good philosophy. We hear that several, several forms today, but it's a good philosophy. All right. Then we now that we have adequately. Let me ask you this. Do you think James is exaggerating? Now, he may be underestimating it, but maybe our speech is more sometimes like atomic bombs than it is a match. This thing is just sometimes all out of control. Okay, so now we jump to the next phase of discussing the tongue, and that is the difficulty of controlling it. We've often talked about how small it is, but it creates huge impact on all around us, like a fire, destructive, spreading all over the place. Now we have the idea and the problem is you can't tame it. And he makes this statement in verse seven for every kind of beast, birds and serpents, things of the sea is tamed. What do you think he said? Is that hyperbole? Are there are there critters out there that have not been tamed? I think we'd all agree. Yeah, it seems to me what James is saying is all of these classes, there are animals within those classes that man has figured out a way to tame. And that is a remarkable thing to me. Let's take the first class. Every kind of beast, that's talking about mammals, animals. What beasts have man tamed? Cats. I don't know. There may be one that can. Dogs and cats. What else? What are some of the strange animals that man have been able to tame? Bears. You've got a bear to get up on a ball. A lion. tamer, we call him. How about an elephant? Isn't that strange? You can get an elephant to do what you want him to do. That is a remarkable thought. Here's this huge thing and man is able to tame him. We got this little old bitty thing here, can't tame it. Alright, what's the next category? Birds. Parrot. The Peabody ducks. Got those critters tamed. Parakeet? Falcons? Turkey? I don't know. I don't know about a turkey, but anyway. You get the picture that here again, these strange things, the fact that you can teach a parakeet to talk. Isn't that a strange thing? In other words, how remarkable that a man somewhere along the line figured that out. I'm going to teach this bird how to talk. Who's the first one to do that? Who could even know that was even possible? You look at a parakeet and you say, there's no way that bird can talk. But he can. Right? Isn't that strange? But with all his ingenuity, man can't tame his tongue. Alright? What's the next class? Serpents. And I'm assuming he means reptiles here. Anybody got a pet reptile? Yeah? Iguanas. Constrictors. What did you say? Cobras, the charmer, the snake charmer, who is able to control this deadly snake. In other words, here's this deadly, venomous snake, and men can tame it, but he can't tame this. Alright? Next one. Of things in the sea. Things that live in the sea. Dolphins. Killer whales. Isn't that a strange thing? What? Sea lions? That's right, seals, sea lions. They were stretching there a little bit, Craig. I don't know. Penguins? Yeah. Of all of those, the one that would catch my attention again is the killer whale. Of course, they've, I guess, pretty much shut that down now down at SeaWorld. Don't let them do that anymore. But the very fact that it can be done in the first place, that you can have this huge, huge, well, not technically a fish, mammal, and you can make that thing do what you want it to do. How many of you have seen those at SeaWorld? Yeah, several of you. Isn't that just astounding? Even though you know you've seen it on TV and so forth, when you're actually there and you get a sense of the size of that critter and the smallness of the person who is controlling it, It is absolutely amazing. And yet notice here you have the taming of the killer whale. But you can't tame this killer. So we got a killer here that we can't tame. We got a poison here. We can't tame the poisonous snake. We can't tame this poison source. You begin to see how James is not exaggerating. At first you think, well, this is just hyperbole. But it's really not. He's right on target. It is that difficult to tame. And so, in verse 8, he says, the tongue can no man tame. It is an unruly evil. And when we say someone is unruly, we normally think of a child acting up and so forth. But it means, well, unrule. It doesn't follow the rules. Does your tongue follow the rules? No. It is unruly. And then the next picture, it is full of deadly poison. We talked about the cobra while ago, the poisonous snake. But in this case, we have a snake right here in our mouth that spews poison in every direction. This is this is quite a. Would you say James is good at one thing? He's good at word pictures because, man, these things grab your attention and they stick with you. They're wonderful illustrations of just how difficult this task is. Alright, I'm forgetting. Notice now, we have the old saying among the Indians, white man speaks with forked tongue. What does he mean? Talks out both sides of his mouth. Says one thing, means another. Says one thing when he's with us, says another thing when he's with somebody else. Now we talk about the duplicity of a tongue. The forked tongue. Anybody here got a forked tongue? We it interesting that that's a trait that we ascribe to the devil because that's the trait of the serpent to have a forked tongue. And so if we saw somebody walking around with a forked tongue we would naturally be suspicious that you can't trust this person. Now that's the picture we have notice in addition to its unruliness it's also forked And this, James immediately says, is not how things ought to be. There in verse 10. We are to be congruent with the gospel, and one of the principles of the gospel is truth. And therefore, our tongue should conform to that principle, that we speak what is true. And Christians should not exhibit what I call here a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde split personality, in our speech. Our speech ought to always be consistent as we go through life. Can anybody have a hint of how that can happen? What would be a help? First of all, maybe nobody has a problem with that except me. I don't know. You all have a problem controlling your tongue? You have a problem with speech? That's where I was heading, Oscar. In other words, when you start thinking about all this, what is Solomon said, let thy words be few. You're in on earth. God's in heaven. Therefore, remember your place. Somebody. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm going to get to that in as we conclude. But that's exactly the point that the really our tongue and our speech is a symptom. It's not the root cause and we'll You're way ahead of me, but that's exactly where I'm going. Yeah, Jim? Exactly. Our speech tends to be controlled by our circumstances. And yet, at the same time, if these things are so, what Oscar's saying is true, then our speech ought to be slow, deliberate, thoughtful. Because if we just run off at the mouth like a preacher, we have diarrhea of the mouth. What comes out? Usually vile, filthy stuff. All right? The examples of this duplicity. Man speaking with forked tongue. This is an interesting one. A fascinating one, really. He says, we use the same tongue to bless God, but curse man who bears God's image. Now there's some interesting things there. Number one, it is a reminder that even though fallen man is fallen, and the image of God in man has been mangled in the fall yet even lost man still bears the remnants of God's nature in other words man in his constitution and and this is not talking about physically that we got I so God has eyes ears so God has ears and so forth but in our ability to think rationally to follow God's thoughts after him as Pascal said to be a moral being as God is a moral being. Those are the things that separate us from animals. That makes us man, makes us human. It is those qualities that are ingrained in us because of our special creation. That's very important that we remember that man is not just an exalted animal. He's not just evolved to the highest point of evolution. He is a special creation of God. As such, he bears the image of God, even in his falling condition, which then leads us to the fact that we need, then, to be careful how we treat man, wherever we find him, whoever he is, because, after all, he is an image-bearer of God Almighty. And so, what James is pointing out, let's say you have Ladies, you get mad at your husband. I know that never happens here, but anyway. You get angry. You're screaming mad. But when you're with your husband, you're just sweet as can be. As soon as he goes out the door, you get his picture and start screaming at him. I hate you. Well, you say, well, that's okay. It's not him. It's just his picture. Does that fly? No. Because it's his picture, You ought to revere it as you would your husband. Right. That makes sense. And this is what James is saying. You bless God and then you curse the picture of God. You curse his picture in man. Houston, we have a problem. OK. The next one is interesting. He said it would be like a fountain that puts out both sweet and bitter water. In other words, you go to the fountain. In the old days, of course, cities were generally constructed wherever you had a fountain, wherever you had water. You had a natural spring of some sort, that's where the city got built. And can you imagine one day you get up and you go and you get you a bucket of water, take it back to the house and it's always just nice and refreshing and clear. And then the next day you get up and you go get you a bucket of water and now it's bitter, alkaline. And his point is, no, wells don't do that. They're either sweet or they're bitter. They don't flip-flop back and forth. And so in this case, the fountain is your mouth. Speech is either the sweet or the bitter water, the stuff that comes out of your mouth. And so he says just as a fountain should be consistent, I said congruent a moment ago, but another way of looking at that is consistent with our profession and with our allegiance to truth. He now goes yet to another metaphor from agriculture. It's like a tree that bears two kinds of fruit. Now, there are trees that bear two kinds of fruit. Jay Wimberly had one out in his backyard in Florida. It would grow oranges, tangerines, and something else. He had three, but it wasn't that way by nature. He had grafted these different branches into this. I think it was originally an orange tree. It was a rather amazing tree. Think about it. But in nature, that's not the way it works. Especially when we consider the kinds of fruits he's talking about here. A fig tree or an olive tree. A fig tree grows berries. An olive tree grows beans. And you don't go to an olive tree one day and pick berries and another day and pick frigs. It stays consistent with its nature. In other words, the tree is not bearing two kinds of fruit, but we, with our mouths, produce two kinds of fruit. And lastly, he said it's back to the fountain image. It's like a fountain that puts out both salt and fresh water. There are wells. You live near the coast, you dig a well, and the water is salty. That can happen. But what you don't find is a whale that's salty one day and fresh the next, or fresh one day and salty the next. All right, anybody have any comments about this white man's feet with forked tongue here? Yes, sir. What's in the whale comes up in the bucket. A vivid illustration that if it's down there, that's what's coming up in the bucket. Yeah, we had a whale on the farm. It was only about 14 feet deep. We never did have the water tested, because I was afraid of what we'd find. Yeah, I had a good immune system. I had a good friend, old Mike Holmes, in first grade. I got to be good friends with him. And he lived over in Josephine. They had city water over there. And every single time he came out to our house, we finally figured out it was because he was drinking the well water. So every time then, he'd bring him one of those big, you remember the old glass milk He'd bring a glass milk bottle full of his water from Josephine to drink while he's out at our farm. It never bothered me. There's no telling what kind of larva was hibernating inside me. And we had to be very careful. You know, I thought everybody lived like we did. And the water during the dry summer in Texas would just be a foot or so of water down there in the bottom of the well. And when we'd take a bath, all four of us used the same water. and you would like to be up early in the rotation on that because the last person, the water was, it was getting pretty rough. And we had, the water was so hard that we had to add tide, tide powder to the bath water or you'd never get any soap, you'd never get any lather. So you'd pour you about a cup of tide in there to sort of get it going. And then you could at least get a little bit lather on your clothes. Well, I thought everybody in the world. I was in college. A couple of guys, myself, we moved off campus. And we had a bathroom upstairs and one downstairs. And I was upstairs one day and I'm getting poured a bath. And I got my box of Tide. I'm pouring Tide in my roommate, Jim Akins, comes. He said, what are you doing? I said, I'm putting Tide in the bathroom. He said, are you nuts? I said, no, this is why. Don't you do this? I did not know that folks in the city didn't have to put Tide in their bath. I was 20-something. I guess I was 20 years old before I figured that out. You just assume everybody does what we did. These illustrations are pretty vivid in the sense of, yeah, what's in the whale? That's what's coming out. Well, let's go to this. This is the conclusion, then, that we draw. And this is where Beth was headed a moment ago. Let's never forget that it is from the heart that the tongue speaks. That there is something that is influencing the tongue. That it is, yes, it is unruly, it is untamable. But if the tongue is untamable, it's because the heart has not been tamed. If the speech is divided, so is the heart. Let that sink in. Blessing and cursing, with the same tongue, speaks of a heart that both has blessing and cursing. Right? Therefore, blessed are they who are poor in spirit. A Christian should have a pure heart. The word pure, as it's used there in the Beatitude, doesn't mean clean. There's another word for that. It means, like we would say, pure gold. Unmingled, unmixed, unalloyed. And the Christian is then to strive to have a pure heart that is unmingled, unmixed, so that out of that pure heart pure speech, then will flow. And then, for the Christian, only speech that is edifying, truthful, and blessed should proceed from our lips. That then should cause us pause when we speak, think before we talk. Alright, that's what I got. Anybody? Al, you got something? Pure in heart, blessed are the pure in heart, because they shall see the Lord. Those who have a divided heart won't. This idea of having a divided heart, I think, explains why we have lost people who sometimes act like Christians. And it's not that there is nothing in their heart that is not sometimes right, truthful, kind. The problem is that the lost man has this divided heart. Sometimes it's the Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde symptom. Y'all remember old Bob Bob the Baptist. What was his last name? Chaplain of Bourbon Street. Bob Herrington. Well, anyway, please don't take this as an endorsement of Bob Herrington. But anyway, he did say he was a humorist, basically. He was sort of the first of the Christian comedians that came along. And he was sort of funny. But he used to say that his wife, she was lost, and said she had two purses, one she had with the holies and one she had with the sinners and just pin on which group she was going with. That's the purse she took. And that's a pretty good illustration here of what we're talking about. We have this divided allegiance. And yes, we can act very Christian at times, but our heart has this mixture and we can turn on a dime and we can attack venomously. We can use our tongue as a weapon to assassinate people. We may not kill them. You remember Jesus in talking about the relationship of the heart to outward action, lust and adultery. He uses the idea of your speech and murder that we may not kill someone with a sword, but we will assassinate their character with our. So let your words be few. Let them be deliberate. Let them be thoughtful. All right. Any other comments? A few minutes here, David. Yeah, we know when they're outlying. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, our speech is a strange thing. All kinds of trouble, create all kinds of trouble. All right.