SPEAKER_01: The book of Psalms 34 13 Your tongue Your tongue evil And I'll be reading from Matthew seven fifteen through twenty Watch out for false prophets They come to you in sheep's clothing but inwardly they are a ferocious wolf by their fruit you will recognize them.
SPEAKER_00: Do people pick grapes from thorn bushes or figs from thistles?
SPEAKER_00: Likewise, every good tree bears.
SPEAKER_00: A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit.
SPEAKER_00: Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.
SPEAKER_00: Thus, by their fruit you will recognize them.
SPEAKER_01: Thank you all.
SPEAKER_02: I think just out of habit, I was I was highlighting things.
SPEAKER_02: Ooh, this will be good for us to read aloud together.
SPEAKER_02: Sorry, darling.
SPEAKER_02: Thank you for being a good sport.
SPEAKER_02: Oh, will you stand with me as we read from James chapter three?
SPEAKER_02: We're going to read verses five and six and nine and ten.
SPEAKER_02: There will be a couple of yellow words that you will read with us.
SPEAKER_02: Likewise, the tongue is a small part of the body, but it makes great boasts.
SPEAKER_02: Consider what a great forest is set on fire by a small spark.
SPEAKER_02: The tongue also is a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body.
SPEAKER_02: It corrupts the whole body, sets the whole course of one's life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell.
SPEAKER_02: With the tongue we praise our Lord and Father, and with it we curse human beings who have been made in God's likeness.
SPEAKER_02: Out of the same mouth come praise and cursing.
SPEAKER_01: Brothers and sisters, this should not happen.
SPEAKER_01: Will you pray with me?
SPEAKER_01: Lord, there are many things that I I want to say, and this passage is so rich.
SPEAKER_02: May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable.
SPEAKER_01: May your word speak to us.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus, may you be present with us as we hear from your God in your name.
SPEAKER_01: Amen.
SPEAKER_01: You can sit.
SPEAKER_02: I am Victoria.
SPEAKER_02: I am the interim children's and families director here at First Baptist.
SPEAKER_02: Pastor Mike is out of town today and next Sunday.
SPEAKER_02: So I'm preaching this week, and then we'll have our friend Skip Wallace come and share with us next week, which will be wonderful.
SPEAKER_02: When our family first moved to Virginia in 2010, my parents rented this little apartment on North Jefferson Street, which is just two blocks up.
SPEAKER_02: My brother and I had never lived in an apartment before.
SPEAKER_02: And we pulled in front of this great yellow house just to realize that we were only living on the top floor.
SPEAKER_02: And my mom, even on Facebook, she said, Hey, we're going, we're moving to this house.
SPEAKER_02: Don't get too excited.
SPEAKER_02: We're just living on the second floor.
SPEAKER_02: How thin plywood panels were the only insulation between the upstairs unit and the downstairs unit, which became very apparent from the beginning.
SPEAKER_02: Our downstairs neighbor, Ray, had a smoking habit of something other than cigarettes.
SPEAKER_02: And the smoke would float upstairs and linger in our living space.
SPEAKER_02: And my dad, my dad would say, Hey man, uh, we can smell what's going on downstairs.
SPEAKER_02: And our neighbor, he was really kind and he would apologize and he would burn incense or a candle, but we would still smell it.
SPEAKER_02: And we lived in this apartment for two years before we moved down three blocks to St.
SPEAKER_02: Clair Street, then up two blocks to Fayette, and then about a mile to Fraser.
SPEAKER_02: But I loved my experience on North Jefferson Street.
SPEAKER_02: This is my brother and me back in 2010.
SPEAKER_02: This was the first time we got to experience snow.
SPEAKER_02: We were desert kids from Las Vegas.
SPEAKER_02: Uh, I loved living in this split house.
SPEAKER_02: And if you notice, this house is actually where we met Jesse, who read today's Old Testament passage, and his brother, our backyards shared the same fence.
SPEAKER_02: As an adult, I think about this first apartment a lot because two very different families, tenants, shared one house and one yard.
SPEAKER_02: At a basic level, the outside of that great yellow house looked unified, but we weren't.
SPEAKER_02: The upstairs and downstairs housed very different people, and the smoke floated upwards and outside.
SPEAKER_02: Many of us in this room are still tenants.
SPEAKER_02: We still share apartment buildings or split houses with neighbors who might be quite different from us.
SPEAKER_02: And we understand the troubles that can arise from this living situation.
SPEAKER_02: And what James is addressing in chapter three is that the human body was not made to be an apartment building.
SPEAKER_02: It was not created to contain different types of characters in the same body.
SPEAKER_02: It was not made to praise and curse.
SPEAKER_02: What we've learned about James, who you may remember is Jesus' younger half-brother, is that he argues that to follow Jesus is to practice what you preach, to become someone who praises God and blesses others.
SPEAKER_02: James is incredibly invested in his community's faith.
SPEAKER_02: He's been saying to them, look, if the Spirit of God really dwells in you, let me see it.
SPEAKER_02: Where's the evidence?
SPEAKER_02: Let me see the Spirit.
SPEAKER_02: Now, how is James expecting to see it?
SPEAKER_02: Here are a couple of the ways we've we've learned so far.
SPEAKER_02: One, by the community's care for the most vulnerable, for the poor, the widow, and the orphan in their community.
SPEAKER_02: Two, by the community's response to God's word.
SPEAKER_02: They aren't supposed to just be hearers of the word, but doers, doers of God's word.
SPEAKER_02: Three, by the community's ability to walk through tests and trials, how well they can withstand suffering.
SPEAKER_02: Four, which we'll talk about today, by the community's speech about fellow image bearers.
SPEAKER_02: James will continue to address our behaviors and our actions.
SPEAKER_02: Which makes us feel a little bit uncomfortable because we've been told and we read in the Bible that if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, you will be saved.
SPEAKER_02: If you call upon the name of the Lord, you will be saved.
SPEAKER_02: And that is true.
SPEAKER_02: And James affirms that.
SPEAKER_02: And he says, there should be some change within you.
SPEAKER_02: When you make such an audacious claim that Jesus is Lord, that should change everything about you.
SPEAKER_02: He spurs us to be completely single-minded.
SPEAKER_02: He wants what's on the inside and on the outside to align.
SPEAKER_02: He doesn't want compartmentalized followers of Jesus.
SPEAKER_02: He wants what David prays in Psalm 19, what I prayed, that the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart would be acceptable and pleasing in your sight, Lord, my rock and my redeemer.
SPEAKER_02: The problem and what we have heard in our scripture readings earlier is that our tongues, when they are left to our own devices, they will stir up all sorts of trouble.
SPEAKER_02: They require us to actively monitor them, or as Jesse read, keep them from telling lies.
SPEAKER_02: Did anyone ever receive a bar of soap in their mouth for saying a cuss word?
SPEAKER_02: Or maybe hot sauce on your tongue for saying something, for telling a lie?
SPEAKER_02: Uh, okay.
SPEAKER_02: When I was about eight years old, I repeated a terrible, terrible word to my friends at school that I had heard from a neighbor.
SPEAKER_02: And my friend told her mom, and her mom called my mom.
SPEAKER_02: And I ended up with a bar of dial soap in my mouth for five minutes, which that I mean, that also feels like the appropriate story to share when my parents aren't in the room.
SPEAKER_02: But don't give them a hard time because you had better better believe that I didn't say that word again.
SPEAKER_02: But I have said other words that don't count as cuss words, and I wish I could take them back.
SPEAKER_02: Our tongues remain an untamable creature, a fire starter with a 100% success rate.
SPEAKER_02: You know, we've experienced the power of wildfire this week.
SPEAKER_02: Roughly 1,000 miles north of us in northern Ontario, Canada, there are over 900 active wildfires that are burning out of control right now.
SPEAKER_02: What's incredible to me is that's a thousand miles away, yet we were impacted by it.
SPEAKER_02: Our air quality changed.
SPEAKER_02: We saw, we smelled, we breathed in the smoke in the air.
SPEAKER_02: Think about the scale of these fires to know that we are being affected by them here.
SPEAKER_02: That is incredible.
SPEAKER_02: That is what James says our tongues are capable of.
SPEAKER_02: The tongue is a fire.
SPEAKER_02: Within the Christian family, the tongue has the power to hurt an individual and to keep spreading destruction, setting whole communities ablaze, and its impact can permeate not only our immediate church, not just the local church, but the surrounding churches, a denomination, an entire country.
SPEAKER_02: The way that we Christians speak about each other matters just as much as the way that we speak about God.
SPEAKER_02: It requires action on our part to control our tongues.
SPEAKER_02: Remember, only you can prevent destructive speech.
SPEAKER_02: I felt that Smoky Vera was the right mascot for this morning.
SPEAKER_02: If we move back to the Old Testament, so we're in the New Testament in James, but if we move back to the Old Testament, there are many warnings about the words that we speak.
SPEAKER_02: Throughout the book of Proverbs, a wise king warns his son of the dangers of his words.
SPEAKER_02: There are at least 90 explicit statements about wisdom and words.
SPEAKER_02: I pulled just a couple for us to chew on this morning.
SPEAKER_02: Psalm 18.2, fools find no pleasure in understanding, but delight in airing their own opinions.
SPEAKER_02: The next one, Proverbs 26, 23, like a coating of silver dross on earth and wear, like a silver coating on a wooden bowl, are fervent lips with an evil heart.
SPEAKER_02: The next one, Proverbs 17, 5.
SPEAKER_02: Whoever mocks the poor shows contempt for their maker.
SPEAKER_02: Whoever gloats over disaster will not go unpunished.
SPEAKER_02: And this last one is probably a familiar one to most of us in the room, Proverbs 18.21.
SPEAKER_02: Life and death, or death and life, are in the power of the tongue, and those who love it will eat its fruits.
SPEAKER_02: So if we just stayed with Proverbs, we would we would walk away saying, Oh, okay, maybe I need to be careful about the words that I say.
SPEAKER_02: Or the words that I say matter.
SPEAKER_02: The way that I talk about people and to people matter.
SPEAKER_02: But it's not just about our words.
SPEAKER_02: And if we look at how Jesus addresses the tongue, we'll notice he's getting at a deeper root, a deeper issue.
SPEAKER_02: Because what the Proverbs hint at and what James is primarily concerned with is the heart.
SPEAKER_02: Jesus will speak to the point of being mismatched.
SPEAKER_02: Outside's not matching the inside, especially to the religious leaders around him.
SPEAKER_02: So one passage we'll look at, Matthew 15, 7 through 9.
SPEAKER_02: Oh, he starts off strong.
SPEAKER_02: You hypocrites! Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you.
SPEAKER_02: These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.
SPEAKER_02: They worship me in vain.
SPEAKER_02: Their teachings are merely human rules.
SPEAKER_02: And again, in Matthew 23, I don't have this one on the screen.
SPEAKER_02: Uh Jesus calls out the religiously teachers for their mismatch inside and outside.
SPEAKER_02: He says, Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites.
SPEAKER_02: You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside, but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean.
SPEAKER_02: In the same way, on the outside, you appear to people as righteous, but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness.
SPEAKER_02: All right, let's return to James 3, because we're getting we're getting to the root, we're getting to the main problem that James has.
SPEAKER_02: In verse 8, chapter 3, verse 8, James says, No human being can tame the tongue.
SPEAKER_02: It is a restless evil full of deadly poison.
SPEAKER_02: And here is the core of James's frustrations, what we read earlier.
SPEAKER_02: With the tongue we praise our Lord and Father, with it we curse human beings who have been made in God's likeness.
SPEAKER_02: My brothers and sisters, this should not happen.
SPEAKER_02: Theologian Martha Moorke notes that this is the only New Testament affirmation that people, all people, are made in the image or likeness of God.
SPEAKER_02: Do you know the other time where people are told that they are made in the image of God?
SPEAKER_02: In Genesis, Genesis chapter one, uh, that we will make mankind in our image.
SPEAKER_02: James says, you claim to praise the Creator, but you cannot even speak well about the created ones.
SPEAKER_02: The ones who bear the image of our God, you curse.
SPEAKER_02: How is this possible?
SPEAKER_02: The Bible translation that we typically use here at First Baptist is the NIV, but I I really I appreciate the King James Version here, which some of you may still be carrying with you.
SPEAKER_02: It says, therewith bless we God, even the Father, and therewith curse we men, which are made after the similitude, that similarity, the likeness of God.
SPEAKER_02: What does it mean to bless God?
SPEAKER_02: What does it mean to bless others?
SPEAKER_02: And this blessing and cursing, these are being uh contrasted with one another.
SPEAKER_02: There are a series of blessings and curses throughout scripture.
SPEAKER_02: Can you think of any off the top of your head where God blesses?
SPEAKER_02: Can you think of a scenario in the Old Testament where God blesses?
SPEAKER_02: Abraham, yes.
SPEAKER_02: God says, I will make you into a great nation.
SPEAKER_02: I will bless those who bless you, and I will curse those who curse you.
SPEAKER_02: Uh, God blesses the women, or the man and the woman in the garden, he says, to be fruitful and multiply.
SPEAKER_02: Uh Jesus says in the New Testament in Luke, bless those who curse you.
SPEAKER_01: Now, can you think of any scenarios where God curses?
SPEAKER_01: The serpent, yes, yes.
SPEAKER_01: Uh what did you say, Duane?
SPEAKER_02: He does, yes.
SPEAKER_02: Now, I I do I want to make clear that God does not curse the man and the woman for their sin.
SPEAKER_02: There is a consequence for their sin, for their actions.
SPEAKER_02: It is not a curse.
SPEAKER_02: The only ones that God curses are the serpent and the ground, which means that a curse is different than giving someone a consequence for their actions.
SPEAKER_02: It has to be different.
SPEAKER_02: A curse, uh a curse, to put it succinctly, is to slander, judge, dismiss, and doom someone with one blow.
SPEAKER_02: And to bless someone is to will for someone's good.
SPEAKER_02: That means even if it puts you at a disadvantage, I think when someone blesses you financially, even if they say, oh, it's not that big of a deal, they are giving of themselves to you.
SPEAKER_02: They are putting themselves at a disadvantage to care for you.
SPEAKER_02: And that's just one way that we bless people.
SPEAKER_02: Uh for James' listeners, this blessing and cursing would have reminded these Jewish followers of Jesus of that original covenant God had with Abraham.
SPEAKER_02: That God said, I will bless those who bless you, and I will curse those who curse you.
SPEAKER_02: Now, for us to bless God is for us to sacrifice ourselves, to lower ourselves before Him and praise Him.
SPEAKER_02: But for us to curse our fellow image bearers, that is the equivalent of us crushing the head of the serpent under our heel.
SPEAKER_02: To do that to our fellow image bearers, the only one who can hold blessing and cursing is the Lord who can hold both together at the same time as an impartial judge.
SPEAKER_02: This isn't a matter of teachers speaking before they think.
SPEAKER_02: This is thinking that there is any part of me that does not need to be under the reign of the Spirit of God, that I have the authority and power to curse someone else.
SPEAKER_02: My brothers and sisters, this should not be.
SPEAKER_02: Okay, now might be the time you're wondering, well, then what am I supposed to do?
SPEAKER_02: Because sometimes people's actions and their words, they elicit a response out of us.
SPEAKER_02: What how am I supposed to handle someone's unjust actions?
SPEAKER_02: Or how am I supposed to speak against someone who is speaking ill of the Lord?
SPEAKER_02: Uh am I supposed to say anything?
SPEAKER_02: And maybe I know how to bless if I'm in this room.
SPEAKER_02: Maybe I know how to bless God, but what do I do for the rest of the week when I'm not sitting in this sanctuary?
SPEAKER_02: What do I say?
SPEAKER_02: How do I speak when I leave this place?
SPEAKER_02: Well, we might conclude from James's warnings that we should avoid talking altogether.
SPEAKER_02: And maybe some of us need to take a break from talking sometimes.
SPEAKER_02: At the beginning of chapter three, James says, not many of you should become teachers.
SPEAKER_02: He's not making a strong case for teaching the gospel or for preaching it.
SPEAKER_02: In fact, he seems to be saying that the tongue itself deserves to be burned in hell.
SPEAKER_02: So if your conclusion is that we should stop talking, I would be inclined to agree with you based on this passage.
SPEAKER_02: If our tongues can and have caused damage throughout the centuries of the church, should we try keeping to ourselves?
SPEAKER_02: Should we try not talking to people outside of our church?
SPEAKER_02: And maybe, maybe all I do is I just talk to God and I don't talk to anyone else around me because this has a capacity.
SPEAKER_02: For too much destruction.
SPEAKER_02: But remember, James is speaking to the teachers of this community whose actions are not matching up with their words, and whose words are being used to harm the vulnerable in their community.
SPEAKER_02: So when James said earlier, don't show favoritism, his intent isn't for us to conclude, don't show any special attention to the poor.
SPEAKER_02: When James says, out of the same mouth come praise and cursing, my brothers and sisters, this should not be so.
SPEAKER_02: James isn't apply implying that we should stop speaking altogether.
SPEAKER_02: And he certainly isn't implying that we should just resort to cursing.
SPEAKER_02: He's saying that this double-mindedness is going to tear us apart, that it will burn us and those around us if we're not careful.
SPEAKER_02: So what should we say instead?
SPEAKER_02: I'm glad that you asked because I have three things that are not original to me.
SPEAKER_02: Probably that's for the best.
SPEAKER_02: Here they are.
SPEAKER_02: Number one, the Lord bless you.
SPEAKER_01: Number two, Lord have mercy.
SPEAKER_01: Number three, Jesus is Lord.
SPEAKER_01: Number one, the Lord bless you.
SPEAKER_02: This comes from Numbers chapter six.
SPEAKER_02: There's a blessing that God tells Moses to tell Aaron to tell to the Israelites.
SPEAKER_02: He says, When you are going to bless the Israelites, here's what you say: You say, The Lord bless you, the Lord keep you.
SPEAKER_02: The Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you.
SPEAKER_02: The Lord lift up his countenance to you and give you peace.
SPEAKER_02: Those should be our first words to bless one another.
SPEAKER_02: It's why we start our mornings off with a grace and peace.
SPEAKER_02: Those aren't just silly, flowery, light words.
SPEAKER_02: If we believe that our words matter, we say grace and peace because we want to extend the blessing that God has shown to us to one another.
SPEAKER_02: According to that covenant that God made with Abraham, that blessing wasn't meant to stay with Abraham.
SPEAKER_02: It's meant to bless the nations, that through you all peoples would be blessed.
SPEAKER_02: The blessing isn't meant to stick with us.
SPEAKER_02: We're meant to extend it.
SPEAKER_02: It's not our blessing.
SPEAKER_02: The Lord bless you.
SPEAKER_02: Number two, Lord have mercy.
SPEAKER_02: We hear this phrase throughout the Bible, but especially in the New Testament, when people are calling out to Jesus as he walks past, they say, Lord Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me.
SPEAKER_02: When they desire for healing, it humbles us.
SPEAKER_02: And sometimes when the right response is not to bless someone for something that doesn't deserve blessing, maybe the proper response is to say, Lord, have mercy on them.
SPEAKER_02: Bless you, Seth.
SPEAKER_02: Lord, have mercy.
SPEAKER_01: Because not every action deserves a blessing.
SPEAKER_01: Lord, have mercy on them.
SPEAKER_01: And that last phrase, that's for our own hearts.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus is Lord.
SPEAKER_02: These are the weightiest words that we can speak to declare that Jesus is Lord over everything and everyone.
SPEAKER_02: There is nothing he does not see.
SPEAKER_02: There is no injustice he is not aware of.
SPEAKER_02: There is no cry that he does not hear.
SPEAKER_02: We trust that Jesus Christ has undone the curse of evil by the work on the cross, and he is making all things new today and into eternity.
SPEAKER_02: So when all other words fail, when we don't know what we're supposed to say, we can say Jesus is Lord.
SPEAKER_02: I don't think there's a limit to how many times we can say that.
SPEAKER_02: Okay, there's one other passage that I want to highlight where there are fiery tongues.
SPEAKER_02: It's actually a positive thing.
SPEAKER_02: And maybe you've been thinking about this as I've been talking.
SPEAKER_02: If you can remember back to our series on the book of Acts, the earliest followers of Jesus have just witnessed Jesus leaving.
SPEAKER_02: This is right at the beginning of the book.
SPEAKER_02: But Jesus promises them that he will send the gift of the Father, that they would become baptized with the Holy Spirit.
SPEAKER_02: And we read in Acts 2 that on the day of Pentecost, this was this great festival for the Jewish people, the followers of Jesus are all gathered in one place.
SPEAKER_02: And suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting.
SPEAKER_02: They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them.
SPEAKER_02: All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit, and they began to speak in other tongues, other languages, as the Spirit enabled them.
SPEAKER_02: This is an uncontrollable good fire.
SPEAKER_02: These are uncontrollable good words.
SPEAKER_02: This is what surrender to the Holy Spirit.
SPEAKER_02: When we surrender our tongues, our words, our minds to the Holy Spirit, this is what can happen.
SPEAKER_02: And when people begin to question what the followers of Jesus are saying, Peter says, okay, this isn't foolishness.
SPEAKER_02: We're not drunk because it's only nine in the morning.
SPEAKER_02: This is the work of the Holy Spirit.
SPEAKER_02: He says, this was already told to us by the prophet Joel hundreds of years ago.
SPEAKER_02: And we'll read this together.
SPEAKER_02: In the last days, God says, I will pour out my spirit on all people.
SPEAKER_02: Your sons and daughters will prophesy.
SPEAKER_02: Your young men will see visions.
SPEAKER_02: Your old men will dream dreams.
SPEAKER_02: Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my spirit in those days, and they will prophesy.
SPEAKER_02: They will use their tongues for good.
SPEAKER_01: And everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.
SPEAKER_02: Both that they themselves may burn with loving, and that by preaching they may set others on fire with fiery tongues, as it were.
SPEAKER_02: Jesus said that by our love for one another, people would know that we are his disciples.
SPEAKER_02: By our intentional blessing, by willing for our neighbors' good, by seeking the benefit of those around us, even when it's to our disadvantage, even when it means I need to hold my tongue, we do it.
SPEAKER_01: Why?
SPEAKER_01: Because this blesses God, this praises God.
SPEAKER_02: This is the greatest witness to the power and the presence of Jesus in us.
SPEAKER_01: Will you pray with me?
SPEAKER_01: Lord, when we do not know the words to say, we cry out to you.
SPEAKER_01: We say, Lord, have mercy.
SPEAKER_01: For the times that we have used our tongues for evil, for the words we have said to tear other people down or to cause division.
SPEAKER_01: Lord have mercy.
SPEAKER_01: And we confess with our mouths that Jesus Christ is Lord.
SPEAKER_01: We bless your name.
SPEAKER_02: And we thank you that you do not curse us, that you desire to bless us and bless those around us.
SPEAKER_01: Thank you for your words that have the power of life in them.
SPEAKER_01: May we surrender to you in Jesus' name.