Taming the Tongue

by Pat Lee

(Based on James 3:1-12)

When I first became a Christian back in 1977, this text was one of the ones that spoke to me most. It taught me that I had to unlearn and re-learn how to use my words, and how the tongue can be one of the most damaging weapons we can use. I used my tongue to defend myself because it was the only thing I had to resort to.

I had been brought up in a family where there were many arguments. I had heard many spoken words that were hurtful and, to be honest, nasty. As a child, I didn’t understand why this was happening, and often thought that I had caused it, as my father once told me when I was about seven that I was worse than my brother and sister put together. How does a child cope with that?

I experienced many moments of distress. My way of coping and escaping was to find one of my favourite places around the farm just to be alone – to sit and cry my heart out. Neither of my parents knew anything about the personal struggle I was having at the time, of being sexually abused by a male relative when he stayed with us on the farm. He taught me that this was a ‘secret’ between us. And what kid doesn’t like a secret? This perpetrator had taught me to lie about what he was doing, so, consequently, I became a seasoned liar.

The most comfortable place for me to be was at school in the classroom, but I was bullied – in the playground, and on the way home from school, by some of the boys from a family who lived just up the road from me. My dad knew it was happening because I had plucked up the courage to tell him. His response to me was to ‘just ignore it’. Now, an adult might be able to do that but as a child, I could not. I put up with it until I was twelve, when I began to stick up for myself.

James shows us how a horse can be trained by the use of a bit in its mouth. We had draught horses on our farm so I know first hand how they could be trained and be used to do all manner of things. At the time James wrote this letter, the ships in the story were sailing ships which needed the wind to blow them along. Their captains used to steer them with a small rudder.  And then he gets on to talk about the tongue, which is not very large compared with rest of the body, but can be most influential.

Time and again the Scriptures address the tongue. In Matthew 12:34 when Jesus was talking to the Pharisees, he said, “How can you speak good things, when you are evil? For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.” How we handle the tongue is a great indicator of our hearts before God.
I found a fable from Aesop to illustrate the point. Once upon a time, a donkey found a lion’s skin. He tried it on, strutted around, and frightened many animals. Soon a fox came along, and the donkey tried to scare him too. But the fox, hearing the donkey’s voice, said, “If you want to terrify me, you’ll have to disguise your bray.” Aesop’s moral: Clothes may disguise a fool, but his words will give him away.

James compares the damage our tongues can do to a great forest fire that has been started by a careless action like dropping a cigarette butt, or by not completely extinguishing a camp fire properly. But sometimes by an intended action that goes wrong.
I remember, when I lived in Timaru, a young friend who, with his twin brother, worked on their father’s farm. One day he decided that the conditions were right to do a burn-off, which is a common farming practice on the Canterbury plains. He lit the fire and everything was going well. But suddenly the wind changed direction, and before long he had an out-of-control inferno on his hands. The Fire Brigade was called and swiftly got it in under control, and thankfully no great damage had been done.

In a slightly edited version of my daily reading on 6^th September, the Word for Today said this: Your mouth is a powerful tool that can help or harm. If you grasp an understanding of the power of the words you speak, it can change the course of your life. You can either speak positive, uplifting, encouraging things into existence in your life, or words that produce negative, discouraging things. ‘Let no corrupt word proceed out of your mouth, but what is good for necessary edification, that may impart grace to the hearers.‘

I remember an experience I had at Pukekohe Intermediate. I was teaching confidence and communication skills to a number of children who lacked them. One girl, I shall call ‘Alice,’ never spoke at all in her class because she was too frightened. As I worked with her she gradually started to gain the confidence to join in. She discovered that she had a voice and could make worthwhile contributions without being laughed at or criticized in any way. Her confidence grew daily and, with encouragement, her communication skills also improved.
Her mother came to parent interviews with her class teacher. Then next day the teacher called me into his room to tell me that her mother had obviously noticed a difference in Alice, but then added that she thought that I had been wasting my time because she was ‘useless and would never amount to anything’. Her teacher and I were both devastated by this statement, but both of us realized that Alice had been subjected to this kind of oral abuse all her life, which was why she had not been able make any kind of contribution before. She thought that she was useless and nobody would be interested in anything she had to say. Her mother’s words had made her feel inferior and, probably, unloved.
She was such a lovely girl and I have often wondered what became of her. She would now be about 56 years old.

Some harmful words we speak may not be intended to be so, because we are not aware of what is happening in another person’s life, so our words can be spoken unwittingly, without realizing the pain they are causing. This also happened to me. An uncle of mine said something to me one day during a family celebration that caused me a great deal of pain. He had no idea what was going on in my life at that time. He meant no harm, as the question he asked was quite reasonable, but not to me.  I know that he would never have said anything if he had known, as he was a lovely, gentle, caring man. I held it together when it happened, and passed it off with an answer which everyone laughed at. I went outside and burst into tears.

I bet there is not a single person here today who has not been on the receiving end of someone’s harsh, nasty, angry or unkind words. In Ephesians 4:32 it says, “Be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you.”

Of course, we also use our tongues to encourage, bless, praise, give thanks and to speak lovingly to our children and those we love. We praise and worship God with our tongues, giving him the glory he deserves.

But Aesop was right. We need to control our bray. And James teaches that, apart from Christ, efforts to do so are inadequate. Redeemed speech and wisdom only truly come from the work of the Redeemer. Let us cast ourselves on the mercy of our Redeemer and pray that he will continue his work of overthrowing any demonic words that might flow from our mouths.
And let us remember that when someone says or does something that we don’t like or hurts us, not to fall into the temptation of retaliating with our tongues; to turn the other cheek.

My thanks to Mike Leake, associate pastor at First Baptist Church, Jasper, Indiana, for some of the information used in this reflection.