James is all about faith under pressure, faith persevering, and not just hearing the word but doing the word. He finished chapter two by talking about how you can be a Christian, but your faith can actually be dead and useless without works. He portrays faith as a muscle that you’re supposed to stretch and train so that you can use it properly. Immediately after this conversation, James talks about the tongue in 3:1-12. This is not an accident. The tongue is one of the strongest muscles in the body, and James wants us to think about training it and taming it. He wants us to think about our words as works that should accompany our faith. He wants us to feel the poignancy and responsibility of the old proverb: “Death and life are in the power of the tongue.”

Read James 3:1-12

We think that we are in control of our words. But the truth is, in a very real way, our words control us. 

James says the tongue is set on fire by hell itself (3:6) because the enemy has taken the gift of words and made death its parasite. We have to remember the bigger story: God ordained words to be powerful vehicles of life and flourishing, but the enemy has twisted them to be corrupting tools of death and deterioration.

But there’s hope. Yes, we should practically be doing things like pausing to think about any way in which our words might be interpreted as hurtful. Yes, we should learn the art of saying “thank you” and “I’m sorry” and meaning it. Yes, we should fight to bless God and others with our words. But we should do all of these on the foundation of the Word-made-flesh.

This Word of the gospel doesn’t take away the memories of hurtful words, but it gives you a way to interpret them whereby they don’t sink into your heart, whether spoken by you or to you. By faith, Jesus as God’s Word gives you an identity that no human words can take away, not even your own. It doesn’t matter how loud your dad yelled at you. Jesus, as the Word of life, gives you a security that words of death can’t overcome. It doesn’t matter how many times they said it to you. And all of these realities should re-ignite our commission to speak life to people. And when we do, our words hold them up into the light of Christ and we get to share in its beauty and its glory because that Light has conquered the darkness that often feels so near.