The Tongue Reveals the Heart
Ever had something slip out from your mouth that you didn’t want to say? James has something to say about that.
James 3:2-5 CEV (emphasis mine)
(2) All of us do many wrong things. But if you can control your tongue, you are mature and able to control your whole body.
(3) By putting a bit into the mouth of a horse, we can turn the horse in different directions.
(4) It takes strong winds to move a large sailing ship, but the captain uses only a small rudder to make it go in any direction.
(5) Our tongues are small too, and yet they brag about big things. It takes only a spark to start a forest fire!
The commentary I read for this passage (Christian to the Core: Getting Deep in the Book of James) says this: “From one end of the Bible to the other, God teaches us that this little tongue we carry around in our mouths tells a lot about what’s going on in out ‘whole body.’ It is a prime indicator of the condition of our hearts. It may be small, but it is mighty powerful.” (emphasis mine)
Check these two verses too:
James 1:26 CEV (emphasis mine again!)
(26) If you think you are being religious, but can’t control your tongue, you are fooling yourself, and everything you do is useless.Matthew 12:34 LITV (yup)
(34) Offspring of vipers! How can you, being evil, speak good things? For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.
I think it’s cool to think of what we say in this light. I remember one time I was with a girl I was dating, and I made a reference to my car horn that was really really crude (never mind how THAT can happen). That was years ago and I -still- can’t believe I said it! But I didn’t think about it before I said it, it just slipped and as soon as it did I knew that it wasn’t me. So what does that mean? By this commentary, it would mean that I harbored that bad language in my heart. And I did!
Do you swear a lot? Do you say really prideful things or really racy stuff to the opposite sex? Do you try to stop and find yourself unable to? Think of it this way: if your car goes slower than you want it to, you don’t try to fix the speedometer, you go to the source of the problem, which is probably the engine, the heart of the vehicle. Get it? When we say things we don’t want to, what we say is only a by-product of what’s in our hearts.
So we have to change our hearts! Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and everything else will be added to you. (Matthew 6:33) If we seek God and think about God and let him work in you and change your heart, then you’re not going to say bad stuff, because Jesus said (in one of my favorite verses ever) that “Out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks.”
Seek God!
Grace and peace,
Brendan
July 4th, 2008 at 3:07 pm
Oh man, Brendan! So good, but you could have gone on much longer from the last paragraph! You’re right, we need to change our hearts! Thanks for this article, AND your emphasis. It really hit me when you emphasized “But if you can control your tongue, you are mature.” Right on.
July 21st, 2008 at 10:43 pm
Wow the tongue is powerful. It’s like a rudder, a bridal, or a steering wheel. That means it will take you in the direction you want to go (or don’t want to go).
You control the tongue by controlling what you put into the heart. So if you put the God’s Word into your heart, you will begin to speak God’s Word, which says things like God is able to do infinitely more than you can ask or imagine, that you can do all things through Christ, you are overwhelmingly victorious, and God loves us no matter what.
That’s where I want to go!