James Part 7 - chapter 3 verse 1 to verse 12 Teachers and tongues

[Music] well good evening we're working through the letter of james some of you will be familiar with it and others may not so we'll read the section first before i talk about it to you we're going to read james chapter 3 and the first 12 verses not many of you should presume to be teachers my brothers because you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly we all stumble in many ways but if anyone is never at fault in what he says he is a perfect man able to keep his whole body in check when we put bits into the mouths of horses to make them abuse we can turn the whole animal or take ships as an example although they are so large and are driven by strong winds they are steered by a very small rudder wherever the pilot wants to go likewise the tongue is a small part of the body but it makes great boasts consider what a great forest is set on fire by a small spark the tongue is also a fire a world of evil among the parts of the body it corrupts the whole person sets the whole course of his life on fire and is itself set on fire by hell all kinds of animals birds reptiles and creatures of the sea are being tamed and have been tamed by men but no man can tame the tongue it is a restless evil full of deadly poison with the tongue we praise our lord and father and with it we curse men who have been made in god's likeness out of the same mouth comes praise and cursing my brothers this should not be can both fresh water and salt water flow from the same spring my brothers can a fig tree bear olives or a grape vine bear figs neither can a salt spring produce fresh water well this passage is so straightforward and simple you don't need anyone to explain it to you but nevertheless i want to go through it with you we're reading a letter a third of the new testament is made up of letters or epistles which is the technical name for them but they're simply lettuce correspondence and if you enjoy reading other people's letters then the new testament is an ideal book for you to read where we're listening to one side of a conversation when we read a letter i don't know if you get irritated when people with mobile phones talk loudly in your presence and you can't hear what the other person is saying does that irritate you as it irritates me you're listening to one side of a correspondence a verbal correspondence but you're only getting one side of it let me test it out on you here's somebody with a mobile phone hello is that you now i'm dying to know has it arrived oh congratulations that's wonderful news how much does it weigh and what color is it and is it petrol or diesel now you see what i mean you were only hearing one side of a conversation and i'll bet your minds had jumped to the wrong conclusions already correspondence corresponds and when you read a letter in the new testament your first task is to ask what's going on at the other end and that's how from the epistles you can gauge what is going on in situations to which they wrote and that applies to the very first thing not many of you should presume to be teachers a surprising thing to say when you consider that teachers are a gift of the ascended christ to his church and one of the five major ministries apostles prophets evangelists pastors teachers there are five major ministries there which are gifts of the head of the church to his body by the way some people say there are only four and regard pastors and teachers is one gift i don't think that's so because i've met some pastors who can't teach and i've met other teachers who can't pastor and it's quite a rare thing to find them both equally in one man so i i regard those as five gifts and a person can have one two or three of those gifts if they have all five they're an apostle because an apostle needs every one of those gifts but why should he say don't be many teachers it's as if he's discouraging teachers well the two subjects in chapter three of james are teachers and tongues and we'll look at both but first is this extraordinary discouragement telling people not to put themselves forward as teachers you'd have thought since it was one of the major ministries of the church that the right thing to do would be to encourage people to consider teaching others but james says the opposite and he does it for the sake of those who would love to be teachers because as he says they will receive stricter judgment than other christians and we'll explain why that's so in a moment but it's obvious that there were too many people putting themselves forward as teachers in the churches which i've told you already in an earlier study were made up of jewish christians dispersed among the nations they'd been converted as the dispersed jews of israel and that gathered in little fellowships or synagogues they were used to calling themselves synagogues and they did so when they were christians too and as the synagogues had usually had at least one rabbi or teacher then so did the christian synagogues made up of converted jews and so he's discouraging them they were getting too full of windbags people who had a desire to teach the others why should people have such a desire well quite frankly there are some rather subtle pleasures in being a teacher such as human nature we can enjoy correcting other people or informing them there's a subtle pleasure in all of us at knowing things that others don't know and telling them it happens in ordinary gossip people enjoy passing on things that they are sure the other people haven't heard there's a certain pleasure in being in the know and in correcting others we all in the flesh can enjoy putting others right and so there are subtle temptations of dignity and status because teachers acquire a certain status and there are some people who would like to have that status and so the first thing that james does is say now don't rush to be teachers don't have an ambition to be a teacher in fact i remember when i first went and told our pastor in church that i said i feel i ought to be a pastor and he said don't stay out of the ministry if you can possibly do so i thought at first that was rather strange advice i thought he'd be keen to chalk up another convert to the ministry but no he said don't do it if you can possibly help it and i realize now what wise advice that was he was saying stay out of it unless you have no other choice and i went back to see him about 12 months later and i said i have no other choice i've got to and that's why paul says the love of christ constrains me woe is me if i don't preach and that's the com compulsion that comes if it's a clear call from god it's not a human ambition it's a divine calling and it must be that but it says it's because not only does that give you greater authority but it opens you up to greater accountability we teachers and you notice that we there he's saying i'm a teacher too and again he's virtually saying i didn't have any choice either i had to be but it does expose i'm exposing myself to stricter judgment than most of you there are one or two teachers among us perhaps but i'm exposing myself to stricter judgment in the day when god looks at what we've been doing now why should that be there are two obvious reasons one is that a teacher has the responsibility of interpreting and applying god's word he doesn't just read it or repeat it he seeks to interpret it and tell people what it means and then apply it to daily life those are the two callings of a teacher can i put it this way to make the word of god real by going back into the past and getting its original meaning in its original setting and then coming back into the present and showing its relevance to daily life today now that's the job of a teacher and all that is summed up in a word that you may have heard it's a technical word called hermeneutics have you heard that word and hermeneutics covers both the interpretation of the meaning of scripture and its application in today's context and that's a teacher's job but there are many factors that can creep in into that task of hermeneutics the preacher's background the way he was brought up what he was taught by others the teacher's temperament plays a big role is he an extrovert or an introvert does he he likes challenging people or does he prefer comforting which is he which is his temperament and then the people who have taught him will have had a great influence consciously or unconsciously and the result is that teachers with the same bible the same word of god can come up with great variations in both interpretation and application and there are two very common ways in which teachers can distort the word of god without realizing it one is by having favorite authors and by letting one writer of the bible have more influence on your thinking than the others among evangelicals this particularly applies to paul and many evangelicals have taken paul as their last and final guide to what they believe and what paul says goes we saw last time in james chapter 2 that james appears to contradict paul when he says you see that it is not by faith alone that was saved but by faith plus works and that seems the exact opposite of paul on any subject faith included we must balance all that all the authors say about a subject and not choose one rather than another and that means studying the whole bible all the time and everything it says on any given subject one of the most common ways in which teachers distort the word of god is to quote texts out of context and a text without a context becomes a pretext a pretext for the teacher's own ideas own prejudices own opinions and so all this can get in the way of the word of god and the teacher will be judged by whether he has been faithful to the word of god in its original meaning and in its application and that's enough to make any teacher tremble before god and i can tell you if there's one verse in the bible makes me tremble it's the first verse of chapter three in james it really is because your responsibility in teaching others is that you are responsible for them and it's a heavy responsibility and there's another way in which the teacher will be judged by his own teaching you see god judges everybody by how much they know and if you don't know a thing god is prepared to regard that as ignorance time and again the bible does say that god overlooks something because of people's ignorance you remember jesus prayer on the cross father forgive them for they don't know what they're doing they were ignorant of the gigantic crime of which they could be accused by his father and he pleaded that ignorance on their behalf but a teacher is dedicated to know more than those he teaches mind you i'll let you into a secret some people said have said to me i'm amazed at how much of the whole bible you know and the real answer is i was only one step ahead of the congregation i knew one chapter better than they did and gave them that on a sunday morning and a teacher's real job is to stay one step ahead of those e teachers so don't get the impression i know it all far from it i'm just ahead of you that's all and probably not much ahead but i qualified qualified to be a teacher because i know a little more than you and that's the main qualification but knowing more means that i will be judged by more a teacher will be judged by what he's taught if we're all judged by what we know and the teacher has dedicated his life to knowing more of the word of god than other people and that means more judgment so i'm piling up judgment for myself every time i teach it's quite a sobering thought and yet i feel i have to teach that i must do it that god has said you're to be a teacher of my people it's great when you know what you are in god's sight and then you don't try to be what you're not i'm not an evangelist hundreds of people have come to face through my teaching but i'm not an evangelist and i had a year as an evangelist just to prove that i wasn't and it was freedom to know that i'm not a billy graham now i'm not an evangelist so i shouldn't try to be i know i am called to be a teacher and so i've had to dedicate my time to getting to know god's word the whole of it and what every author says on any subject get a balanced view a biblical view and it takes time a lot of time i'll let you into another secret preparing to teach any part of the bible takes me an hour in the study for five minutes teaching and i've found that if you're not prepared to give that time you're not going to have enough to teach and so a teacher will be judged by how he's handled the word and whether he's obeyed it himself whether he's listened to himself and god has given many of us teachers a gift of wives who hold us to our teaching and it's an uncomfortable thing sometimes when my wife says over the lunch table now you said last sunday and you're not doing it and she's reminding me that god will say one day you taught other people to do this and you didn't do it yourself so that's the double reason why teachers will come into stricter judgment than other ministries and giftings in the church and it's a solemn thought for me not you unless you share my calling as a teacher of others whether it's in a house group or a whole church or whatever if you are teaching anybody else the word of god then you will have a stricter judgment than others in the great day when we all answer to our maker well now that's the first part of chapter 13 and if i said no more that tonight that would be enough a real lesson an important lesson for us to learn but let's move on the tool that a teacher has to use is the tongue and the rest of the section we're looking at is all about this little lump of flesh in our mouths the tongue there was a vicar churchilling in vicar once began his sermon by saying i want to show you that part of my body which causes me the greatest temptation and there was a breathless hush in the congregation and then he stuck out his tongue to them and he said that's what i'm going to talk about that's the most difficult part of my body to control and so since that is the tool that i have to use and if you teach others you will have to use it then we need to know quite a bit about this thing we call the tongue it's our tool but it's not only used by a teacher it's used by every other christian almost every day we're using that part of our body and it's the most dangerous thing to use i compare it to a mobile saw you've seen these electric or petrol driven chainsaws that cut down the trees that have fallen on the road that's about the dangerous most dangerous private tool i know and you really have to know how to use them i was once preaching in new zealand and a young boy who'd had a very nasty when he was only two years old in a car which had caused his left arm to be paralyzed and therefore it had remained a child size arm and it damaged other parts of his body too and he had very foolishly got hold of a chainsaw to cut up logs and he's using a chainsaw in one hand and he's kneeling on a great big log that he's cutting up and he simply sliced his knee right off and they managed to link the bone of his lower leg to the bone in his upper leg without a knee so here was this poor lad of 16 sitting in my meeting with a short leg and a short arm and the lord had mercy on him and told me that he wanted to heal him and that boy who was on aluminium crutches leapt off the crutches and ran outside the shed we were meeting in and ran right round the field with both arms and legs working and came back into the watershed and then gave testimony to the lord's healing but uh i've never used a chainsawn after meeting that letter i don't think i ever will they're a very dangerous thing to handle and so is your tongue it's the one part of your body that is the most difficult part to control and so james talks about why is it so dangerous the first thing you need to know about your tongue is its significance and the significance is that it's a gauge a measurement of how holy you are it's the quickest way to realize what progress you're making in the christian life so much so that james is prepared to say that if you can control your tongue you're perfect so you can tell how near perfection you're reaching and it's god's will that we should all be made perfect he's able to prevent us from falling and present us faultless before his throne and that's his intention he wants to make all of you perfect no she's not here so i'm going to tell you something about my wife she's got tremendous faith but there's one thing i teach that she finds very difficult to believe she comes to the very edge of doubt when i say this and it's when i tell her that one day her husband will be perfect and for some reason she finds this very hard to accept i know what she replied she said if i base my faith on experience i can't believe it but she said i'll try and base it on the word of god and she's trying very hard i've got to believe that my wife will one day be perfect that's god's intention he's able to complete a good work that has begun in all of us but it's easier for me to believe that she will be perfect one day for her to believe that i will be i understand that but that's god's intention so how do you know how do you measure your progress in holiness well here's the ready gauge if anybody doesn't say the wrong thing ever they're perfect they've reached christian maturity i'm not going to ask you to raise your hand if you never say the wrong thing that might embarrass you but who can say that i certainly can't it is that's the significance of your tongue it's the spiritual measure of your christian progress not long ago i went to the iron gorge up in shropshire where there's a huge cast iron bridge over the river seven the first cast iron bridge ever made and that was where the heart of the industrial revolution began it had stocks of coal and iron ore and so the industrial revolution began right there but i wanted particularly to go to a village nearby called maidly and i wanted to see the grave of a man whom john wesley preached at his funeral and took the text mark the perfect man man who never said the wrong thing his name was fletcher he was a frenchman and he was born on the shores of late geneva and his name there was fleshy but he came as an immigrant to england changed his name to fletcher which is the english version and became a methodist preacher under john wesley and john wesley said he was the one man who persuaded him that perfection was possible on earth by the grace of god and he preached that it is sermon mark the perfect man he's buried in the little churchyard outside the parish church of maidly and his tomb is above ground and it's all made of cast iron and his life story is cast in raised letters in cast iron on the tomb and still they talk about that man though he died in the 18th century fletcher of maidly john wesley had chosen him to be his successor and to take over methodism when john wesley died unfortunately fletcher died first and he never came into that position but that's what he says on his grave the perfect man the man who could control his tongue perfectly we sing it we take my lips and let them be filled with messages from thee it's really a prayer that we may have total control of our tongues so that's the significance of it anyone who never says the wrong thing is perfect that's because if you can control that part of your body you can control every other part because that's the most difficult part to control so it's a ready-made litmus text test of your progress in the christian faith and now he moves on to the size of the tongue the extraordinary difference between its size and its influence he talks about a bridle put in the mouth of a horse it goes in the gap between the front teeth and the back teeth of a horse and there's a gap either side and when you're harnessing a horse you get the bit in that gap and because it's been broken in you can control the whole horse through that little bit of metal in the gap in its teeth when i worked on the farm indeed when i was 10 years old on the farm we had two huge shire cart horses they are huge and to a little boy of 10 i was always awed by their size and yet they would leave me in charge of a hay boogie with a stack of a pike of hail on the back of the bogey and i would have the reins of this huge horse and the slightest pull on one side of the other and the horse would turn and the bogey would follow i was always amazed that this little boy of ten could control that huge thing but it was because i had little thing in his mouth that i could control and i had the control of the whole horse that's the tongue it's a little thing in the mouth between your teeth but if you can control that bit you can control the whole body just as i could control the whole horse or take the rudder of a huge ship it's always amazed me when i see a ship out of water either in model form or sometimes in dry dock and you see the size of the rudder compared to the whole hull it's nothing and yet i know that the pilot just turning that rudder a little bit turns the whole ship a modern illustration of that would be the ailerons on an aircraft wing have you ever watched as you come into land those little strips of flap at the back of the wings and one just goes up a little and you feel the whole plane lurch it's just a little bit of metal and it turns the whole plane i recently flew in a 380 the big double decker planes and i know because i've flown in a 320 for example in the cockpit with a pilot that i know who is a christian and i've watched him as we've taken off and he's holding a little stick a joystick about three inches tall and that's all he's got this is the new wireless or um new way of controlling a plane just a little joystick and that's all he used to turn the whole plane it was quite weird no big joystick up here but just a little one down here and all he did was this and this magnificent huge machine did his perfect will the tongues like that its size is out of all proportion to what it can achieve and what it can do to other people so he moves on to his size and illustrates that by a horse's bridle or bit in its mouth or by a rudder on a huge ship or by a forest fire i've only once in my life experienced the horror of a forest fire and it was in australia south australia that time and there was a high wind and the flames were leaping from one tree to another and since most of the trees were eucalyptus trees which are full of oil flammable oil you could see the flames just rushing from one tree to another and in fact the cars were running away from the flames at 70 miles an hour because the flames were traveling at 60. you have to see a forest fire well you've seen it on your screens this week there's a huge forest fire around sydney at this moment and they're investigating right now whether it was a freak meteorological cause or whether there was a human cause behind the fire it could have been a dropped cigarette end that set acres on fire it could have been a drop match a tiny spark could have done it either deliberately or not but this huge forest fire that is threatening sydney and burning houses and robbing people of their homes and racing bringing death with it could have been started by a tiny flame that's what the tongue is and this thought that the tongue is like a forest fire develops into certain other thoughts he said now the tongue is a fire it's small it's tiny but your tongue can set off a conflagration that will destroy many and he even goes to fires to say your tongue has been set on fire by hell it's a demonic thing the devil uses tongues more than anything else to damage the social scene in which we live set on fire by hell it was a lady in france went to confession and she told the priest i'm afraid i've been a gossip and i've been gossiping in this village for years and the priest said then you must do penance or she said i'll do anything if i can be forgiven and he said well you must do these things first of all he said i want you to go and pluck two chickens and bring all the feathers to me in a bag which she did and she said is that enough penance no he said there's a second thing you must now walk down the village street and take handfuls of feathers out of the bag and throw them up into the wind when you've emptied the bag come back and she came back she said is that enough penance no he said there's a third thing she said what's that well they said this is all you need to do now go and pick them all up and she said but i'll never be able to find them all they're blown away in the wind and he said and that's what your gossip has been like you can't ever get it back it's gone you fill the village with your gossip with your rumors there was a lady on a bus was overheard to say to another lady sitting next to her about a third lady they both knew and the first lady said i don't like her and for all i've said about her i never will which was honest at least from all i've said about her i never will like her we have all been guilty of gossip and gossip is mentioned in many places in the bible it's a deadly thing there are three questions to ask before you say anything about anyone else is it true is it kind and is it necessary and if you ask those three things before you say anything about anyone else you'll find yourself controlling this little organ one of the greatest philosophers said if everyone in the world knew what everyone had said about everybody else there wouldn't be four friends left in the world that may sound cynical but you and i know there's an element of truth in that and so he moves on from this the stubbornness of the tongue there's something in the tongue that is wild that can't be tamed he says every other animal seems to be able to be tamed the tongue no whales have been tamed killer whales have been tamed programmed on the tv this last week i think about that all kinds of animals have been tamed when i was young i went out of sheer curiosity to see a flea circus have any of you ever seen a flea circus you have you'll back me up then it's true nurse the man behind you he's seen one i didn't think you could train fleas and yet i watched as those fleas walked the tightrope hauled little chariots around walked on tight ropes balancing with weights carrying burdens doing all kinds of things but then there were plenty of fleas in those days to train there are not so many now they're quite rare but fancy training a flea did you know that a worm can be trained and tamed god did that if you find in the book of jonah that god told a whale what to do and told a worm what to do which was the bigger miracle don't go by size the biggest miracle is telling a worm what to do i haven't seen a worm circus yet but every kind of creature has been tamed except this and finally he mentions the schizophrenia of the tongue a forked tongue snakes have a fork tongue and james says our tongues are sometimes forked we can bless people and we can curse people with the same tongue we praise god and we criticize people we can say nice things and nasty things with the same organ now that's the most unnatural thing about the tongue in fact james says nature never has such a contradictory or inconsistent behavior human nature does nature doesn't there's no such thing in nature as inconsistent and he illustrates this in two ways first of all a spring of water there are in israel two kinds of spring some are full of salt they come through natural salt deposits in the earth and they are foul to the taste but they are good for your health if you bath in them and so there are special places like tiberias for example where people came from all over to bathe in the spring water and you can go to bath today i don't recommend drinking the water in bath or harrogate it's pretty horrid but it comes out like that and you don't expect fresh water clean water out of such a spring nature will be one or the other it will never be both likewise trees can a fig tree produce olives course it can't a fruit tree produces its own kind of fruit and you don't expect it to produce anything else and yet here we are our tongues can do what nature cannot do human nature is can be schizophrenic we can bless and curse with the same tongues it's an extraordinary contradiction so that's his last point about this possible in human nature but not possible in nature herself we are the exception to nature we can do things that nature can't and we shouldn't be able to but we do it so here we have been given tongues by god to use to praise and bless him and to bless other people and one of the things we should be judged on in the great day of judgment is every idle word i suppose we translate that word of jesus every casual word because it's what we say when we're not prepared when we're just speaking off the cuff we are usually careful when we're giving prepared words but it's what we say when we're off our guard when we weren't careful when we were careless and so jesus said it's for every careless word that we shall be judged quite frankly that means most of us may not have committed any other sin but sins of speech are enough they are set on fire by hell and they can take us to hell no wonder james says don't be many teachers because we have a strong temptation to tell people things that are not true i think of my interpretation of james too i trembled before i gave that to you because i was giving you an interpretation and an application of faith and works which the majority of evangelicals would not agree with and i had to go to the lord before i told what i said to you take another example the example of no i'm going to take the example of writing i think if james had been teaching today he would say don't be many writers because when you write you are teaching in a very permanent way that will go far beyond your own voice and will influence many people and i know that there are many christians with an ambition to be a writer they send me their manuscripts regularly they want me to read them correct them commend them find a publisher for them i've got three on my desk at the moment that people have sent me because they want to be a writer and because i have written they want to do the same i want to tell you quite honestly that i never wanted or intended to write a single book i loathed the idea i thought it was the last example of egotism and i just said when publishers demanded sorry i'm not a writer i'm not writing and then one day i was asking the lord how i could share the burdens of my heart on a wider more effective scale and he took me to jeremiah chapter 30. and verse 2 says this write everything in a book that i have told you says the lord and i wrote my first book out of obedience i've written over 30 now and they've all been out of sheer obedience i never wanted to be an author had no ambition to be but as soon as i became an author i found there are many many christians who've got an ambition to write a book and see their name on the cover and they write and ask me to help them don't be many writers either because they will come in the same stricter judgment i just throw that up out because i believe there are too many books that have not been ordered by god but have been the ambition for someone to get something off their chest so if i'm speaking to anyone this evening that is considering that you'd love to write a book then i would say please don't unless you have to unless god says i want you to do this it's so important we would all love to be an influence on other people but don't unless you can't help it and i think that's my final word on this part of james 3. thank you for listening you

Channel: David Pawson - Official

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Length: 52min 24sec (3144 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 03 2021