Our Words Show Our Character

Our Words Show Our Character

A Sermon on James 3:1–12 — The Tongue, the Heart, and the Wisdom from Above

Shane Gunn · Disciple of Christ · Pleasant Springs Church · August 2, 2026

Key Texts: James 3:1–12 • James 1:19–27 • James 4:11–12 • James 5:12 • Matthew 12:34–37 • Proverbs 18:21

A bit in a horse’s mouth. A rudder on a ship. A single spark in dry grass. Jacob — the man we call James, the half-brother of our Lord — reaches for three small things to make one large point: the smallest member of your body sets the direction of your whole life, and it broadcasts what is actually in your heart. This sermon walks the third chapter of James, then traces the three places in the letter where he returns to our speech, and ends where he ends: not with a technique for controlling the tongue, but with the wisdom that comes down from above.

Everything below the closing — Author & Audience, the history of Jacob, the discussion questions — is study material, not preached. It is here for the congregation to take home.

Understand who is talking to us. The man who wrote this letter grew up in the same house as Jesus of Nazareth — Mark names him among the Lord’s brothers (Mark 6:3). He ate at the same table. He heard the same mother sing. And John tells us plainly what he made of it at the time: “For not even his brothers believed in him” (John 7:5).

So what changed? Paul gives us the answer in one short line about the risen Christ: “Then he appeared to James” (1 Corinthians 15:7). Somewhere between the cross and Pentecost, the risen Lord went and found His brother. By Acts 1 the man who did not believe is in the upper room praying. By Acts 15 he is presiding over the most consequential meeting the church has ever held, and Paul calls him a pillar (Galatians 2:9).

Remember that when he says “we all stumble in many ways.” He is not preaching down at us. He puts himself in the sentence: we stumble, we all do.

Jacob gives us three pictures, and every one of them is about disproportion — something tiny governing something enormous.

Notice what the first two have that the third does not. A bit and a rudder are small things under control, and they produce a destination. A spark is a small thing out of control, and it produces a ruin. Your tongue will be one or the other. There is no third option — there are only lives steered on purpose and lives steered by accident.

And look what Jacob claims for the man who gets this right: “if anyone does not stumble in what he says, he is a perfect man, able also to bridle his whole body.” That word does not mean sinless. In Greek it is teleios (τέλειος), and behind it stands the Hebrew tamim — whole, complete, all of one piece. It is the opposite of the double-minded man of chapter one, “unstable in all his ways” (James 1:8).

Jacob is not being poetic when he calls the tongue a fire. He is being precise about three things fire does.

The word there is Gehenna (γέεννα) — the burning valley south of Jerusalem, the Lord’s own picture for final judgment. And here is something worth knowing: outside the mouth of Jesus in the Gospels, this is the only time that word appears in the entire New Testament. Jacob is the only other writer who reaches for his brother’s most terrible word — and he spends it on gossip. Last week in Hidden Things we saw why: the desire is genuinely ours, but there are powers in the unseen realm who know exactly which loose word will set a family, or a church, on fire.

Then he changes the picture from fire to venom: “a restless evil, full of deadly poison.” Fire is loud, and everyone sees it. Poison is quiet. It goes in with a smile, in a lowered voice, prefaced by “I’m only telling you so you can pray about it.” And it kills just as dead.

The Greek is literally “in the hand of the tongue” — the Septuagint keeps the Hebrew idiom (bẽyad, “by the hand of”) rather than smoothing it to “power.” The tongue is pictured as holding death and life in its grip. Jacob grew up on this book.

Now Jacob puts his finger on the exact place it hurts:

Do you see the trap he has sprung? He does not say “you curse sinners.” He says you curse people who are made in the likeness of God — borrowing the exact wording of Genesis 1:26 from the Greek Scriptures he read. So the blessing and the cursing are not two unrelated activities. They are aimed at the same target. The person you just took apart in the parking lot was made in the likeness of the God you were singing to twenty minutes ago.

Then he says something small that carries unusual weight: “My brothers, these things ought not to be so.” The word for “ought” is chrē (χρή) — the only time it appears in the New Testament. It is not the ordinary word for obligation. It is closer to “this does not belong; this is against the nature of the thing.” He is not scolding. He is pointing at something that has come apart.

And that is why he goes straight to nature. A spring does not pour fresh water on Sunday and salt water on Thursday. A fig tree does not have olive days. In God’s creation, what comes out is determined by what is in there. Every farmer in his audience knew it. Every one of us knows it.

Chapter three is the longest treatment, but there are three more places where Jacob will not leave our speech alone — and together they cover just about every way a mouth can go wrong.

Three commands, in that order, and the order is the sermon. Almost every word we regret was born from running the sequence backwards. And notice how honest verse 20 is: your anger may be completely justified — and it still will not produce the righteousness of God. Being right has never once sanctified being cruel.

The Greek is katalaleō (καταλαλέω) — to talk down about someone when they are not in the room. And Jacob’s argument is stunning: when you do it, you have not merely broken the royal law, you have set yourself above it. A man who judges the law is no longer a doer of it — he is sitting in the Judge’s chair. “Who are you?”

This is his brother’s teaching from the Sermon on the Mount, almost word for word (Matthew 5:37). The point was never a rule about oath formulas. It is that a person who has to swear to be believed has already admitted his ordinary word is not reliable. Elaborate assurances are the tax we pay on a reputation for shading the truth.

Here is the sentence that decides whether this sermon does you any good: “no human being can tame the tongue.”

Every kind of beast and bird and reptile and sea creature has been tamed by mankind. We put lions in harness and taught parrots to talk. We have not managed the four inches inside our own faces. So if you leave here with nothing but a resolution to try harder — count to ten, bite your tongue — you will be back where you started before the week is out. Jacob is not handing us a technique. He is closing a door so we will look for the right one. Because his brother had already told him where the words come from:

“Out of the abundance of the heart” — out of the overflow, out of what the heart has too much of to hold in. That is why a slip of the tongue is so humiliating: it was not a slip. It was a leak. The pressure was already there.

So Jacob does not end chapter three at verse twelve. He ends it with two kinds of wisdom — and it is no accident at all that this is where a chapter about the tongue lands.

Look at how he answers “who is wise among you?” He does not say let him explain it to us. He says let him show it — by his good conduct, and in meekness. In Jacob’s church, wisdom was not something you proved by winning the argument. It was something you proved by how you treated the person you were arguing with.

And the source is the whole point: this wisdom comes down. It is not manufactured or self-taught. That is exactly where he started the letter: “If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach” (James 1:5). So the answer to a mouth we cannot tame is not more effort at the mouth. It is a heart we did not make, given by a God we ask.

Jacob will not let us leave with a theory. His whole letter is one long refusal to let hearing substitute for doing: “But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves” (James 1:22). So take it home in his own terms.

Every book of Scripture was written by someone, to someone, in a real moment of history — and we read it better when we know that moment. What follows is the background to this letter: the man’s name and why our Bibles change it, his life and his death, when and to whom he wrote, what shaped his thinking, and how the letter came to sit in our canon. The Septuagint (LXX) and ESV are set beside the Greek throughout, as we do across the Discipleship School.

The name at the head of this letter is Ἰάκωβος (Iakōbos). In Hebrew that is יַעֲקֹב (Ya‘aqov) — the name of the patriarch, the third of the fathers, the man who wrestled with God at Peniel. The Hebrew name is bound up with the word for “heel” and “to supplant,” from the grip on Esau’s heel at birth (Genesis 25:26). Every Jewish parent who named a son Ya‘aqov in the first century was naming him after Israel himself.

So how did Iakōbos become James? Through Latin, not through English. The Vulgate rendered it Iacobus. In later spoken Latin the hard b softened toward an m in some regions, giving the form Iacomus; that passed into Old French as James, and into English from there. The route is Hebrew → Greek → Latin → French → English, and it lost a syllable and swapped a consonant on the way.

That is why, in this study, we will often call him Jacob. Not to be clever — but because it puts him back where he belongs: a Galilean Jew named after the patriarch, writing to Jewish believers, quoting the Law and the Prophets, thinking in Hebrew categories.

The name was extremely common, and the New Testament has several men who carry it. Keeping them straight is the first step to reading this letter well.

One more note: Jude opens his letter as “a servant of Jesus Christ and brother of James” (Jude 1) — that is, the brother of this Jacob, and therefore another of the Lord’s brothers named in Mark 6:3. Two brothers of Jesus wrote books of our New Testament, and neither of them opened by claiming the relationship.

We can put his story together from Acts and Paul’s letters, and it is one of the most remarkable in the New Testament precisely because it starts so badly.

For roughly two decades this man held together the mother church of all Christianity — through famine, poverty, and mounting hostility — and he did it as a peacemaker, holding Jewish believers and Gentile believers in one body when it would have been far easier to let them split. That is the man writing to you about the tongue. He had used his own to hold a church together.

Read the letter with the Jerusalem church’s actual circumstances in view and its emphases stop looking random.

Jacob was killed in Jerusalem around A.D. 62. We have two ancient accounts, and it is worth being clear about which is stronger.

Both accounts agree on the essentials: he was killed in Jerusalem, by the priestly establishment, for his allegiance to Jesus, in the early sixties — only a few years before the city itself fell. The man who wrote “count it all joy… when you meet trials of various kinds” was not writing theory.

The audience. “The twelve tribes in the diaspora” — Jewish believers in Jesus living outside the land of Israel. Many of them may be the very people scattered by the persecution that followed Stephen’s death (Acts 8:1; 11:19), which would make Jacob their pastor writing to a flock he had lost to the roads. He addresses them the way a Jew addresses Jews: he calls their meeting a synagogue (2:2, the plain sense of the Greek), he assumes the Law, he cites Abraham, Rahab, Job, and Elijah without explanation.

The date. It must be before his death around A.D. 62. Many hold it is very early — possibly the earliest document in the New Testament, from the mid-forties — on the grounds that Jacob never mentions the Gentile controversy that dominated the church from Acts 15 onward, never addresses circumcision or food laws, and describes a very simple community life. Others place it later in his ministry. The early date is a strong argument from silence, but it is still an argument from silence; we hold it as likely rather than certain.

The Greek. Here is an honest difficulty: the Greek of this letter is polished — a wide vocabulary, careful rhythm, real rhetorical skill. Some ask whether a Galilean tradesman could write it. Two things are worth saying. First, Galilee was thoroughly bilingual, and Nazareth sat within a few miles of the Greek-speaking city of Sepphoris. Second, letters in this world were routinely composed with a trained secretary (an amanuensis) — Paul used one openly (Romans 16:22). Neither point settles the question, but neither does the objection.

The genre. It opens like a letter and then stops behaving like one. There is no closing greeting, no travel plans, no named recipients, no single church’s problem being solved. What we actually have is wisdom — a string of short, hard-hitting speeches, each largely self-contained, each usually landing on a memorable line, all stitched together by repeated keywords rather than by a linear argument. By the common count there are some fifty-nine imperatives in one hundred and eight verses. This book was built to be preached, memorized, and obeyed.

Two streams run through everything Jacob writes. The first is his brother’s teaching — above all the Sermon on the Mount. The astonishing thing is that Jacob never once quotes Jesus by name, and mentions Him only twice in the whole letter (1:1 and 2:1) — and yet the Sermon on the Mount is on nearly every page. He does not cite his brother. He thinks like him.

The second stream is the wisdom literature — Proverbs above all, and the poems of Proverbs 1–9 in particular, where Wisdom is a voice calling in the street and the choice is between two roads. Jacob’s method is the method of Proverbs: short sayings, vivid images from ordinary life (a horse, a boat, a spark, a spring, a fig tree, a mirror, a wildflower in the heat), aimed not at your information but at your feet.

One more strand: Jewish wisdom writing between the Testaments had already worked this exact ground. Sirach devotes a long passage to the destructive power of the tongue — slander as a scourge, the tongue as a fire, and the counsel to make a door and a bolt for your mouth (Sirach 28:12–26). Jacob is standing in a long line of Jewish teachers on this subject, and he knows it.

If you want one word to carry the letter in your pocket, take this one. The teleios (τέλειος) word-group runs from the first chapter to the third. Watch the Greek rather than the English, because our translations render it several different ways:

In the Greek Old Testament, teleios is one of the words used for Hebrew tamim — whole, sound, unblemished, all of a piece. It is what Noah was (Genesis 6:9), and what Israel was commanded to be:

That is the same Greek word Jesus uses to close the Sermon on the Mount — “You therefore must be perfect (teleioi), as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48) — and the same word Jacob picks up in 1:4 and lands on in 3:2. Deuteronomy to the Sermon on the Mount to the tongue. Wholeness is the aim, and the mouth is where the fracture shows.

No one gets through James without the question. “Faith apart from works is dead” (2:26) sits beside Paul’s “one is justified by faith apart from works of the law” (Romans 3:28), and the two have been set against each other for centuries.

They are answering different questions. Paul is answering: how does a sinner get right with God? Answer: “by grace you have been saved through faith… not a result of works, so that no one may boast” (Ephesians 2:8–9). Jacob is answering: how do you tell the difference between real faith and a claim to have faith? Answer: look at what it produced. Jacob is not adding a second requirement to salvation; he is denying that a faith which changes nothing was ever the article in question. His test case is a man who says “Go in peace, be warmed and filled” to a brother with no coat and no dinner (2:15–16). That is not a doctrinal error. It is an absence of the thing itself.

Both men, tellingly, reach for the same proof text — “Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness” (James 2:23; Romans 4:3, both quoting Genesis 15:6) — and both are quoting it in the Septuagint’s wording. They are not rival schools. They are two sides of one coin, and the letter you are holding is the side that asks whether it shows up on Monday.

James had a slower road into the canon than the Gospels or Paul’s major letters, and it is better to know that than to be startled by it later.

We hold it as Scripture — and we note the history honestly, because a faith that has to hide the paper trail is not the faith of a man who told us to let our yes be yes.

The threads in this sermon — the heart behind the words, the wholeness God is after, the sources our English Bible came through, and the wisdom that must be given rather than earned — each open into a fuller study. Keep growing: