No One Can Tame It

On the afternoon of 23 July 2018 a trailer rolling along a highway near Redding, California, blew a tire. The bare rim dragged on the asphalt and threw sparks into the dry grass at the shoulder. The Carr Fire that followed burned for more than a month, blackened some 229,000 acres, destroyed more than 1,600 buildings and killed eight people.¹ Nobody meant it. A wheel scraped a road.

“How great a forest is set ablaze by such a small fire! And the tongue is a fire” (James 3:5–6). James is describing a mechanism. Small things steer large ones — a bit turns a horse, a rudder turns a ship — and the smallest member of the body sets “the entire course of life” (James 3:6) on fire. Before he gets there, though, he raises the standard, and we should not let him lower it. “We all stumble in many ways. And if anyone does not stumble in what he says, he is a perfect man” (James 3:2). The bar is not mostly kind or rarely cruel. It is never once: no word we would take back, no silence we should have broken.

Then he says the thing we would rather he had not. Every beast and bird, reptile and sea creature “can be tamed and has been tamed by mankind, but no human being can tame the tongue” (James 3:8). Not hard. Cannot. We have run the experiment. The resolution to speak less, the count to ten, the pause before sending, the apology afterward — and still, from the same mouth, blessing and cursing (James 3:10). James explains why with a picture: a spring cannot give fresh and salt water from one opening (James 3:11). Our words were never the real problem; they are the evidence. Contempt rises when we are feeling superior to someone, and it comes out of us sounding like discernment. Flattery rises when we need to be liked, and it comes out sounding like warmth. And when our record feels shaky, out comes the careful account of what really happened, the version in which we are reasonable throughout. Each mouthful tells us what is down in the well. Jesus said the same: “out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks” (Luke 6:45). The spring is the problem, and the spring is the one thing we cannot reach.

So James’s “perfect man” is a description no one fits. Except that one did. Isaiah wrote of a servant in whose mouth “there was no deceit” (Isaiah 53:9), and Peter — who had listened to him for three years, and had heard his own tongue deny him — wrote that “he committed no sin, neither was deceit found in his mouth. When he was reviled, he did not revile in return” (1 Peter 2:22–23). Around the cross every mouth was a spark — false witness, mockery, “Crucify him” — and the one mouth with authority to answer used its breath to bless: “Father, forgive them” (Luke 23:34). The fire our tongues kindle, James says, is “set on fire by hell” (James 3:6). The blaze our words deserved fell on the one man who never spoke a wrong one.

And that mouth is still speaking. He “always lives to make intercession” (Hebrews 7:25) — the tongue that never stumbled is, this morning, pleading for people whose tongues do. That is where James’s hard law was driving us all along: not to a tighter grip on our own jaw, but to the throne where our great High Priest ever lives to bring us in. A spring cannot be disciplined into sweetness; it has to be given new water, and that is the Spirit’s work, not ours (Ezekiel 36:26–27). So we stop trying to tame what we were told cannot be tamed, and we rest — and a mouth that has been blessed begins, without much noticing, to bless, because it is no longer needed to defend us. The word spoken over us is a blessing and not a curse — and it is a blessing because the curse went somewhere else: “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us” (Galatians 3:13). From the same mouth, James says, come blessing and cursing. From his mouth came only blessing; on his head fell only our curse. The tongue we cannot govern has an Advocate, and no spark from our mouths can burn down what his has spoken.