James 3:10-12 From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers, these things ought not to be so.11 Does a spring pour forth from the same opening both fresh and salt water? 12 Can a fig tree, my brothers, bear olives, or a grapevine produce figs? Neither can a salt pond yield fresh water.
James is a good preacher because he finds simple comparisons to illustrate his points. He shows how the tongue has so much influence. Out of it can come both good and bad. In his thinking, the logic is as clear as the illustrations he uses: fresh and salt water springs and the type of fruit from a fig tree. These do not require any explanation. Rather, what these verses call for is reflection and application, not explanation. We have to ask ourselves about what we say, or sometimes what we do not say. At the start, we must have something by which we compare our speech. How do we determine that what we are saying is a blessing or a curse? We have the laws of God particularly the law of love, the community of faith to help us know about the gray areas, and our own conscience illumined by the Holy Spirit. Another indicator is the affect our words have upon people. If our words do not move people closer to God, then we know they are being a curse. A second thing we must do is train our speech. For some people, this simply means to shut up! Keep your mouth closed. Essentially, this means to keep your thoughts to yourself. But this brings us to a third thing we must do: allow God to change our hearts so that our speech will also change. This can be the slow part. It may be difficult to unlearn habits and ways of talking. I cringe at the memory of how boys and girls talked on the playground when I was young. I hope they unlearned those habits later in life. Some people grow out of those but others just become more sophisticated in how they basically say the same things. Indeed, there are still a lot of playground Christians in our churches who have not grown up in the speech, which indicates that they have not grown up in their faith and obedience.
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