“Consider what a great forest is set on fire by a small spark.” (James 3:5)

Try an exercise using this question: Isn’t she pretty? 

Say it as if you’re watching your granddaughter at her first ballet recital. Listen to your tone. Now, sarcastically say it as you watch a teenager dressed deliberately to annoy her parents. Finally, say it with the emphasis on she as if you’re selecting from a group of young women walking by your freshman dorm! 

The words stay the same, don’t they? But has the meaning? The intention?

Communication involves more than just the words we choose. Of course, verbal language matters. But gestures matter. And tone matters. “Taming the tongue” has to mean more than choosing kind words over ugly ones. We can say the right thing, but if our gestures and tone undermine the literal words, our real meaning manifests itself, and James’ admonition goes unheeded. 

The tongue is a tiny, dangerous tool with the potential to impact the “whole course” of people’s lives, as rudders do ships and bits do horses (3:6,3-4). Words can hurt, and sometimes we intend them to. But danger also lurks when we overlay the “right” words with an inconsistent tone. Perhaps that teenage girl is forever damaged by your oh-so-nice words voiced with disdain, or your granddaughter becomes a woman trapped into needing to be pretty all the time.

James addresses our inconsistency with vivid examples: “With the tongue we praise our Lord and Father, and with it we curse men made in God’s likeness” (3:9). He notes that nothing in nature does what we do: a spring of water never produces fresh and salt water simultaneously, and grapevines never bear figs (3:11-12). And yet how often do we say one thing but intentionally undermine it with our tone? “Fine,” we tell our spouse, but whatever it is is far from “fine.”

As Christians intent on integrating our faith into our lives, are we also working on how well our words integrate with the appropriate tone? Jesus’s remarks, “Out of the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks” (Luke 6:45), underscore how intimately tied tone (our “heart”) is to words. We know we can’t always trust our emotions, and yet we still frequently speak in haste. How to stop? James unequivocally states, “no man can tame the tongue” (3:8). This is the Holy Spirit’s work. We must seek His help integrating heart and mouth into the kind of communication befitting Christians who comprehend the power of this little rudder of a tongue.

We don’t know how far our words - especially overlaid with the tone we use - might go, how much they can destroy. Small sparks start forest fires (3:5). “Set a watch over my mouth, O Lord, and keep watch over the door of my lips” (Ps. 141:3).