Reverend Jonathan Waits
How to Talk Right (James 3:1-12)
Date: February 9, 2025
The largest cruise ship in the world right now is the Icon of the Seas from Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines. It’s big on a scale that’s hard to imagine. For starters, it’s as long as four football fields back-to-back-to-back. It weighs approximately 250,000 tons. It’s 20 decks high—that is, it’s as tall as a 20-story building. It can hold up to more than 10,000 people between passengers and crew. You could take the entirety of Oakboro on a cruise…times three…and still have room to spare. It’s so big that if you were to completely hollow it out, you could fit the Titanic inside of it with enough room to still play a football game at one end. In short: It’s enormous. Exceedingly enormous. So big, that you really can’t grasp it until and unless you’re standing in front of it looking up. Even then, it’s still hard to grasp. By comparison, though, the mechanism for steering it—the rudder—is remarkably small. Sure, the rudders of ships scale up with the size of the ship, but by comparison to the whole thing, it seems incredible that such a small thing can successfully steer something so large.
Small things can be pretty powerful. The microchip that powers your phone, for instance, is not very big at all. And yet, that tiny, little chip has far more computing power to it than the total computing power NASA had available to them when they were sending astronauts back and forth to the moon. A small gesture of kindness can completely alter the course of someone’s life. A small investment made wisely and managed well can, over time, become a retirement nest egg that allows us to live with a kingdom generosity even after we stop getting a regular paycheck. We’re not all that far removed from when a single virus—one of the smallest types of organisms in the world—brought the entire world to its knees. Just because something is small, doesn’t mean it can’t still accomplish big things. Well, today, I’d like to talk with you about how something that seems pretty small can make or break a marriage relationship—or any relationship for that matter.
This morning we are in the third part of our series, Back to the Basics. For the last two weeks before this one, and with one more week to go, we have been having a conversation about marriage. Marriage is something that affects all of our lives. Whether you are married, not yet married, or not married anymore, your life has been impacted directly by a marriage. Your own marriage obviously does that. Your parents’ marriage did and does. The marriages of your friends and other family members have an impact on your life. Strong and healthy marriages can have a profoundly positive impact, while weak and struggling marriages can become a major hurdle to clear before you can do much of anything else in or with your life. Because marriage is such a critical part of our stories, getting it right really does matter. A lot. Getting marriage right, though, means building on the right foundation. With that in mind, for these few weeks we have been going back to the basics to talk about some of the strong foundation points that are necessary to have in place if we are going to have the marriages we desire.
The first two foundation points we talked about were perhaps not what you were expecting them to be. The reason for this is that they really didn’t have a whole lot to do with our spouses. By the end of our conversation last week we were starting to get pretty interactive, but for the last couple of weeks we have mostly been talking about our own relationship with God. The reason for this is that if our personal relationship with God is not in the shape it should be in, the likelihood that our marriage is going to be in the shape it should be in goes way, way down. Or, as we put it back in our first week, properly loving your spouse means loving God first. The idea there was that if we look to someone other than God as our first love, we’re going to be looking for that person to meet needs that only God can meet. That’s pretty unfailingly a recipe for relational disaster.
Taking things a step forward from there, because loving our spouses properly means loving God first, if we want to get closer to our spouses so that we can enjoy a more intimate relationship with them, we’ve got to get closer to God first. Being intimate with another person means sharing of yourself and receiving the same from them. But if we are not deeply connected to a source in which our value is strong and sure, sharing of ourselves is not going to be such an easy thing to do. If you want to get better connected to your spouse, get better connected to God.
So, loving God first is good. Getting better connected to God is good. But when it comes to having the marriage we all desire, those are things that can happen apart from our spouses. Yes, they absolutely impact the relationship we have, and they should be pursued in conjunction with our spouse pursuing them at the same time, but they are between-you-and-God things. If we are going to have the kind of marriages we dream about, eventually we have to actually, you know, interact with our spouses. Of course, when we start actually interacting with our spouses—that is, talking to them—we run the risk of making an absolute disaster of things. I don’t know about you, but I manage to make a mess with my words far more often than I’d like to admit. Getting our marriages right, it turns out, depends a great deal on our ability to communicate well. It depends a great deal on our ability to master one of the smallest parts of our body: our tongue. This morning, I want to look with you at the foundation point of our communication. And I’m going to go ahead and tell you what the big idea is because it’s such a simple one, and I don’t want you to forget it: When we talk right, our relationships work better.
Talking right, though, means taming our tongues, which is no small task. This is actually a point we find addressed pretty thoroughly in the Scriptures. If you have your copy of the Scriptures with you this morning, find your way with me to the New Testament letter of James, and let’s take a look at what He had to say about taming our tongues.
James is sometimes known as the Proverbs of the New Testament. His little letter is filled to the brim with practical wisdom. He focuses this wisdom around three major themes: trials in the Christian life, wisdom, and wealth and poverty. Over the course of unpacking these themes James quotes and otherwise borrows from things Jesus said more than just about any other New Testament author. This makes sense too because James was Jesus’ half-brother. And that, by the way, has long since struck me as a really good argument in favor of the resurrection. Here’s why: What would your brother have to do in order to convince you that He’s the Messiah? I mean, short predicting and pulling off His own death and resurrection, I really can’t think of anything. James didn’t believe in Jesus and in fact tried to oppose Jesus directly on at least one occasion that we know about from the Gospels. But then he did an absolute 180 and became the highly respected leader of the church in Jerusalem, proclaiming to anyone who would listen that his brother was his Lord. He is known to history as James the Just. An encounter with His risen brother is pretty much the only thing that can explain this dramatic about face on who his brother really was.
In any event, in James 3, we find our faithful pastor talking about the tongue and the challenge that it presents to us who want to live a life consistent with the life of Christ. Check this out with me in James 3 right at the beginning of the chapter. James puts all of this in the context of warning teachers to be especially careful with their words, but it really applies to all of us.
“Not many should become teachers, my brothers [and sisters], because you know that we will receive a stricter judgment. For we all stumble in many ways. If anyone does not stumble in what he says, he is mature, able also to control the whole body. Now if we put bits into the mouths of horses so that they obey us, we direct their whole bodies. And consider ships [like the Icon of the Seas]: Though very large and driven by fierce winds, they are guided by a very small rudder wherever the will of the pilot directs. So too, though the tongue is a small part of the body, it boasts great things. Consider how a small fire sets ablaze a large forest. And the tongue is a fire. The tongue, a world of unrighteousness, is placed among our members. It stains the whole body, sets the course of life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell. Every kind of animal, bird, reptile, and fish is tamed and has been tamed by humankind, but no one can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison. With the tongue we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in God’s likeness. Blessing and cursing come out of the same mouth. My brothers and sisters, these things should not be this way. Does a spring pour out sweet and bitter water from the same opening? Can a fig tree produce olives, my brothers and sisters, or a grapevine produce figs? Neither can a saltwater spring yield fresh water.”
Now, but for a couple of spots there in the middle that scholars debate back and forth about, what James writes here is pretty clear. And pretty uncomfortable. I mean we all know that our mouths can get us into trouble, but this makes the problem seem even worse than we thought. The power of the tongue, the power of our words, is enormous. Words are powerful things. Words are what God used to call creation into existence from out of nothing. Part of our being made in His image is that our words are powerful too. We can’t call physical matter into existence out of nothing, but we can nonetheless speak some things into reality. With words, Adolf Hitler led Germany and the rest of the world with it into World War II. With words, Martin Luther King, Jr. called this nation to finally realize the promises of our Founders and to extend civil rights to all people regardless of the color of their skin. Words can tear down a confident man. They can build up a struggling woman. Our words carry with them the power of life and death. And the tongue is what enables all of this.
The trouble is that our tongue has been corrupted by sin just like the rest of us. Now, of course, the tongue itself isn’t the thing that is corrupted. It’s just a bit of flesh. It’s our minds and proverbial hearts that are the source of this corruption. Yet so much of that corruption manifests itself as words. No one, save Jesus, has ever managed to get full control of their words. If we could, James says, we could be a fully mature individual capable of controlling everything about ourselves. But we can’t do it. Instead, we use our words to bless, yes, but also to curse. This gross duplicity should not be. It is unnatural. And when we unleash all of this into our marriages, the results are often relationally catastrophic. When we talk right, our relationships work better. The challenge is that we don’t talk right very often.
So, how do we fix that? Well, I want for this conversation to be really, really practical for you. I want for you to walk out of here in a few minutes with some clear and concrete things that you can put into practice today to start moving your relationship in the direction you want it to go. I want to give you some really practical ways to start talking right. Because, when we talk right, our relationships work better.
For the rest of our time together this morning, I want to give you four rules for communication in marriage (and, honestly, in any other area of life as well), that if you start using, have the power to completely transform your relationship. I don’t usually say this, but if you are a notetaker, this is something you’re going to want to write down. Are you ready?
The first rule is this: Speak the truth in love. Always tell the truth in your relationships. If you are a follower of Jesus, you serve a God who is the source of all truth. Deviating from who He is will necessarily cause issues with the relationship foundation points we talked about over the last two weeks. But there’s a difference between lovingly setting the truth before another person and using the truth as a sledgehammer to tear them down. Beating someone about the head with the truth does not make you more right in spouting it, and it doesn’t make them more likely to receive and adjust their lives to it. It throws up our defenses and can cause a total collapse of carefully laid lines of communication. When we talk right, our relationships work better. Truth by itself isn’t how to talk right. We need truth with love.
Of course, this means understanding what love is. Let me define that for us: Love is an intentional decision to see someone else become more fully who God designed them to be. So the question you need to answer before you set about telling the truth to your spouse (or anyone else) is this: Are you delivering the truth in order to gently, compassionately, and graciously lead them in the direction of becoming more fully who God designed them to be, or are you using it as a weapon to wound, paying them back for some actual or even merely perceived wound you feel like they have dealt you? Here’s another question to ask: Are you trying to make them over into God’s image for them, or are you trying to manipulate them into your own image for them? Truth is absolutely foundational in our relationships. But if we don’t wrap it properly in love, we aren’t doing anyone any favors. When we talk right, our relationships work better. Speaking the truth in love will get us pointed in the right direction here.
The second rule for communication in our relationships is this: Get rid of all contempt from your communication. Contempt is anything that sends the message that you think your partner is an idiot. This can happen in all sorts of ways. Some of them are verbal. Many of them are not. All of them shut lines of communication down with remarkable rapidity. And the reason why is pretty obvious. How inclined are you to communicate productively with someone you know thinks you’re an idiot? Instead of trying to meaningfully communicate with such a person, you’re far more likely to be defensive of yourself, and even to redirect the criticism back in their direction. Well, now instead of communicating, you’re arguing back and forth about who’s the bigger idiot. Remember what James said? Blessing God and cursing those made in His image should not come from the same mouth. That’s unnatural. When we talk right, our relationships work better. Telling your spouse, with or without words, that you think they’re an idiot is not how to talk right.
Okay, but what about when they’re actually being an idiot? I don’t know about you, but sometimes I can be a bit of an idiot. Sometimes I know it in the moment. Sometimes I don’t, and need to be told it so that I stop being an idiot. What are we supposed to do in those times? We apply both of these rules, but especially rule number one. We communicate the truth…in love. “Honey, some of the decisions you are making right now and have been making lately are pretty puzzling to me. To be honest, some of them have been more than a little hurtful to me. Can we talk about what some of those are, why you’re making them, and how perhaps we can work together to find a better path forward?” Doesn’t that sound better than just telling them they’re an idiot? Sure, you may need to do some work to get to a place where you can say something like that instead of what you were thinking at first, but wouldn’t you rather them do that for you too? When we talk right, our relationships work better.
Rule number three: Learn to speak each other’s love language. Gary Chapman wrote a book more than a generation ago called The Five Love Languages. Since then, the book has never gone out of print, and has been repackaged in almost every variety you can imagine. The basic idea is that every person has a primary way that they send and receive messages of love to the people around them. Chapman identifies five different love languages that people speak. These are touch, quality time, acts of service, gifts, and words of affirmation. You have one or maybe a couple of those ways that are the primary way you send and receive messages of love to and from the people around you. If someone tries to send you a message of love that is not in one of those couple of ways, while you may appreciate the gesture, you’re not going to perceive it as a communication of love. The same is true for your spouse. What this means practically, is that if you and your spouse don’t have the same love language, you could spend your lives sending messages of love back and forth that never get received by the other. This will leave you both feeling like the other never communicates love to you. We can bear that for a while, but eventually it starts to wear on the relationship.
The implications of this should be clear. You need to learn what your love language is. Your spouse needs to learn what his or her love language is. Then, you need to share that information with each other. If those love languages are not the same, you need to have a conversation about what kinds of things make you feel loved more than others. You can talk about what kinds of things don’t make you feel loved. Once you’ve done all of this, you can start to practice speaking each other’s love language. There may be a learning curve to the process, but when your spouse for perhaps the first time starts receiving consistent messages of love from you in a language that speaks right to their heart, there’s a good chance you’re going to get rewarded for and encouraged in your efforts. You’ll likely feel like doing the same for them. And when you are wrapping your communication in love like this, you’re a whole lot more likely to be talking right. When we talk right, our relationships work better.
And just to take away any excuses you might have for not knowing what yours and your spouse’s love languages are, I have a resource you can access easily: 5lovelanguages.com/quizzes/love-language. Go there, take the quiz, and get practicing. And, if doing it online isn’t something you’re going to try to do, I’ve got a paper version you can take with you as you leave today. When we talk right, our relationships work better. Use this tool so you can start talking right in a way your spouse will be able to hear.
One last rule for communication, and this one is perhaps the most important of all. In fact, when I present these rules to people, I usually start with this one. I wanted to save the most important for last here today. If you want to improve the communication in your marriage—and all your relationships—the most important discipline you can develop is to assume the best. Assuming the best about what your partner has said or done will set you up for communication success in a way nothing else will match. And here’s what I mean by that: When your partner has communicated with you in some way (verbally or non-verbally; intentionally or unintentionally), you need to find the most generous and gracious explanation for what has been communicated and operate as if that were true regardless of whether or not it actually is true.
Sometimes our partner sends a message our way that could be taken in a way that is hurtful or offensive. In the vast majority of cases, and in the context of a relationship that is even remotely healthy, the reality is that they didn’t mean to communicate in a way that was offensive or hurtful to us. The reason for this is obvious. If they did or said something to intentionally hurt or offend us, the great likelihood is that we’re going to respond to them from out of our hurt and offense. That usually doesn’t go very well. Nobody wants that. The only time most of us will even consider actively trying to hurt someone else is either when we have been hurt by them and are trying to get them back for it, or we have been hurt by someone else and they’re the closest, most convenient target. And, we only do that when we are behaving out of our five-year-old-self brain that thinks that kind of thing makes sense, rather than our mature, adult brain that knows fully well that it doesn’t.
So then, given all of that, if our partner has done or said something that is offensive or hurtful, the assumption that they didn’t intend to do that is generally a pretty safe one to make. If we respond in a manner that is shaped by the hurt we feel, given that they didn’t try to hurt us on purpose, we are creating conflict and shutting down lines of productive communication totally needlessly. If we instead assume the best, we will be able to respond in a manner that acknowledges the hurt we feel to them while yet giving their intentions the gracious benefit of the doubt. This opens the door to having a productive conversation about why something felt hurtful and how we can both avoid that kind of situation again in the future. Now, instead of the relationship being wounded by an unnecessary conflict, it has been strengthened by a good conversation. When we talk right, our relationships work better. Assuming the best is a sure pathway to talking right.
Now, does this sometimes take a little bit of work and creativity to actually put into practice? Yep, it sure does. For many of us, making gracious and generous assumptions about the people around us is not the relational habit we have developed over the years, so doing this will not be our first instinct. It may not even be our second or third instinct. If we are carrying hurts from the past, that’s going to impact our ability to do this. When present offenses trigger past hurts, we respond with that stored up pain rather than with the gracious rationality the situation actually warrants. After all, the tongue is a world of evil. That’s going to be our default. And it may be that the other person really did intend to hurt or offend us. If that’s the case, then we’re going to have to have another, more convicted conversation. But if we go into that conversation with gracious and generous assumptions leading the way, it’s a whole lot more likely to be a productive, restorative affair than one that just drives us further apart. When we talk right, our relationships work better.
So, let’s get into the spiritual discipline of talking right. Let’s assume the best, speak each other’s love languages, relentlessly remove contempt from our conversations, and speak the truth in love. None of these are easy, especially if you haven’t been in the habit of practicing them. Getting these things right is going to require us to get back to the basics and build new habits where old ones have proven ineffective at bringing us to the relationship we desire. But if we’ll do the work, the transformational power this has for our relationships is profound. When we talk right, our relationships work better. Let’s commit to doing just that.