EM Worship Sevice (9/2/18)

Title: One Same Mouth
Passage: James 3:1-12
[Summary]
James 1:26 indicates how worthless one's religion, if his tongue is not bridled. And today's passage expands that idea by showing us the problem of our tongue. In verses 3-6, James uses three images to describe the huge influence of our tongue. First image is the bits of the horse. Comparing to the horse it is small, yet it controls the horse. The second image is rudder of the ship. No matter how large the ship is and how strong the wind is, a pilot can control the ship with small rudder. Those two images are neutral. And third image is fire. Small fire can burn the whole forest. And this carries negative image. And this leads to second problem of our tongue, which is that our tongue is nasty. It does not clean but stains our whole body (v.6). And it shows that it is a lot easier to use our tongue in an evil way because of our sinful corrupted nature. And the third problem is that it is hard to tame (v.8). 
And the solution of it is that we should know that we are given only one mouth (vv.9-10). As we prefer to separate our towels for feet and towels for face, as we make clear distinction between our dish brush from our toilet brush, we are not supposed to juxtapose our blessing and cursing in our one same mouth. But we only have one mouth, so we should discard the curse out of our mouth so that we can devote our mouth to praise God. 
How? We should rely on the Holy Spirit who can rule over our mouth (Acts 2:4). And the start point is speaking truth. We should speak truth. In order to speak truth, we should have right knowledge. And speaking truth does not mean that we always have to speak every detail. We need wisdom to know what to say and what not to say.