Set Aflame week 2: James 3.5b-8

Are you a control freak? Do you like to be in control? You plan and over plan and have ever little detail worked out to its minutia? You don’t feel like you’re complete until you have a contingency for every possible scenario? Some people are control freaks. Some are control freaks in the sense that they just like power and like to be in control. While others, just like to be well prepared and have everything well thought out. . . Control is important in our spiritual lives as well. There are certain parts of our spiritual lives which we ought to control, in fact, we could go so far as to say that we must control. You can probably think of several areas in our spiritual lives where control is an important quality to maintain, but we’re going to continue talking about one specifically this morning—our speech. Our tongues. Controlling our tongues is an important part of our spiritual lives. The problem is, though we may be control freaks in certain areas of our lives, how we use our speech usually isn’t one of them. In fact, very often it’s just the opposite. We can be very loose and careless with our tongues. . . And our passage today addresses this tendency that we all have, and the weakness we are prone to display in our speech. And as we open and unpack our passage today, there’s one bottom line I think we learn from this passage, and this is the big idea for this morning:‌‌ if you don’t control your tongue, it will control you!