"My dear brothers, take note of this: Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry" (v.19). Our tongues are a barometer of whether we are living a righteous life or not. James is helping people who are facing trials of many kinds. We all regret that in past trials our fears were stirred, and we became confused and began to doubt God, and we did not behave as James says here. We were slow in listening to others, quick to speak and quick to get angry. We blew it. Especially during trials we need one another as Christians, and this is the only way we can help one another - being quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry. Let us look at these three exhortations.
i:A righteous man is quick to listen. He listens first to God. Particularly in trials, but at any time when he feels his temperature rising, and he's getting utterly frustrated, and everybody seems to be acting in an utterly stupid way - then it is he makes sure that he listens to God. He listens to what the Bible says, and especially when the Bible is being preached. He'll be saved from an absolute disaster if he will listen. If the apostle Peter had listened to what the Lord had said there wouldn't have been hot tears and sobs of sorrow the following day.
When the Word of God was preached and God gave us a new birth then Scripture became our mother. Listen to your mother ! "Be quick to hear ". You must not linger, hesitating, debating, quibbling about her meaning. Your mother speaks plainly about the matter; listen to her and be quick to understand and obey. There is nothing ambiguous about what she says. Grasp her meaning and learn to obey. Christians often fail to grow and gain the mastery over their tempers because of their disposition. There is little eagerness to hear. But eagerness to listen to one's mother comes from a love for her. Love listens. It grows out of a proper relationship to her. This relationship, in turn, is maintained by obedience. One is eager to learn more of God's Word when he loves it. And he will love it all the more as he obeys it"
Before he speaks to anyone else he must learn to listen to God. It seems that anyone with some notoriety who makes a profession of faith is in a pulpit speaking to other people the very next day. It does not matter how prominent a position he has held, and how quickly he is learning the Christian faith, when he is given a divine birth he is a new-born babe, and he has a child's attitudes and faith. Let him promptly give himself to the Word of truth and pass through the stage of a novice before he speaks to others. Hasty births make poor preachers. Christians must first become quick to listen before they can become useful in teaching others.. "Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God" (Rom. 10:17). How many sermons did the Lord Jesus hear in the synagogue before he began to preach ? John the Baptist was thirty years old before he spoke first, and so was our Lord.
Let a man learn to listen to others. James is not exhorting us to listen a lot, as it were to be just sitting and letting a monologue of someone's stream of consciousness flow over and around us while we say nothing at all. Of course, times come when we have to forfeit our right to interrupt and to dictate the direction of the conversation. We let the person talk away, and it may seem an utterly unedifying exercise to us. But that grace is not what James is talking about here. He is urging promptness in attending to what someone is saying to you. "Drop everything you are doing and listen," is James' meaning. He is talking about the respect you pay to someone who is speaking to you, that there is a genuine interest, because by this you are showing that you are loving your neighbour as yourself. You don't fidget, as you give yourself to someone. Dr Martyn Lloyd-Jones was once addressing a group of clinical medical students at the British Medical Association House, London, in 1972, about counselling patients, and he told them, "the first basic requisite is patience. If you are not able to exercise such patience you will be a very bad counsellor. If you appear to be only half-listening, and give the impression that your mind is somewhere else, and that you think that this interview is a waste of time, you will do no good at all. You must be ready to give yourself to listening. Above everything else you must listen to what the patient says. It is astonishing to note the way in which people are helped merely by having someone who will listen to them" (The Doctor Himself and the Human Condition, "The Doctor as Counsellor", p.44). Someone said, "We have two ears and only one tongue in order that we may hear more and speak less."
A wise old owl lived in an oak.
The more he knew, the less he spoke;
The less he spoke the more he knew;
Does that same thing apply to you ?
Unfortunately, many old people are not like that owl, and have never learned to listen. They will give young people no time to finish what they are saying before interrupting, as though age alone has made them wise:- "Yes, yes, young man ..." Let's be careful we don't patronise young people by cutting them down in mid-sentence. "Let no man despise your youth." Let us learn early to be swift to hear old and young.
ii] The righteous man is slow to speak. How different is the spirit of our age where there is this emphasis on expressing your feelings, and letting everything hang out. Be slow to speak, says James. You know that he is not commending drawling speech ! Nor is James exhorting us to take vows of silence. How could a Christian - who has good news to tell every person he meets - take a vow of silence without sinning ? We are urged to, "Exhort one another daily, while it is called today, lest any of you be hardened through the deceitfulness of sin," In the days of Israel we are told, "those that feared the Lord spake often one to another; and the Lord hearkened and heard it." There are truths that need constantly to be brought forward. Who will bear witness to them if we are silent ? There is such an entity as a guilty silence for which many of us cowards must answer to God. Nor is James with these words encouraging an unsociable taciturness. How refreshing it is when a group of Christians gather and someone can break the ice and speak, answer questions in a Bible Study, or make helpful comments about a matter of concern. James is not commending unmortified shyness. An open-faced young Christian who will volunteer answers in an unsurly manner is a joy to a congregation.
James is concerned here about blurting out words thoughtlessly. The Lord Jesus speaks of 'idle words' and having to give to Almighty God an account of them. "For by thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned" (Matt. 12:37). There is an old saying, "many a man has had to repent of speaking, but never one of holding his peace." James' concern is that we might never be rash, but speak when we see our duty clear, and then carefully weigh what we are going to say. "Even a fool, when he holdeth his peace, is counted wise: and he that shutteth his lips is esteemed a man of understanding" (Prov. 17:28). There was a time when the Lord Jesus was being pressurised into passing the ultimate sentence upon a woman caught in adultery. They were using the woman as a snare with little genuine concern for her or the word of God. "But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger" (John 8:6). How unbearable that long hush, as the woman stood there, and the Lord Christ said nothing, and the minutes went by. When they persisted he merely said, "If any of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her" (v.7). Then in another silence that followed those words they drifted away, the older ones went first because they knew they had more years of sin to take to the Judgment. We, under those circumstances, might have wordily discussed the ending of the requirements of the old covenant's capital requirements, and the new covenant's stipulations about church discipline for immorality. But with this woman dehumanised into becoming a lure in order to trap the Lord Jesus how powerful was his lengthy deliberation before speaking. How slow he was to speak ! Then he focused upon the consciences of those men, who were more excited by the woman's sexual guilt than their own sin, and his silence and then those few words drove them to a more serious spirit. With his exhortation to the woman to go and sin no more the Son of God dismissed her. He did not condemn her because God had not sent his Son into the world to condemn the world but that the world through him might be saved.
Be slow to speak especially when you are making judgements about people or behaviour or doctrine. Is it not a fact that when we pass judgment upon others we are suggesting how far above them we are ? As we dispense moral judgements, so, by that very act, we acknowledge ourselves to be moral men. "He is so careless," we say, implying that we are careful people. "I don't like his pride," we say to a close friend, implying that we ourselves are models of humility. Or if their meanness is getting under our skin, are we announcing our own generosity ? When we talk of a great man's doctrinal aberration are we parading our own theological superiority ? Be slow to speak !
iii] The righteous man is also slow to become angry. Of the three this is the most important barometer to the God-pleasing life, because a reason is appended to this command.
Everyone knows that not all anger is wrong. Christians point out that in Psalm 7 and verse 11 righteous anger is attributed to the Lord himself. God is angry with unrighteousness, injustice, and false religion. We remember Jehovah Jesus making a whip and driving the moneychangers out of the temple. Then the apostle Paul exhorts the Ephesian congregation not to allow righteous anger to become sinful anger by letting the sun go down on their wrath (Eph. 4:26). There is a right display of anger, we are correctly told, like the display of every emotion which God has created and given to us. A husband is justified in being angry with someone who has violated his wife. Parents are justified in being angry with anyone who introduces their children to drugs, or laces their drinks in a party. We don't appreciate a religion which teaches people to be as devoid of anger as a Buddha or a Sphinx, but, then, we are interested in one that will tell us how to control and purify that emotion.
My concern is this, that rarely is man's anger righteous. Anger doesn't do ourselves or anyone else any good, in fact, the very reverse. Think of what the world does when it's enraged. How horrible a sin anger is, and allied to the deceit of our own hearts, how quickly we justify to ourselves every display of our rage as righteous. When I hear of one Christian becoming angry with another I am utterly depressed. When I witness anger in church meetings or officers' meetings - which events have been extremely rare - I will never forget those nights. How I groan over other times when I lost my cool. .
The sin is of anger lies in this, it gets angry for the wrong reasons, Cain was angry with Abel out of envy, and so killed him. Moses fell into nationalistic hatred when he saw a taskmaster beating a fellow-countryman in Egypt and he murdered the Egyptian. What retaliation did Pharaoh take for that action against the Israelites ? It was not a popular act, and for its wildness Moses had to spend the next forty years living on the edges of a wilderness. Again, if our pride is hurt we fall into anger. "Do you see a man who speaks in haste ? There is more hope for a fool than for him" (Provs. 29:20). And a husband who clams up and will not apologise to his wife for an angry outburst before they go to sleep has also fallen into wicked anger. We might prefer to have a discussion about legitimate anger, but God is pressing us to go down on our knees and confess to him and one another our sins of anger. I fear our fine debates about righteous anger become a loophole in which we hide the convictions of our conscience.
I want the biblical warnings about anger to rub my conscience that they may prevent me from ever being angry. I never want to be angry again. James says, "man's anger does not bring about the righteous life that God desires" (v.19). How is God honoured, and our own Christian lives strengthened, and the church advanced, and the world saved, and the Bible become easier to understand by our anger ?
Consider some of the ill-consequences of anger:
1. Anger hinders men's prayers. I Timothy 2:8, "I want men everywhere to lift up holy hands in prayer, without anger or disputing." How can you speak to a loving merciful God when your heart is seething with anger ?
2. Anger gives the devil a foothold in your life by filling you with guilt and destroying your walk with God. Ephesians 4:26 "Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry, and do not give the devil a foothold."
3. Anger is frequently out of control and leads to other sins. Proverbs 29:22, "An angry man stirs up dissension, and a hot-tempered one commits many sins."
4. Anger keeps bad company. Ephesians 4:21 tells us that anger keeps company with bitterness, rage, brawling, slander, and all kinds of malice. That's a grim gang.
5. Anger is incompatible with the teaching of the Lord Jesus. In the Sermon on the Mount he says, "Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also ... I tell you love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you ... I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to his brother, 'Raca' is answerable to the Sanhedrin. But anyone who says, 'You fool,' will be in danger of the fire of hell" (Matthew 5:39, 44, 22).
6. Anger usurps the role of God who is the only judge. If you're under pressure the only response is patience, meekness and endurance, not retaliation. Think of the Lord Jesus: "When they hurled their insults at him, he did not retaliate: when he suffered, he made no threats" (1 Peter 2:23). He was the lamb not a wolf. We are to be a congregation of lambs. The only hope for the future of the church in fiercely Islamic lands is that it remembers its Lord has sent it out as sheep amidst wolves.
James is telling us here you have to choose between achieving the righteousness of God or giving in to the anger of man. You have to choose between going for the blessedness of the peacemaker or the strife of rage. You cannot have them both. You can have your anger and go to hell, or you can be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry and go to heaven. Getting angry does not bring about the righteous life that God desires. Anger does not meet with God's approval, but righteous living does.