I could hardly believe that, on Resurrection Sunday, Trump chose to speak like that.
My day had begun in the chill of a sunrise service, moved to a fellowship breakfast with my church family and then into the joy of regular worship at Cedar Ridge. People came through the doors with Bibles in hand. Children slid into pews. Elderly saints stood slowly to sing. All of them joined in the same glad truth. Jesus Christ had risen from the dead.
At nearly that same hour, the President of the United States sent out words thick with profanity, menace and swagger. The language was as filthy as the threat was ugly. Civilian infrastructure was spoken of as though lives were pieces on a board.
Many Christians saw the post and felt a jolt of shame run through them. The shame did not rise merely from embarrassment over vulgar language. It came from the collision itself. While worshipers were lifting their voices to the Prince of Peace, a ruler was using his to cast sparks into dry grass.
James speaks straight into a moment like this.
By the time he reaches the third chapter of his letter, he has already pressed one great truth on the conscience of the church. Real Christianity is heard and lived. Faith receives the Word of God. Obedience brings life into line with that Word. Then James takes that burden and lays it on the mouth. Speech belongs to Christian obedience. Words are works. The tongue is part of the life that must bow before Christ.
“My brethren, be not many masters, knowing that we shall receive the greater condemnation” (James 3:1).
James begins with teachers because men who shape minds carry heavier judgment. Their words do not fall to the ground in a quiet corner. They do more than fill the air. They settle into hearts, shape standards, sharpen tempers, and tutor a people in what to laugh at, what to excuse, and what to fear.
A man with influence speaks into more than a microphone. He speaks into the moral atmosphere around him.
That truth reaches beyond the pulpit. It reaches any voice with power to move multitudes. A pastor can disturb a church with his mouth. A president can disturb a nation and send his speech across oceans.
Then James says something far more searching. “If any man offend not in word, the same is a perfect man, and able also to bridle the whole body” (James 3:2). Spiritual maturity shows itself in a governed tongue. The mouth is not a loose wire hanging off the Christian life. It is tied to the soul. It reveals the man.
Jesus said the same thing with devastating simplicity. “Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh” (Matthew 12:34). A mouth does not create the heart, yet it exposes it.
Words rise from somewhere. They come from a real interior world. They rise from love, bitterness, fear, lust, envy, pride, peace, mercy or rage. Public speech does not hover above character like weather. It pours out of character like water from a spring.
James gives us things we can see. A bit in a horse’s mouth. A rudder on a ship. A small flame running through a field. Little things. Terrible power. “Behold, how great a matter a little fire kindleth! And the tongue is a fire” (James 3:5-6).
Anyone who has seen blackened pasture after a grass fire knows what he means. One spark catches in the wrong place. Wind takes hold, fences burn and trees crack. Smoke hangs low for days. James looks at the mouth and says there is that kind of ruin in it.
American Christians need to hear that without filtering it through party loyalty.
We have become skilled at grading leaders on scales that help us keep our favorite sins. We talk about policy wins, court appointments, border plans, media bias, economic strength, foreign threats, and strategic necessity.
Some of those questions belong in public life and deserve sober thought. Yet once the church begins to treat moral rot as an acceptable tool, something inside her starts to bend. A nation may reward a man for being brutal. The church is commanded to ask what kind of spirit is ruling him.
A Christian can say with a straight back and a clean conscience that profane, reckless, threatening speech is shameful in any man. It is shameful in a father and in a pastor. It is shameful in a president. Office cannot bleach corruption white.
“Therewith bless we God, even the Father; and therewith curse we men, which are made after the similitude of God” (James 3:9). The terrible thing is not only that the ruler’s mouth has spoken filth. The terrible thing is that the church knows something about this split tongue herself.
The same mouths that sang resurrection hymns on Sunday morning are capable of cutting a spouse on Sunday afternoon. The same lips that said, “He is risen indeed,” can carry gossip by lunch, bitterness by evening, slander by nightfall.
James will not let worshipers hide behind better manners. He is after deeper honesty than that. He wants the church to feel the contradiction. “Out of the same mouth proceedeth blessing and cursing. My brethren, these things ought not so to be” (James 3:10).
Springs do not pour sweet water and bitter water from the same opening. Fig trees do not bear olives. Grapevines do not grow figs. The natural world keeps faith with its own kind more faithfully than redeemed people sometimes keep faith with theirs.
That is where this whole matter becomes painfully personal. It is easy to grieve over vulgar speech from a public leader. It is harder to let James search the Sunday school class, the elder meeting, the kitchen table, the private text thread, the whispered comment in the church foyer.
A nation does not decay through Washington alone. It decays through millions of mouths set loose in homes and churches and screens. Public corruption gains its strength from private approval. The fire runs because dry timber lies everywhere.
What, then, should a Christian seek in a leader, especially one many insist on calling Christian?
James answers with a portrait that feels almost foreign in a culture drunk on combat. “The wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, and easy to be intreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and without hypocrisy” (James 3:17). Purity. Peaceableness. Gentleness. Mercy. Steadiness. Sincerity. James does not describe a weak man. He describes a ruled man. He describes a man whose strength has a bridle on it.
Then he shows the other kind. Bitter envy and self-seeking which causes strife. “For where envying and strife is, there is confusion and every evil work” (James 3:16).
That line reaches farther than one post, one politician, one ugly morning. It explains a whole age. Look around long enough and you can feel the confusion in the air. Everybody is shouting and everybody wants the win. Very few seem interested in purity of heart.
The Christian answer to that age cannot be silence born of fear. Or selective outrage that condemns filth in enemies and baptizes it in allies. James leaves no room for that game. He calls for clean mouths, peaceable lives, and wisdom that carries the scent of heaven.
James 3 does not leave any honest reader standing tall. It leaves him convicted. Who among us has a clean tongue? Who has never pierced with sarcasm, burned with anger, spread suspicion, or spoken truth without love? Scripture says, “The tongue can no man tame” (James 3:8). That sentence drives us out of self-confidence and toward mercy.
This is where Easter morning speaks.
The risen Christ whom the church was praising that day is the only man who ever lived with a perfectly pure tongue. No deceit was found in His mouth. No corrupt word ever crossed His lips.
He was reviled and He did not revile in return. He was lied about by crooked mouths, condemned by false witnesses, mocked by soldiers, and nailed to a cross by men whose lips dripped poison. Then He rose from the grave to save people exactly like that. People like us.
The gospel for a nation of unclean lips is not better spin or merely one more election cycle. It is Christ crucified for foul-mouthed sinners and Christ risen to make them new.
He can forgive the man in high office just like He forgives the church member in the pew. The Lord Jesus can wash the lips that once spat poison and teach them to speak peace.
So the church must say the truth plainly. A leader’s character matters. His speech matters.
A Christian must never excuse wickedness because it delivers victories he likes. Then the church must bow lower still and say another truth with tears. Judgment begins with us. Lord, search our mouths. Lord, cleanse our hearts. Lord, make Your people sound like people who belong to a risen King.
While the church sang, the fire spoke. Easter morning answered with a greater voice. Christ is alive, Christ is Lord, and Christ still calls men everywhere, from pulpits to pews to palaces, to repent and believe the gospel.
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