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This is a difficult passage for me. Saying that the tongue is a "world of evil, full of deadly poison" seems a little unfair. It would be like saying that the hand is wicked and depraved because it is with the hand that man cheats, steals, and hurts others. Body parts in and of themselves are not the culprit. So we need to take what James says here as a word picture for the essence of the problem: uncontrolled speech. The sins that are as a result of the use of the tongue (our speech) are significant: lying, deception, anger, false pretense, exaggeration, omission, and so on. It is also the source of our greatest hypocrisy. We can be singing praise songs one minute and cursing out our neighbor the next. The poor little tongue is an indentured servant to a horrible task master . . . our old nature. And there are both personal and public elements to this issue. On a personal level, uncontrolled speech can wreck our lives, our relationships, our marriages, our children, and our careers. That's just on the personal level. On the public level, uncontrolled speech can cause division, create factions, instigate rebellion, foment anarchy, and destroy reputations. What James is warning us here is that this is not something we can conquer on our own. It's not something we can take a pill and the problem will disappear. So what is the answer? We have to wait until chapter 4 to fully understand the answer to this. . .