Praying through Anger

Would you take your Bibles, please, and turn to Ephesians chapter 4? As we talked about praying through anger, I think most of us have experienced the situation, the condition that the Psalmist in Psalm 4 we'll talk about in a few minutes. We've had a sleepless night where we've tossed and turned full of hurt and dismay and frustrations in even a sense of fear, and certainly that's kind of part and parcel to life, especially as an adult. But I think what most of us don't realize is when we have those sleepless nights, we're really, we're really struggling through anger. An anger is not always a sinful response to certain situations. There are times when it is naturally even righteous. It can be the anger that a girl feels when she is molested or the anger when someone is fired unjustly at work or passed over unfairly for a promotion, it's the anger of a single mom or dad when their spouse leaves and they are left with a burden to work a full-time job and care for little children, it's the anger that a person feels when others do them wrong and the situation goes on and on with no reconciliation. I think we're seeing it in the political arena today where the anger of Americans, the frustration towards their government is leading them to nominate candidates and vote for them that normally would never be considered viable candidates for office, but they are the incarnation and the expression of our anger towards our own government. So anger is a very normal part of life. There are a lot of people, in fact perhaps the majority of people who would say, well I really don't have a problem with anger and I in the Bible would beg to differ with you. I think everyone has a problem with anger. In a wonderful book called The Anger Workbook, two Christian psychologists who actually ones a psychiatrist and the other psychotherapist, Les Carter and Frank Manurth have said this, anger is an emotion that is common to every person because we are imperfect people and in imperfect we're living in an imperfectly frustrating, sometimes senseless manner. And so we are guaranteed to regularly encounter this emotion of anger. As we come down, seek to understand our anger and its management, we know that we can define anger in this way. That can be felt even when others don't see it. For anger is an intent to preserve one, our personal worth, two, our essential needs and three, our basic convictions. But define the anger as the emotion of self-preservation of your worth and needs and convictions. It is easier to detect your moments of vulnerability to it, but while we recognize our times of vulnerability, we still need to answer a common question, is anger good or bad? And the answer is, it all depends. There are times when anger is incorrectly associated with trivial matters and there are times when it may be associated with legitimate concerns but is managed irresponsibly. Balances found when anger is linked to a reasonable issue and is communicated in a proper manner. This requires delicate sifting through of the options of our anger and its management. It might surprise us that the Bible assumes that we will get angry. In fact, it even gives us permission to do so in a proper manner. In Ephesians 4, looking in verse 26 and 27, Paul writes this, be angry and do not sin. Do not let the sun go down on your anger and give no opportunity to the devil. And then in verse 29, let no corrupting talk come out of your might but only such as good for building up as it fits the occasion that it may give grace to those who hear. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you along with all malice be kind to one another, tender-hearted forgiving one another as God in Christ forgave you. Interesting that in the very same paragraph, Paul says, be angry and do not sin, but let all anger and wrath and malice and clamor be put aside from you. It's as if Paul is speaking out of both sides with an apple, of course, he's not. When he says, be angry and do not sin and do not let the sun go down on your anger, he is actually quoting Psalm 4 verse 4. Be angry and do not sin, ponder in your own hearts on your beds. So I ask you to turn to Psalm 4, which is our text for tonight, where David learns how and teaches us how to pray through our anger. Carter and the Mother Earth inform us that there are generally five kinds of anger, and I would encourage you to write these down because you're going to find that one of these kinds of anger is how you usually express your frustrations, your anxieties, your fears, and your contempt for other people. Then the first and most common kind of anger is suppressing anger, suppressing anger. These people deceive themselves and say to others, I'm not angry, I don't have a temper, but of course they do. Their anger is common to mankind. They put on a storefront of self-control, but inside they are washed with feelings of inner rage, pain and frustration, they stuff as we say in our culture that leads to great anxiety and sometimes physical manifestations of irritable bowel syndrome, or an upset stomach or even ulcers as this anger and rage that never is channeled properly, literally from the soul to the body, eats them inside out. Then there's open aggression, open expressions of rage, intimidation and blame. These people get loud and get mean or get even. These folks we say have an anger issue and they do, but it's just less concealed than other people's anger. They have the opposite problem of the people who suppressed their anger, did this, let it go without any kind of channeling whatsoever. Then there's what we call passive aggressiveness, often called passive aggressive disorder by psychologists. These folks soak and withdraw affections, they give others the silent treatment, they gossip, they refuse to cooperate, they back bite, they do subtle things to frustrate others in order to get even. This quite frankly is a cowardly anger in process and used most often by people who don't have the venue or the permission to express the anger like children towards their parents or an oppressed minority towards the majority or the poor toward the rich. There is forthly assertive anger. These people express anger with both firmness and respectiveness. It is how mature people handle anger, but it can border on putting people in their place, being insensitive, overstating one's case, and it's usually motivated by the demand to be in control. This kind of anger can actually strengthen relationships and solve problems if it's not taken too far. Finally, there's one healthy way to handle anger, and that's to release it. This is God's way of expressing His righteous anger. He simply forgives. He tolerates our sinful behavior, seeks for reconciliation and restitution. The danger when we try this is obvious. When we try to drop our anger at alternate returns in greater force, and as we need to forgive again and again and again until our anger abates and acceptance of others returns to us, that is why Paul says, let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamber and slander be put away from you, along with all malice and be kind to one another, tender hearted for giving one another just as God and Christ has also forgiven you, and therefore be imitators of God as beloved children, and walk in love as Christ, all defts and gave Himself up for us as a fragment offering and a sacrifice to God. We shouldn't kid ourselves, folks, because we're not kidding other people. Other people may not be able to call our reactions to their behavior that displeases us anger, but it takes on many forms, and they know when their souls, as we react to them in an unwise and unmanaged way that something is amiss. Remember the words of Brother James, know this, my beloved brothers, let every person, let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, and slow to anger, for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God, therefore put away all filthiness and rampant wickedness and receive with meekness, the word implanted which is able to save your souls. What word is that? Well, perhaps it's Psalm 4, a Psalm that talks about David as he wrestled on his bed one evening with his anger, and how he learned to pray through it and channel it into the hands of Jesus Christ. Through the choir master, with stringed instruments, a psalm of David. Answer me when I call, oh God, my righteousness, you have a given me relief when I was in distress. Be gracious to me and hear my prayer, oh man, how long shall my honor be turned into shame? How long will you love vain words and seek after lies? But know that the Lord has set apart the God name for himself. The Lord hears when I call to him, be angry and do not sin, ponder in your own hearts on your beds and be silent. Offer right sacrifices and put your trust in the Lord. There are many who say, who will show us some good, lift up the light of your face upon us, O Lord. You have put more joy in my heart than they have when they're grain and wind amount. In peace, I will both lie down and sleep for you alone, O Lord, make me dwell in safety. As pray. Father, we do pray that our hearts would receive with meekness this word to be implanted in us from psalm four, so that we might understand, first of all, our own anger and the anger of others, and we might be instructed on how to bring these two angry forces and collision in our own souls before your throne of grace for help and time of need. And we ask this in Jesus' name, amen. Well, let's do what we do with all these psalms as we're using the Psalter as a prayer book. Let's look at, first of all, how to understand psalm four and then how to pray it. First of all, psalm three is considered a morning psalm, psalm four is an evening psalm. Commentators arrive at that conclusion because of verse four, be angry and do not sin ponder in your own hearts on your beds and be silent. It's seen that psalmist is exhorting his own soul to rest while he sleeps in the evening, in the grace of God and to handle all the challenges brought before him. Verse three and four are often attached by commentators and put in the same place, the same context of David's life, the rebellion of epsilon and all of the pain and the frustration that's surrounded that, but that's not necessarily true. Whereas psalm three has a definite historical superscription that says when he fled from epsilon his son, psalm four does not. It could be related to that, but not necessarily whereas in psalm three David was praying about dangers that surrounded him and psalm three he's praying about slander and lies. In fact, this is a prayer set to music that has four paragraphs, four stanzas and they guide us through a way to handle our anger. Children on the playground, you know, they have this little children's rhyme, sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me. What does a child know? Words can oftentimes be more destructive and leave deeper scars than a punch in the face, and although children don't know what they're saying, they learn early on in life. How do you use words as weapons? It says the words can hurt you, and the worst kind of words are words that are gossip and slander and lies. So David prays while struggling to go to sleep, knowing that a whispering campaign of lies and gossip at slander and false accusations and sinister insinuations is gathering momentum in his own royal court and the royal city, and here's what he prays, first. He invokes the presence of God and his mercy and ask God for relief. Answer me when I call, oh God, my righteousness, you have given me relief when I was in distress, be gracious to me and hear my prayer. He tells God that he's in distress, not danger, but distress, and he asks God for relief, not for revenge. There's a completely different tone to Psalm 4 than there was in Psalm 3. Now perhaps this is associated to David's dealings with his rebellious son, Absalom, because the scripture tells us that a whispering campaign is exactly what Absalom undertook to undermine the throne of David. After this, Absalom got himself a chariot and horses and 50 men to run before him, and Absalom used to rise early in the morning and stand beside the gate in the city. And when any man had a dispute to come before the king for judgment, Absalom would call him and say, from what city are you? And he said, well, your servant is of such and such a tribe in Israel. And Absalom would say to him, see, your claims are good and right, but there is no man designated by the king to hear you. Then Absalom would say, all that there were a judge in the land, then every man with the dispute or cause might come to me, and I would give him justice. And whenever a man came near to pay homage to him, he would put out his hand and take hold of him and kiss him. Thus Absalom did to all of Israel, who came to the king for judgment, and this is how Absalom stole the hearts of the men in Israel away from David. Gossip, lies, sinuations, and slander, these are very real enemies, they're just invisible. We know they're there. We just don't know where they are, but God knows, God sees. So David asked God for grace, for answers to prayer, for relief from false reports, answer me when I call, oh God, God of my righteousness. You have given me relief when I was in distress, be gracious to me and hear my prayer. Secondly, in his mind, David reasons with those who are his secret enemies. I'm sure you've done that, as you've tossed to and fro on your bed. You script out a conversation with these people, if you could actually gather them all together and talk to them logically, here's what you would say, oh men, how long shall my honor be turned into shame? How long will you love vain words and seek after lies? And then there's little words, say la, pause. David wants his detractors to stop and think about those two questions, then he goes on. You should know that the Lord has set apart the godly man for himself, the Lord hears when I call to them. He addresses them as oh men, because he doesn't know who they are. He literally says, oh men of rank, these are people in his own court. These are his advisors and his sons who were princes and his generals and his priests and his prophets and these people who surrounded him as the men of influence in his culture and in his court. And he brings before them three truths. He said, the slanderers are seeking to turn his honor into shame, in other words, they're impugning his character and his integrity. The gossips, the love, vain words and seek after lies, they traffic in half-truths and an outright falsehoods. And these whispers forget that the Lord has set apart the godly man for himself when they malign the good man, they offend the great god. And there is that say-law to stop and think about this. Thirdly, David wrestles with his own anger, his righteous indignation and his spirit in this whole affair. He says in verses 4 and 5, the heart of the salt, not just because it's the middle of verse, but because it's the very center of the theme of this prayer. He says, be angry and do not sin, ponder in your own hearts on your bed and be silent, offer right sacrifices and put your trust in the Lord. There is a second say-law, a second time to pause and think, to think about your own heart on your bed and your anger. Now the question is to whom is David speaking? David appears that he's speaking to his detractors because he says ponder in your own hearts plural on your bed's plural and be silent. In a sense he's saying to his detractors, do not let your anger toward me, my policies or even my sins cause you to use your words as weapons against your king. Sleep before you speak. Take time to pause and think. Use your words to pray to God about what has upset you. Go to the tabernacle in the morning, offer your sacrifices before you react to me. Trust God to both give you proper perspective and correct any wrongdoing on my part. But David could also be speaking to himself, to his own heart, adding himself in that group of mankind who struggles with anger. Because if you read the life of David, that boy had a temper. He was a red head and he might be saying to himself, it is legitimate for you to be upset and even angry over the lies and slander and gossip, you after all, you are the king. But pray on your bed to God, sleep on it, go to worship in the tabernacle in the morning and continue to do the right thing. And trust God to both defend and vindicate your honor. But do not return evil words for evil words. Two slanderers cannot make a truth. And by all means do not use your power as a king to over-correct something that God will fix without your temper. This is how Paul interprets it. When he quotes this verse, he's talking to us who have a tendency to get angry and he says, do not let the sun go down on your anger. He says when you, when you fester on this in your bed, you can go to bed angry. Well, listen carefully. You can go to bed full of anger. And if you don't release it to God, you'll wake up full of spite. And spite, when it's unremitted, when it's not dealt with, eventually ends in hate. The thing that the person did to you that you think is wrong, it may not have been, but you think it is. Soon becomes something that is spiteful in your eyes. And you become spiteful toward that person and soon you're filled with hatred towards them. And your anger is out of control. Forty-and-lastly, David returns to speaking to God and he asks God to restore joy to his heart and give him peace in his soul. There are many who say, who will show us some good, which is an impugning of David as king. Exactly what Absalom said to people, isn't there anyone here in the city that can offer you a fair judge? Well, of course, the king good, but the insinuation here is that David won't do us any good. But David says, lift up your light of your face on us, Lord. You'll put more joy in my heart than they have when they're grain and wine abound. In peace, I will both lie down and sleep, for you alone, O Lord, make me to dwell in safety. David acknowledges that he's surrounded by pessimists, people who've lost perspective. Who will show us any good? I mean, I wonder how many times we've seen a president elected with a landslide victory in the first year he gets, you know, a 90% favourable rating and by his third to fourth year, it's 30% who give him a favourable rating and we're saying, you know, one of the man ever did anything right. How quickly can all change? Because we get dissatisfied. David says three things. He says, God will lift up his face and bless me. There's that imagery from the benediction of the priest and the Old Testament. The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face to shine upon you. It means in the Hebrew to smile. The Lord will smile upon me. He acknowledges that God has given him joy in the past and we'll do it again. You have put more joy in my heart than they have when they're grain and wide abound. I have more joy in my relationship with God in ways blessed me than my enemies do when they're filthy rich and he embraces God's peace. He says, in peace, I will both lie down and sleep for you alone, O Lord, make me to dwell in safety. I want you to notice in this little psalm that all three of these things that Carter and Monter say define our anger, our sense that our personal worth is attacked or basic needs are not being met and our convictions are being drugged through the streets are all present here. David says, how long will you turn my honor into shame? How long will you devalue my self-worth? David's essential needs were in jeopardy. That's why he lists them in this psalm. His welfare, his joy, his peace, the favor of God, his security, and his personal well-being. He senses that behind their slander might be an agenda that could be even more violent and his basic convictions were being challenged. You will show us some good and he says, you should know that the Lord has set apart the God, the man for himself, that he is my righteousness and he will make me to lie down in safety. David handles his anger through prayer. He pleads his case before God as if he and his detractors stood before the throne of judgment in fact we do. Now how do we pray this psalm? I hope you're not unsettled by the fact that I have probably prayed psalm for more than any of the psalm in the Psalter because this is the lot of preachers. People are always upset with me for something. Something that I said that they didn't want to hear or some way offended them in a disclosure of sin in their life, most of the time by accident. They get angry with me and their anger festers and grows until it turns into spite. They nurse a grudge. They misinterpret what I say. They conjecture on the motives of the preacher. They react irrationally against what he does. They feel dishonored or even insulted by him. Your expectations have not been met by him and on and on it goes, who? Well, his peers, his fellow welders and deacons and people and even other pastors. I've told Jane many times you know the nicest thing about being retired is I'm going to wake up the first morning and say, Jane, something's wrong here. There's nobody in the world that's mad at me this morning. You think it's comical though not many of you are laughing. This is the light of people who are in authority. This is the lot of your president and of the policeman who pulls you over when you're speeding or the teacher in school or the elders in your church and what happens is that we get upset with them over something. Could be a legitimate, maybe it's not. And then anger turns to spite and then here's what we're saying pretty soon. If they speak about themselves, then they're being vain. Of course, if they don't speak about themselves, then they're being aloof and they're not relational. If they make a joke, then it's offensive to us or it's not funny because they say, there are smart alike making fun of us. If they tease us in a good nature and good fun, we think that we're being ridiculed or dishonored by them. If they're adamant about something, we say that they're angry. If they're straightforward, we say that they're insensitive. If they're too cautious, then they're cowardly. If they're oh, beminded, then they're liberal. You see, whatever they do, whatever they do, whatever Barack Obama does is going to be misinterpreted by people who are upset with him. They can see no good in the man. And yet there is, he's the image of God. And even by accident, he had to do something right in eight years. But once anger is unresolved, three things start, gossip. A legitimate and honest failure of a person is blown out of proportion and spread far and wide, slander. False things said about the person is, though they were facts and lies, outright fabrications so that other people will join us in our campaign of spite. These people are damned if they do and they're damned if they don't. They're damned by condemned by our anger. And so what we need to do is go to the Lord and pray. Pray these things first. Remembering that God in Christ is our righteousness, that our identity, our worth and our honor are found in Christ and not in what others think of us. Paul's model for this and Ephesians 4 and other places is found again and again in the scripture. He says, you know, it's a very small matter that I should be judged by you, but I'm not by this exonerated. Not the Lord in due season will judge me and then each man will receive his commendation from God. We're to be faithful to trust in Christ, not to judge ourselves too soon or listen to other people's judgments, but to let God judge you in due season. So we rest in our justification, we are righteous in Christ, we rest in our adoption, we are loved by God and we rest in our sanctification. The Holy Spirit is not done with this yet, we're not perfect, but who in the world said we had to be? Not God. So we pray, resting in Christ. Secondly, we live each day with this opening thought in the morning and concluding thought at night, but know that the Lord has set apart the godly person for himself. You as a Christian belong to God, you were sealed by the Holy Spirit, you were branded by Christ. Paul would say, from now on, let no man cause me trouble for I'm rare on my body, the brand marks of Jesus Christ. We pray that others will see that we belong to God. And in the end, if they don't, that judge and change the fact that we do. And God has a tendency to take care of that which belongs to him. Thirdly, we pray through our own anger. We can do nothing. We can do nothing about the anger of others. There's no way we can stop the standard, correct the gossip, put truth to lie. It's out there and it's only going to grow until God brings it to a crashing conclusion. But we can, we can do with Paul and with David said, we can be angry and not sin and we cannot let the sun go down on an anger. We do have control over the fact that our unresolved anger at bedtime turns into devilish activity overnight and when we wake up in the morning, spite is standing at the foot of our bed, waiting to take control of our souls. We can live in the truth that the anger of man cannot achieve the righteousness of God. Whatever anger does, what can be done is done better without it. As far as I know from my personal experience and I'm an expert at temper, anger has never solved any problem yet. As we pray, we learn to pray through our tendencies, our stuffing, suppressed anger that makes us a seeding, pounding, volatile person, or exploding an open aggression which makes us a man with a hot temper, our passive aggression that is a sneaky sort of backbiting anger, our assertive anger that we always have to be in control, or this releasing of anger what has to happen again and again and again until it finally goes away, but we learn how to offset that anger the next day by using our words to give grace to those who hear and not as weapons of gossip and slander and lies in retaliation. Fourthly, we state our case before God the judge, leave the solution to him knowing that he is faithful and finally, before we go to sleep each night, we claim the free marks of favor that God has repeatedly shown to you, his smile, his joy, his peace. We give ourselves these benedictions. The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you. The Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you his peace. Now may the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be yours, your self-worth is honored by God. Peter says, you should know that you were ransom from your futile way of living, inherited from your forefathers, not with perishable things like gold or silver, but with the precious blood of Jesus Christ, like that of a lamb with that lambatier spot, that's how worthy you are that you were purchased by the blood of Jesus Christ. Your essential needs will be met and my God shall supply all your needs according to his riches and glory in Christ Jesus. Paul says, and your basic convictions are grounded in the gospel of God and guarded by the Holy Spirit, the Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are the children of God and if children then heirs, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him and then we release our anger to God and we go to sleep and we wake up in the morning, free of anxiety and we see what God will do. Living with my own anger in relation to other people has been my spiritual journey in life and it's only been accentuated these last 33 years as a pastor. I've spent many, many tossing and turning nights and I've come to three conclusions through all these. The slander, the gossip, the lies of upset people in our culture that hurt both me and you

are not going to go away. In fact, the way our spiritual life and the soul of our country is imploding, they're only going to be get worse and worse and more vitriolic. We're going to have to live in a culture of anger. It's just the way things are right now. Secondly, I've learned that my biggest struggle in yours is with my own anger, how to process these things through with such a way that when I respond, I give grace to those who hear and don't add to the culture of pain with my own versions of gossip and slander and lies. And thirdly, I've learned that God always comes to my relief, to my rescue and to my defense. I'm 67 years old, almost. And all of these campaigns of whispering and subterfuge and all of the anger that I've experienced from people, even my own temper have not been my undoing and they won't be

because I rest in Jesus Christ and God's goodness and Christ joy in the spirit's peace will always be with me. You need to know that God is set apart, the person who is righteous in Christ for his own and that he is a God of mercy and the God of truth. And what's true for me is true for you. So don't lose sleep and never harbor anger. It's deadly. Release your fear and your temper to Jesus Christ and sleep in the peace of the Holy Spirit. In peace, you will both lie down and sleep. For God alone will make you to dwell in safety. God is for you. Let's pray. Father, even when we are sinful, you are for us because all of our sins, all of our gossip and slander and lies about other people, all of our spite, all of our anger, these have been laid upon Jesus Christ and there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are on Christ Jesus. We're not as we wrestle with these things, looking for a judgment. We're looking for mercy to triumph over judgment. What we need is the resurrected living Christ and His power to overcome our own internal anger and help us to see things from a spirit of truth with the mind of Christ. We believe you can do that and we believe that our anger and whatever form it manifests itself regularly is no match for the resurrection life of Jesus Christ. We are new creatures in Him. These old ways of acting and reacting have passed away and a new way has come. It's the way of grace. And the grace that we want for ourselves, we must, Lord, give to others and we can only do that as you help us meditate on our beds at night and not sin by leaving our anger to fester while we sleep. We thank you most of all that you who have infinite reason to be angry with us are not that you have loved us and forgiven us and been tenderhearted towards us in Christ Jesus. And so we would ask for just a measure of this and how we process the information of those who are against us and more importantly, how we process our anger towards them so that grace, mercy and peace abound to us and to our detractors as we ask you this in Jesus name. Amen.