Anger

G.K. Chesterton, famous British author, and once said that no one can really be of any good until they understand exactly how bad they are. And as we've been looking at these seven deadly sins over the last several weeks, one of the things that has been working in my mind and heart is an understanding of how bad I am. You know, I was sharing with the New Members' Class this morning, I was thinking, you know, there are times when I'm sitting alone or sitting in my study or by myself somewhere, or I'm in my car, and just a passing thought kind of goes through my mind. And suddenly, I have this overwhelming awareness of my own sinfulness, my own badness, my own depravity. And there's sometimes, you know, quite frankly, it's pretty overwhelming. It's haunting. It's scary. And that, but, you know, that's just me and God, you know, together there, and suddenly, you know, you just have this little flash, this little inkling, this, you know, this little time and space where, you know, suddenly, you have this awareness of your sinfulness, and you somehow get just a little bit of a glimpse of just how bad it really is and what it really costs. And then almost, you know, along with this fear, then suddenly, you know, you think, okay, this is just me and God, but what happens if God suddenly went public with my sin? What happened if suddenly what was the business between me and God became everybody else's business? You know, it's bad as it feels sometimes when it's just you and God, and it's overwhelming, and it's haunting, and it's horrifying, and it's terrible, it is sometimes to be along with God and to feel the full weight of that sin. How haunting would it be if suddenly God went public with my sin? Now, I was saying to the new members of the class this morning, you know, it's one thing for you guys sitting in the pew, you know, if God goes public, it's another thing that God goes public from it. You know, but that's only looking at it from a temporal perspective, because actually looking at it from an eternal perspective, there is no difference. Is there if God goes public with our sin, say, between the pew and the pulp, but it's exactly the same. And what does this do? I don't know what it does for you, but it makes me so aware of how much I need the gospel of Jesus Christ, which is the power of God unto salvation to the Jew first, and then to the Greek to everyone that believes. And I don't need just the gospel, just for my conversion, right? I mean, I need it for my conversion, but, you know, that's not it. It's not like I get converted, and then suddenly I don't need the gospel anymore. I need the gospel, not only for my conversion, but I need the gospel for my everyday walk with the Lord, for my everyday battle, for my everyday fight of the good fight of faith. I've got to have the gospel. And that's what this hat's what happens. I think G.K. Chesson was exactly right. You see, you're never really any good until you can sort of appreciate how bad you really are. And as we've been looking at these seven deadly sins over these last four weeks or so, this has really been driven home to me in my own life, in my own spirit, my own soul, in my own heart, in my own mind. And I pray to God that we would all begin to get an apprehension of our own badness, because once we get an apprehension of our own badness beloved, then we can begin. You see, to appreciate goodness and to do good things. And so let's look this morning at the sin of anger. We've looked so far at pride. We've looked at greed. We've looked at envy. Now we're going to look at the deadly sin called anger. And if you turn to the book of Ephesians chapter four, I want to begin looking at anger versus 26 and 27 of chapter four. And here's what I want you to see first and foremost about anger. Now anger is one of the seven deadly sins. That is, it's one of the capital sins. And remember, these are called deadly sins or capital sins, because they are seen as sort of foundational or basic sins from which other sins flow from. It's not like these are deadly sins. And then the other ones are not deadly. No, all sin is deadly, right? The wages of sin is death. All sins separate you from God. All sin requires death and it's penalty. It's just that these sins are seen as sins that are sort of basic and fundamental from which all other sins flow from. And as we look at the sin of anger, you know, what I want us to focus on first and foremost is the sin of not being angry. Look at what Paul says in chapter four, beginning in verse 20, he says, in your anger do not sin. Literally it says to be angry. It says be angry and sin not. So what the text is saying here, it's telling you to be angry. And so what I want to look at first here is we consider the sin of anger. I want to consider the sin of not being angry. You see, because we are commanded here in this text to be angry. This is an imperative. The Apostle Paul is saying imperatively be angry. And so Christians first and foremost are to be angry. Are you angry this morning? You think you should be angry? You think all anger is sin? You know, no, I want to tell you a greater sin than the deadly sin of being angry. And that's the sin of not being angry at what you're supposed to be angry at. Yeah, there is a sin when we're angry at stuff that we shouldn't be angry at. But there's also a sin when we're not angry at stuff, we shouldn't be angry at. And that's why Paul assumes here righteous indignation. He assumes here a holy anger. He assumes here that Christians are appropriately angry. Be angry, he says. But don't sin. See, so the first thing we look at here is the sin of not being angry. You know, God is described as an angry God. God is angry with the wicked every day. Psalm 7 says, right? Jesus went into the temple made chords. You know, this is one of those scenes. You ever ever be reading the Bible and say, man, I wish I would have been there, right? This is one of the things I would really love to see, right? Jesus goes into the temple. It's, you know, he calls it a den of thieves. He makes it, it makes together some binds together some chords. He makes a whip and he goes in there and he drives out all the money changer. He tips over all their cast registers as it were. And he turns over the tables and he says, you have turned the house of prayer into a den of thieves. Jesus was angry, wasn't he? Did he sin? No. Paul goes into the city of Athens. Right? This ancient, wonderful city from the classical period of classical Greece. He goes into this wonderful city of Athens and he looks, and what does Luke say in Acts chapter 17, he looks and he sees the whole city is given over to idols. Everywhere he looks, there is an idol. The language there that Luke uses says Paul was stirred in his spirit and that word stirred could be translated. See, there is a sin of being angry in an appropriate way, but there's also a sin of not being angry when we should be at stuff we should be angry at. I don't know how many of you remember the movie Network. It was a movie in 1976, one for Academy Awards, tremendous movie. It was about a failed and fired TV commentator, a newsman, and this failing network that he worked for called UBS. Did anybody ever see that movie? Have you ever seen the movie Network? It's tremendous movie. Have you ever seen it? Go rent it, watch it. Might want to be careful. There is some follow language in it, so you might want to be careful about your kids watching it, but the message in this movie is way ahead of its time. And it's about a picture, about a time when things are really, really bad. And Howard Beal, the failed newscaster, he's somewhat prophet, somewhat madman. His newscaster, somewhat sermon, and somewhat rant. And so he gets terminated from his job, but they give him a chance to come back to make a farewell, his last farewell. And so he comes in for the airtime to make his farewell and he comes in and begins to speak like this. He says, look, I know things are bad. We all know, it goes without saying, I don't have to tell you things are bad. You all know that things are bad. He says the economy is bad, the dollar is bad, you know, the communists, and our relationship with them is bad. Thugs are running the street, there's crime everywhere. Every day a murder, 53 violent crimes in our city just today. Things are bad. We all know it's bad. There's no sense telling you how bad it is. He says, but the truth of the matter is I don't know how to fix it. And I'm not here to tell you how to fix it. But what I do know is this, is that we, before we can fix it, we have to get mad. And he says, here's what I want you to do. So you've, you've clustered yourself and coistered yourself into your living rooms with your little TV sets and your message to the world is, look, don't bother me. He says, you know, your messages leave me alone, but he says, I'm not going to leave you alone. I want you to do something for me right now. I want you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to go to your windows. I want you to open up your windows, and I want you to stick your head out the window and say, I'm mad. I'm mad as Hades, and I'm not going to take it anymore. Because before we can fix any of these problems, you first have to be as I've been sitting thinking about my sin this week. There are plenty of stuff to think about. Trust me. I have thought about my sin of pride. I have thought about my sin of greed. I have thought about my sin of envy. And I've thought about my sin of anger. But the one thing that struck me more than my sin of anger or even angry outbursts was the fact that I knew that I wasn't mad enough about stuff that I should be mad about. Mad about my sin in my own life. Mad about sin in the world. Mad about Satan. Mad about a sleeping church. Mad about it in moral culture. Beloved until we get mad enough. There's no way we are going to fix the things that are wrong either with ourselves or with the world outside of ourselves. We've got to get mad first. You know, one of the things that I worry about and I know I know I step on dangers ground by even mentioning this because our culture and the culture of the churches already been won over about it. You know, one of the things I was talking to a couple of my colleagues about, I don't belong in this time. I really don't. I am ancient already. I belong in another time. I know that. I know I don't fit this world anymore. I know I don't fit the time in which we live anymore. I'm not nice enough. I'm not therapeutic enough. I'm not kind enough. I'm not gentle enough. One of the things that really bothers me though about our time that I see in our culture and God, forgive us in the church is what I would call the feminization of Christians and the feminization of the church. And I'm not talking about women or women's roles in the church. In fact, I'm more progressive about that than many of my colleagues. But I worry about us turning our boys and our young men into some sort of feminist ideal. We have this clue. We have this inkling. We have this theory. And I don't know where we got it from, that somehow estrogen is right and testosterone is wrong. You can laugh. Why is estrogen right? Why is that the default mode for what is right and how what we ought to aspire to be? I believe what is wrong with the church, beloved, is that we laugh, test, testosterone. I didn't think I'd have that mean agreeing with me on this area. Now you look, we got school yards. We can't play tag anymore. Little boys can't play with guns or GI Joe's. What in the world are we doing? What are we thinking? You know, I grew up in the Catholic church and I want to tell you something. Look, there's a lot wrong with the Catholic church. I have no axe to grind here. I was born and raised in the Catholic church. I have no axe to grind. There's plenty of theological things to grind there, but I'm not grinding today. But as a little boy growing up, one thing I noticed about every priest that I came into contact with within the realm of the Catholic church, I noticed that almost all of them were effeminate. And quite frankly, when I first became a Protestant, when I first was really converted by the gospel of Jesus Christ, one of the things that was appealing to me is that I saw men preaching the gospel. I saw men recommending the Christian life. I saw men who cherished the things of God who were real men, a man's man. And I've been doing this almost 20 years now. But one of the things I've noticed is that a lot of ministers today look a lot more like the Catholic priest when I was a boy. I'm sorry to say that. I really don't want to hurt anybody's feelings. I just want to tell the truth. There's something going on in our culture and you know what, righteous anger, righteous indignation is one of the things that is forbidden in my elk these days. It's forbidden of our politicians. Our politicians can't get mad anymore publicly. I'll tell you, I'm not a big fan of John McCain, but the one thing I like about them is they say they've got an anger problem. It's about time. Somebody shows some righteous indignation. Somebody show some holy anger. There is stuff that we ought to be mad about. And it's not holy to not be mad.

God was mad. Jesus was mad. Paul was mad. And I'm getting mad about a minute.

But don't sin. See, there is a way to be angry and not sin, beloved. But there's also a way to not be angry and sin. There's a way to be angry and not sin. There's a way to not be angry and sin. You get it? Be angry, but don't sin. So how is it that I can be angry and not sin? Well, anger is a force that wants to tear something up. Do you understand that? If you've been angry, you understand that. Don't you? If you've been angry, you understand that. That is a force that desires to tear something up. And there are at least two simple ways that we do this. The one is to externalize our anger. Meaning that we want to tear someone or something else up outside of ourselves. It's the externalization of our anger. We want to focus our anger on someone or something else. We want to tear up another person or we want to tear up some property. That's a sinful use of the emotion of anger. It's to externalize it to try to tear somebody else up. Now, that happens to be my particular problem. The way that I, if I'm going to sin an anger, it's from the externalization of my anger. I mean to tear somebody or something else up. That's the way that I sinfully deal with anger. Now, fortunately, not many of you have seen me angry. When I was ordained in this church back in 2000, I think it was, and Jack Arnold installed me, and he's the one that did the exhortation for me. In fact, John, I think that was one of your first times at church here. Jack installed me, and so he read the exhortation to me. It was a series of exhortations that he had gleaned from first and second Timothy. Just recently, Jack's wife and Jack's son, Dean, were going through some of his papers, and his files, and his papers, and they came across the sermon, and they asked me if I wanted it. I said, you bet you I want it. I said because Jack said something in that message, and I want to see if it was in there. So I, Dean, I had dinner with Dean and Carol the other night, and they brought over the Jack's message to me, and I got home and I started going through the papers because I was looking for something that Jack had said. Jack said it. It was from, at this point in his text, it was from a scripture that he was saying that a minister should not be quarrelsome, and he quoted that scripture, and then he said, and Jim, we all know you have an anger problem. Do you remember that? You don't even remember it. Do you? Some of you were there. You don't remember that. I never forgot it. But I was in a dilemma. How do you get mad at somebody who accuses you of having an anger problem without proving the point? And I'm thinking, Jack has never seen me mad. How does he know I have an anger problem? Not saying I do, all right? I'm just saying theoretically, theoretically. There's only one time that I ever even talked to Jack firmly, one time. And if you know Jack, and many of you do, you know, Jack was one of these guys. He didn't let anything go, and he had to tell the truth. He must, he necessarily had to tell the truth. It didn't matter what it, you know, it doesn't matter whether it was appropriate, it didn't matter if it was tactful, it didn't matter. He had to speak the truth. And one time, you know, Jack, you know, we had put a sign up in front of our old building one time, you know, and that was my job to take care of all the details or whatever. The men were just about finished with the work. They had a couple more things to do. They wanted to get paid. So I called Sharon and the requisition of the check, and we paid him. Well, something went wrong with the sign, and it didn't work. The lights didn't come on or something. Something was wrong with the sign. And so Jack, you know, about about once a week, Jack would come to my office and say, you know, Jim, I think the, I think the lesson there is, you don't pay anybody until the work's done. I said, I got it, Jack. You're exactly right. Won't happen again. Next week, Jack came in and said, Jim, you know, I think the lesson there is, you know, you just don't pay anybody until the work is done. Got it, Jack. No problem. Next week, Jack comes and says, you know, Jim, I think what the lesson is there is that you don't pay anybody until the work is done. Okay, Jack, I got it. So then we had a missions meeting one morning and you know, I don't do well if I don't eat first, you know, that's why you see me snacking back there to try to keep my sugar balance, you know. I get a little irritable if I haven't eaten. We had a missions meeting and then after the missions meeting, Jack came into my office and said, Jim, you know what I think the lesson is here? And I said, Jack, I don't want to hear another word. I said it just like that. And somehow from that, Jack deduced that I have an anger problem. And you know, my wife and my sister and my little brother and his wife are all there, you know, and they're way all high five when Jack said that they're all high five in the background. Yeah, see he sees it too. That's one way we deal with anger. We externalize it and then doing so will hurt other people. Maybe we don't intend to, but it ends up we tear other people up and we tear property up. We externalize our anger. He's done a lot of that in my day. Mostly my wife is the one that has seen my anger. She can tell you that even though Jack had never seen me angry, my wife can tell you, he's probably externalizing your anger. That's a sinful use.

What some of you are thinking you're okay now, because you're not like me. I'm glad you're not like me. Your spouses are probably glad you're not like me, but there's another sinful use of anger. And that's when we internalize it. We turn it in on ourselves. We don't try to tear up other people or the property, but we end up tearing ourselves up. We internalize it. We turn it inward.

And we wreak havoc on our own spirits, our own souls, our own psyches, our own spirits. And even our bodies, some of you may even have physical ailments that are the result of turning anger inward on yourself. And then if that does come out in any place, it usually comes out in some passive-aggressive way. I think this is where this whole passive-aggressive thing comes at. People who will not externalize their anger for some reason, but they turn it in on themselves. And then they do little things. They take little jabs. It's a little passive-aggressive stuff that goes on all the time. I see it all the time in the church. I'm glad you're not like me, but you don't want to be like that either. Both of those are sinful ways in which we use language. Now we were at staff meeting this last week and Hannah had asked the question, it's staff meeting when we're talking about this text. She goes, well, you know, what does it mean? Don't let the sun go down on your wrath because that's the next thing that Paul says here. He says, in your anger, do not sin. Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry. See, how do I do that? Because as she noted correctly that there are sometimes when we maybe have an argument or something like that. I know Hannah doesn't fight, but she maybe have an argument or something like that. And then we can't resolve the issue before the sun goes down. What does that mean? How do we deal with that? And of course, there's some good literature on this subject. One of the things that the literature will tell you is that the only way you're going to be successful in dealing with that part of the passage is if you realize that it's not the issue you've got to resolve. Most of the time it's almost impossible to resolve the issue before the sun goes down, but you've got to be committed. You've got to covenant together to resolve the relationship. You've got to agree that you know what? When the sun goes down, we're done here. We're finished. We're tabling this. We're putting away even we can't resolve the issue. But we're going to go to bed and not be mad. And that be angry. And by the way, men, I hate to put the burden on you, but this is one area where I try to take the responsibility in my marriage. I try to be the one to go to my wife, and I try to be the one to say, look, we're not going to solve this tonight, but I love you. I want you to forgive me. I forgive you for whatever little bitty thing you might have done. I take responsibility for this, you know, let's go to bed. As we've all been in that situation, I remember one time when I got, we'd only been married a couple of months. We've just moved down the floor. We've just moved into a little small house, first house we had by ourselves. And we got into a fight. And you know, when you get, and you know, all of a sudden, you never notice, you get into a little fight like, and all of a sudden there's chaos, right? You know, it's like, it's like, it's like some kind of force comes into the room, and you're completely disoriented. It's like there's chaos in there. You know, this is why you can't reason with anger. You can't reason with anger. Okay, you can't defeat it that way. Chaos has come in. And so there's just chaos and we're going back and forth. And you know, when you're young and you're just married, you know, you don't really know how not to push the buttons. You know, you're always pushing the buttons. You know where it is by this time. Which has been married a couple of months. You know what the buttons are to push. You start pushing the buttons, right? Because you know what will set your partner off. So we're pushing all the buttons, and we're setting each other off, you know? And you know, we were, we were counseled in our pre-marital counseling, you know, never to use the word divorce, never to use the word separation. And we didn't, we did consider murder. And, and I remember thinking, this is done. We're over. We're finished. We've been married too much. We're finished. I know this, you know, and you know, I didn't have a ministry spot when I'm thinking, okay, that's over. Now what am I going to do? You know, there goes the call to ministry. And, and then suddenly this verse came to my mind. I don't know where it came from. Came to my mind. Don't let the sun burn on your head. You know, you're going to bed hungry. You know what happens? You get up hungry. You sleep back to back, spiral over on the side of the bed as you can get, you know, far away from each other. If you're going to be in the same bed, sometimes you can't get in the same bed. Sometimes the bed isn't even big enough. You've got to king your size bed. It's still ain't big enough. So you got to go another room. You go to bed hungry. You wake up hungry. That's why you don't let the sun go down. Can't resolve every issue of blood. And here's the thing. You want to know something that's happened 22 years ago. Almost my wife and I have been married almost 22 years by God's grace. I've never forgotten that story. But for the life of me, I cannot tell you and I don't think she can what we're fighting over. So you think the issue is all important. You think I've got to resolve this now. You see because this is what's important. No, you know, most of the stuff we fight about is not important. You know, a good way to judge whether or not something as important as is what, you know, is it going to make a difference 100 years from now? That's important. But most of the stuff we fight about is not important. And indeed, most of the stuff we fight about, you should let it go. Forget, you don't even have to resolve it. Just let it go because it's not that important. Cannot remember what we were fighting about. Our marriage was almost destroyed by whatever it was. But it wasn't the thing itself. It was our inability to let it go. Our inability to focus on each other. Our inability to focus on the relationship that almost destroyed our marriage before it even began almost. Can't tell you what it was. And neither can she. But we both remember today. That tells you what's important. The relationship is important. Not the issue. Be angry. Sin not. Don't let the sun go down on your wrath. It saved my marriage. It will save yours. And it will save a whole bunch of other relationships that you have as well in the process. Don't give place to the devil. Don't give the devil a foothold. What that means is don't open up the door for the devil. Don't let him in. When you're angry, when you lose control, you see, you are opening up the door for the devil. You are vulnerable. When you are angry and you lose control, you're vulnerable to the devil's attacks. And so you've got to be careful with the sin of anger. In the first place, there is a sense in which you should be mad. And you should be mad about the right things. There is a holy indignation. There is a righteous anger. In the second place, when you're angry, don't sin. Don't externalize it and don't internalize it. Settle them matter quickly. Don't let the sun go down. If you can't settle the issues, settle the relationship. Otherwise, then what happens is as we begin to give the devil a foothold. A Paul speaking to the church here, beloved. He's speaking to the church at Ephesus. He's speaking to Christians who have the power of the Holy Spirit, who have the word of God, who have the armor of God. What this means is that he has given us the tools, the resources, the empowerment and the enablement to deal with this by his grace. We see, we deal with this. Apart from his grace, we don't have the power. We don't have the resources to buy his grace that we can do this. And so I commend this to you and your anger, do not sin. Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry and do not give the devil. Don't give him an inch, Heavenly Father. We thank you, Lord, that even though we know that in you is a righteous, holy anger. In you is wrath. Oh, to be sure there is love in you, but there is also justice and wrath in you. We thank you, Lord, that while we deserve that justice and that wrath and your mercy you've given us grace, we pray that we would be like you in this, that when we've been offended, when we've been hurt, that we would not respond with vengeance, but that we would respond with mercy and grace, kindness and gentleness. We ask, oh, God, that you would make us more like your son who was mad at the things that you should be mad at, mad at sin, mad at Satan, mad at sleeping church and in more culture. The Lord that we would not externalize our anger sinfully, others are internalized, sinfully in our selves. We would solve these matters quickly, that we would not get placed in a devil, but rather get placed in the person's work of Jesus Christ, who asks us in his name. Amen.