Anger

Most of us do not have to be able to do it. Do not think of anger as our problem. If you were to ask. A person to identify someone who is angry. We could easily do it by pointing to a To an individual who may speak with a raised voice and who may use harsh words.

But when we think about anger as it pertains to ourselves, it tends to wear cleaner and more proper clothes. As quote-unquote professional Christians, we know how to hide our anger quite well. behind things like sarcasm. Silence. or cloak it with a spiritual baptism And instead of calling it anger, we call it being tired, or maybe we've been hurt, or maybe we're being passionate, or if we're being.

particularly hard-headed, we're just being right. And yet, if we are honest, anger is one of the sins that we practice most frequently, and yet examine and condemn. The least carefully. Anger follows us home. It sleeps in our thoughts.

It it shapes our tone of speech. It lingers around after a heated argument has passed and it quietly rewrites arguments in our favor. Anger invades our shower thoughts and our drive home from work while we rehearse what we should have said during that argument. The good news, however, Is that while anger is a challenge for us as fallen men and women, The Bible has something to say on the matter. And so tonight, as we look here at Ephesians chapter 4, particularly verses 26 and 27, we'll find that Paul will tell us that how we handle our anger reveals whether we are actually living and embracing the new man that Christ has purchased for us, or whether we are merely holding on to the old man.

Furthermore, we will learn that anger is not morally neutral.

So, we're going to look at righteous and sinful anger. When anger is mishandled, It grieves the Holy Spirit. It gives Satan a foothold into our life. It corrodes us from the inside out. And yet, when anger is pure, It motivates us to act for righteousness' sake.

And so this evening, this passage is going to call us to question whether or not we are angry or get angry. But whether our anger is ruled by Christ Or quietly ruling us.

Now, as we go ahead and turn our attention to the text for this evening, I read all the way back to verse 17 and then through the Finality of the chapter, you'll notice that. Paul is calling us to embrace the new life that we have in Christ, and he's calling us to take off the old man and put on the new.

Now, as he progresses with that call, he wants us to be aware of a few sins, in particular, that grieve the Holy Spirit. Not as though these are the only ones that grieve the Holy Spirit, but it seems as though he's pastorally applying a word of wisdom to the church. In Ephesus. Those sins that he gives, we find are sins of lying. of anger, this is verses 25 down through 31.

Uh sins of lying. of anger. Of theft? and of corrupt speech. And the reason that we are to kill these sins in our life, according to the apostle, is because these sins grieve.

the Holy Ghost, according to verse 30.

Now the word for grieve here is referring to that which causes great sorrow and distress in a man. And by choosing this language, I believe that Paul is wanting us to see. Just how relational the Holy Spirit is. Just how intimately invested the Holy Spirit is in the lives of His people.

So intimate is this spirit That Paul writes that he is with us from first to last. Look, he says, Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, verse 30. by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. This Holy Spirit is with you from the beginning until the end. The sealing of our salvation, Paul tells us elsewhere, takes place at the moment of our regeneration, of our conversion.

We are sealed, and yet we are sealed for, in the beginning, for a telos, a final thing, a final purpose, which is for us. The day of redemption. And so what Paul is saying in essence is, hey, You Are you not who you were because of Jesus? You are now not who you once were because of Jesus. He has changed you, He has bought you, and so I want to call you, with Christ in mind, to embrace the new man, to throw off the old man.

And furthermore, he writes, if you continue To live in those old sins of lying and anger and theft and corrupt speech, you're gonna grieve the dearest friend you've got. The Holy Ghost.

So, with this, I think, a loving and a grace-filled call in mind, I want us primarily to focus on the subject of anger. this evening. As we look at verses 26 and 27, I want us to find three things for our lives. The first thing that I want us to consider this evening is that we are called to anger. You have been divinely summoned to be angry.

Rightfully. There is a righteous anger.

So our first point is a call to Christian anger. Look with me in verse 26. It says, Be angry. and do not sin. You'll notice If your New King James is like-minded, that statement is in quotations.

And that's a helpful tool that your translators are giving you. They're trying to tell you that Paul is pulling this quotation, particularly from the Old Testament. And it's helpful. I said this last time I preached, but we'll say it again. When you see the apostles, the New Testament writers, Quoting Old Testament texts, You owe it.

to yourself to go and read that Old Testament text. Because what you're gonna find is... You're going to be taught by the New Testament writers how to interpret and apply. The Old Testament scriptures to your life. They're teaching you how to study the Old Testament as a Christian.

And Paul is pulling this. Paul is applying it to our life. And we find that the text he's pulling from is Psalm 4.

Now in that psalm We are not totally certain about the context.

However, it seems Generally agreed on that David most likely writes this psalm while reflecting on Absalom's attack on the throne. It is in that context that David speaks to himself. He speaks to his men who are rightfully indignant over this. Treason. And he calls them to steward their anger properly through the remembrance of God's faithfulness to his people.

And as we look in Ephesians 4 tonight, Paul is going to utilize that text. For the Ephesian church. And what we are going to find. is that like the men of David, Christian anger, not sinful anger, belongs to those who follow the king. Christian anger, not sinful anger.

belongs to those who follow the king. John Downame. He's an old Puritan and writer of a book on unjust anger. I should have brought it up here. It's tremendous, the best I've read on the subject.

He says: As nothing dishonors God more than sin. Nothing should offend and displease us more than sin. Whether in ourselves, or in our neighbors. And this finds support. In passages like Psalm 97, verse 10, The Psalm reads, You who love the Lord, Hey evil.

You who love the Lord, Hey, evil. And so to put it simply, as a Christian, I am to hate what the Lord hates. I am to hate what the Lord hates. If I am a loyal servant of King Jesus, I'm going to be offended and outraged when something aims at the throne. of my king.

And so, as we look at our text, I want us to first focus on those first two words: be angry. as we consider the subject of Christian anger. It seems to me that That anger's been given a bad rap, and for understandable reasons, of course. When we think of anger, we think of a bull in a china shop. We think of warmongers.

We think of abusive men. And the traumatic nature of sinful anger is real, and I will not discount that.

However, as Christians, we've got to understand that anger in and of itself is not evil. Even before the fall, we have been made as men and women in the image of God. In the sense that our emotional state and the capacities that we have are a reflection of the divine being in sorts. And so anger is not sinful in and of itself. As a matter of fact, we know that God Has anger ascribed to him in multiple different scenarios in the scriptures.

Isaiah 34, verse 2 says, The Lord is angry with all the nations, he is furious with all their armies. And so we have to understand that anger is not innately evil in and of itself.

So, I want us to understand that anger is not inherently bad. As a matter of fact, I believe if we refuse to be righteously angry, we are sinning. You are being summons to righteous Angry. And so the text clearly, I believe, demands that we should be angry. But how so?

Well, the first thing that we want to be angry with is we want to be angry with your sin. We want to be angry with your sin. And I believe that this is the most important yet most easily and conveniently ignored aspect of anger because we want to be angry with the sins of our neighbor, magnify the sins of our neighbor, so that way we can, as it were, minuscule our own sin and feel better in it. And so it's important for us to be angry with our own sin first, because if we're not, you're going to have a moat in your eye when you go to pull out splinters in others.

So before we find ourselves angry at our neighbors, angry at our suffering, angry at our government, angry at the world, we should first look at ourselves and be angry with our sin. It was Paul. Contemplating the nature of his sin in Romans chapter 7, who says, O wretched man that I am. And so there is a sense in which there is a loathing and anger with our sin.

Now, the chief reason that you should be angry with your sin is not because you've gotten caught. Not because you hate the consequences, but because you've sinned against the holy God. I believe that the reason that men. Don't see their sin as a big issue is because they don't understand how big of a deal God is. You'll hear people all the time: the subject of an eternal conscious torment in hell has come back up again.

And a massive movement towards annihilationism is resurging again. And I often hear people say, I wish that annihilationism was true. Beloved, we should be careful not to try and pretend like we're more loving and kind than the Lord is. The reason that eternal conscious torment is true, and the reason that sin is as magnificently large as it is, is because God is so inconceivably grand that sin against Him, in the words of R. C.

Sproll, is an act of cosmic treason.

So we must be angry with our sinfulness. We must come to a point where we cry out with David in Psalm 51 against you and you alone, O Lord, have I sinned. It was, I think it was Thomas Watson. who wrote If it could. Sin would ungod God.

If it could. When you sin, You would un God God In essence, when we sin, we're not merely seeking to defy the law of God, we're seeking to dethrone Him. We are seeking to strip him of his claim to power and to supremacy. Um The law that we break. The law of God when we break, that we break, isn't just some...

conveniently concocted group of guidelines given to us to prevent us from having fun. Those commandments that we receive are eternal in nature. They are reflections of God's divine nature into our lives and given to us to steward us through this life. And when we rebel against them, we are not only shirking off the loving arms of God, but we are also pointing a finger and stating that we hate the very nature of the being who gave them to us in the first place. They flow from his essence, they magnify his holiness.

So, when we rebel against that reality. We are spitting in the face of glory and demanding or declaring, I'm not going to be bound by you. I'm convinced that uh We need a recovery of a healthy understanding of sin. Sin, beloved, is declaring that the creature I know better. Then the Creator.

It's telling God to get off the throne that there's a There's a new kid in town and he's gonna run things. And that does not go well. James tells us in James chapter 4 that Satan plays a game with us. He is going to play on your sinful proclivities. You are going to entertain that sin.

You're going to act on that sin. And then what's going to happen? You're going to come to ruin in that sin. It never goes well. And so we must be angry with our sin.

We must be angry at the fact that it lied to us and we bought the lie and that we acted on that lie and we've transgressed the law of a holy God. And I should be angry with the fact that I can't do better for him. But the next thing is, we should be angry with the sins of society. Launching from that first point, we should be angry with the sins of society. In the late 1700s, there was a British politician named William Wilberforce.

Wilberforce was elected to Parliament at the age of 21 and never lost An election?

Now, he lived a youthful life filled with alcoholism and partying. That was until he read a book called The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul. While reading that book, William Wilberforce became convinced of the Christian faith and became a follower of Christ.

Now in seventeen eighty-nine He would stand before the house and he would say this, I confess to you, so enormous, so dreadful, so irremediable did its wickedness appear that my own mind was completely made up for the abolition. of slavery. Let the consequences be what they should. I from this time determined that I would never rest until I had effected. Abolition.

He would later that year stand before them again and say, I mean not to accuse anyone. but to take the shame upon myself. in common indeed with the whole Parliament of Great Britain. For having suffered this horrid trade to be carried on under their authority, we are all guilty. We ought to all plead guilty and not to exculpate ourselves by throwing the blame on others.

This was a man whose whole life was consumed with outrage and disgust towards the slave trade. Wilberforce would fight for the abolition of slavery for his entire life until the decisive vote. to abolish slavery was passed on July 26th of 1833. and William Wilberforce would die three days later.

So, this is a man who was disgusted with this. It's stated that when it passed, he looked to his colleague and said, What other things shall we abolish next? He stated in his conversion that he was committed to two things, for the reform of morals in Great Britain and for the abolition of slavery, and that Christianity was necessary for them both. This is a man who was greatly disturbed and disgusted with the sins of his society. And this is not merely something that we see in a civil sense, but we see it in a scriptural sense as well.

Isaiah 1:17, Isaiah writes: Learn to do good, seek justice, rebuke the oppressor, defend the fatherless, plead for the widow. This is the expectation for God's people. He expects us to seek justice. He expects us to defend the helpless and to plead their cause and to rebuke evildoers. He expects us to manifest righteous hatred towards societal evils that are before us.

God expects us to be disgusted with the rampant sexual immorality in our land. God expects us to be enraged at the open practice and celebration of abortion in our land. The fact that we are lukewarm on this matter is not an indictment on whether the scriptures speak on it. It's an indictment on the fact that we think that we know better than the word, because if we were wholly consumed with it, we would be more disgruntled with this act. If we are going to allow our minds to be renewed day by day, as we are called to in Romans, Then, as we are being renewed by the scriptures, we will have a renewed hatred for the things that God hates.

It was Isaiah, or excuse me, Elijah, who seeing the sins of Israel said in 1 Kings 19, 20, I have been very zealous for the Lord of hosts. It was Paul. Who walking through Athens sees all of the idols, and it says that he was provoked by the Spirit to preach to them. And as Christians in the United States, We should prayerfully open our eyes and hearts to behold and be gripped by the practice of the things that we abhor. And when we are gripped, We will start asking.

How can I mobilize my money against this? How can I use my voting power against this? How can I preach the word and bring the gospel to bear against this in our culture? And so we, beloved, we must be careful to keep our hearts tender. Because I believe that too many Christians pacify their numbness towards these sins by saying that they're.

They're simply waiting. for the Lord, since vengeance belongs to the Lord. Yes, vengeance does belong to the Lord. But have you considered That, what if the means by which he seeks to bring forth vengeance in this world is through the means of the government? Romans tells us that the government will bear the sword and that the church should bear forth the gospel.

What if the Lord, we know the Lord will see to it that there will be eternal vengeance poured out on the last day, but he's also established means for the day in which we live too? And we are granted this great democratic republic that we can speak, a constitutional republic, where we can speak on these matters and, in some sense, affect change. And yet we stay largely quiet. And so, my question for us today is: have we gotten too soft? Have we convinced ourselves that we're nicer than Jesus and that we're justified in leaving righteous anger behind?

I think that we tend to think this way until we feel personally disrespected by someone, and then we rediscover anger again. And this is because we love ourselves more than we love the righteousness of God. We're passive. And we're tolerant. We were celebratory.

Until someone offends us personally, and then we find what anger is all over again. And the reason for that is not that we have a proper handle on anger, it's that we have a miscategorization of what rightful anger is. May God help us this evening to be angry with our sin, to kill our sin ruthlessly. May God help us to be angry with the travesties committed in our society and to be prayerfully moving against them in a God-honoring way. John Downing again says, moderate.

And sanctified anger is far from hurting and hindering the judgment of reason. Rather, It aids and supports reason. by provoking it to courageously execute What reason has resolved? Let me read that again. That's important.

Moderate. and sanctified anger. Is far from hurting and hindering judgment. When we think of anger, we typically think of seeing red, not thinking logically, and moving. in accordance with just our emotion.

But Down says that righteous, godly anger is not going to do that. It's going to provide the courage to execute what reason is telling you is unjust. This is what we see in the life of Moses, isn't it? In Exodus chapter 32, Moses comes down the mountain. Moses is carrying the two tablets.

He sees that Israel is worshiping a golden calf, and here's what the text says.

So it was as soon as he came near the camp, That he saw the calf and dancing.

So Moses' anger became hot. And he cast the tablets out of his hand. He broke them at the foot of the mountain. Then he took the calf which they had made, burned it in the fire, ground it to powder, and he scattered it on the water, and he made the children of Israel drink it. This is what we see in the life of Phineas.

In Numbers chapter 25. The people of Israel are committing rampant adultery with the Midianites. As a matter of fact, they're getting ready to go into the tabernacle of meeting, and here comes an Israelite with a Midianite. Celebrating her in front of them.

Now at this time the Lord has sent a plague that's killed 24,000 Jews because of their sin. And Phineas, seeing this, is filled with righteous indignation, follows them into their tent, and pierces both of them with a javelin. And here's what the Lord says: Phineas, the son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron the priest, has turned back my wrath from the children of Israel, because he was zealous with my zeal among them.

so that I did not consume the children of Israel. In my zeal.

Now The most famous Example of anger. in the scriptures that you hear quoted Comedically, in some times, and seriously, in others, is the The anger of the Lord Jesus in John chapter 2. Jesus is walking into the temple. He sees that Jewish merchants have have commandeered the Gentile hall or the Gentile court and have filled it. with areas where they can make sales.

And so, when the Lord sees this, when the Lord sees that the state of the Jewish society would rather forbid and bar the entry of Gentiles to worship God so that they can make a few extra bucks off of your convenience, what does he do? He flips their tables and he starts whipping things. He is filled with righteous indignation. It's not because Jesus hates capitalism. It's because the text says that it is fulfilled: zeal for your house has eaten me up.

And so there is these examples all throughout the scriptures that there is a righteous indignation that we ought to have. There is a righteous zeal that we ought to have for the holiness of God. in our society.

Now with Jesus He is the perfect and sinless man in view. I want us to begin to shift perspectives. Because We must recognize that while we may experience just anger, Our emotions give way to perversion very quickly. Emotions are good things and they're bad compasses, and they're bad compasses because they're easily manipulated by Satan. We're going to get to that in a bit.

So, Paul rightly warns us to be angry. He wants us to be rightfully angry, righteously angry. And then he says, Oh, by the way, and sin not.

So be angry. and sin not. He is aware. The anger is not inherently evil. But it can be corrupted.

And that leads us to our second point, which is that we must be cautious. About anger's corruption. There is a call. You are being summoned by God to be consumed with righteous indignation over sin. But there is a second sense at which we must be cautious about anger's corruption.

Yeah. Paul warns us about sinful anger. And he's going to provide us with two things we must be concerned with. The first thing that you need to know about anger is that anger will corrode wherever it lingers. Anger is going to eat up whatever container it is in.

Now, I want you to look down with me in Ephesians 4, verse 31. There's a progression there, it's fascinating. Let all bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor, and evil speaking be put away from you with all malice.

Now, first, we find that there's a progression in the anger here. First, it begins with bitterness. Aristotle spoke of bitterness. The word here is picrea in Greek. as a spirit which refuses reconciliation.

A spirit which is fostering animosity. And the next thing that we find is that we become wrathful and angry. This kind of aggression is that which springs up from personal animosity. It sparks into a blaze of passion and fury. And then the result here is moving onward to clamor.

Now, Finley writes, this is the loud self-assertion of the angry man who will make everyone hear his grievance. That's the kind of man, there's a development here. There's first this inward resolve, I will not be reconciled. Then there's this outward explosion that manifests in the fact that all of you are going to hear that I'm discontented. Proverbs 12, 6 says something about that.

It says, The way of a fool is known at once, but a prudent man covers his shame. And then it continues to slander. The word for slander there is blasphemia. That's where we get our word blaspheme from, and it's typically used for ill speak against the Lord. But it's also used to describe slanderous or abusive speech towards others.

And so the final thing that Paul is going to do is he's going to say something about malice. And what he's doing here is he's kind of picking up his basket and sitting it down and saying, okay, all these things are included, and if I missed anything, they're captured in this thing too. Malice is an all-encompassing term here. Put these things away. He's warning us against the fact that anger progresses and it becomes explosive in nature.

It's a cancer which eats you from the inside out, and by the time you discover that it has manifested itself, you're already exploding. Yeah. So in short, we need to know that sinful anger is a bitter poison that's going to slowly corrode wherever you store it. For instance, when Cain was refused by God. His anger became bitterness towards Abel.

And that anger. And that bitterness consumed him to the point that he killed his own brother. It was Jesus, remember, who says, you talk about murder. I said, if you have been angry with your brother, you have committed murder in your heart. The Lord sees that, in a sense, that the crux of the matter, that when murder is committed in a malicious sense, we find that anger is at the core.

And Jesus says, when you're angry, that same seed of murder is already there. It's already there.

So when we allow bitterness, Or anger to linger in our hearts. It will callous us and it will turn us into bitter people. It will turn us into bitter people. I think that bitter people were once broken people. who bit into the lie of anger and let it become their personality.

In short, we didn't know that sinful anger is a poison that is going to eat you. If you hold on to it, this is what Paul wants us to get a hold of in verse 27. Be angry and sin not. And he continues, and he's going to give us his final exhortation on the matter: do not give place to the devil.

So you need to know that anger is going to corrode where you store it. And second, It's going to be commandeered by Satan. Do not give place to The devil or diabolos. Diablo. The term refers to Satan as our As our deceptive adversary, the slanderer, the accuser of the brethren.

Jesus tells us in John chapter 8 verse 44 that there is no truth in Satan because he's the father of lies. And because that's true, Paul does not want you to give the devil an opportunity. to commandeer, to use your anger. may not be able to create your anger. But Satan can capitalize on your Anger.

If you allow it to fester. If you give them a chance. He will twist your emotion. He will distort the truth in your mind to the point where you're going to isolate yourself from any reconciliation and you're going to commit yourself to an echo chamber of self-justification.

So if you um If you want to die bitter and mean, Hold on. To your anchor, over every little inconvenience. Refuse anyone who seeks to confront your sin. Surround yourself with other bitter people who are going to validate and inflate your wrath, and you'll burn so hot with rage that you will devour every bridge that, by God's grace, you've ever built.

Now, for a time in 2021, I was a walking illustration of this text. Almost overnight, things seemed to fall apart for me. A simple text message with one of my best friends was sent to my ordaining committee. It revealed to them that Hunter Strength was perhaps flirting with leaving King James onlyism. That he was even flirting with Calvinism.

And that private conversation being exposed, it changed everything. Uh I I uh I Went from having loads of friends, went from serving at a place I love to losing my ordination, to losing our home, to losing all of the friends and community that we had. And I felt at one point being lied on, being betrayed, being devoured by my closest mentors, I felt like I was righteously indignant. I don't tell you that to get sympathy. I don't need sympathy over that.

What I want you to get is how how sneaky The devil is at commandeering anger. That righteous indignation, when days became weeks and weeks became months. I wasn't simply grieved about that situation anymore. I was a stick of dynamite that was looking for any opportunity to explode at any inconvenience you put in my path. Everything deserved to be aired out.

And I don't share that for sympathy. I don't want you to feel sorry for me. What I do hope is that my example is a means of grace to show you just how tricky the subject of anger is. There is a sense in which gossip was there and betrayal was there, and you're righteously indignant over that. And yet, Satan, being brilliant, knowing that I was harboring and that was festering in me, used that to make me a bitter and angry man.

Satan will commandeer your anger. He will use it. and you will burn so hot. You'll devour every means of grace that God is trying to give you to burn them to the ground to prevent your anger from being extinguished. Anger is a brilliant liar when it's used sinfully.

It'll tell you that if you'll harbor me and you'll use me, I'll be a shield against you getting hurt again. And it's going to devour you. And that leads me to the third point that we have here this evening, which is a cure for those consumed by anger. Um What do we do? What do we do when we're consumed with anger?

Paul gives us clear counsel in verse 32. He says, Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another. Even As God in Christ forgave you. Did you catch that? The catalyst for conquering anger.

is in Christ crucified. Are you consumed with anger?

Well, have you considered that God has extinguished his wrath? towards you in the crucifixion of his dear Son. Are you bitter towards the people who have wronged you?

Well, have you considered how often you've wronged the Lord, and yet He forgives you lavishly on a daily basis? Are you hard-hearted towards the people in your life because you're afraid of being hurt?

Well, have you considered that a life that is filled with loving like Christ is also going to be filled with hurting like Christ? He is the man of sorrows. And if we're going to follow him, we've got to follow him as ardently as we can. And that means that I'm going to love like Christ. And that also means, unfortunately, I'm going to hurt like Christ.

Christ says, You're going to bear your cross and you're going to follow me. And one of the things that deals with is you're going to love difficult people and they're going to hurt you. And you've got to realize that if you're going to hang on to every little bit and be angry about it, you're going to be a bitter, mean, sinful man who's going to burn hot all the time. Beloved, the cure to unrighteous anger is a daily dose of Christ and Him crucified. That's what we've got for you.

The cure for your corrosive anger is not in the denial of pain. I'm not asking you to deny that it hurts.

However. When we look at Stephen in Acts 7, for every blow that he endured, there was a beloved vision of Christ, a beloved vision of Christ crucified for our sins, risen for our peace, standing at the right hand of the Father, interceding and cheering on his beloved saints. And so tonight If we deal with anger, we need to know that my forgiveness of those who have wronged me should flow as freely and completely as the salvation that God allowed to flow from his own son's body. Did the blood of God incarnate flow for you in your sins that you might be forgiven and reconciled with the Father? Yes.

Then why are we so hesitant to allow forgiveness to flow from us. that others may be reconciled. to us. We are not more holy than the Lord.

So with our remaining time, I may finish before 7. Yeah. I'm convinced that they have that clock up here because I don't take the time to try and count the hands right there. And so I think they have it to To comfort you that we have a clock, but we're not actually reading it. And so I have the numbers right here.

My brain is too far for me to go, where are we at?

So I actually have the numbers.

Okay. Anyway, that's probably just a That's probably me just admitting I don't read clocks that often.

Now, with our remaining time, I want to consider a few aspects of this subject that we haven't covered yet, just a few caveats. The first thing is, when we are confronted with anger, I want you to ask yourself a few things. First. is the cause of my anger and injustice in the eyes of God.

So so is what is what? is the thing that is making me angry. Going to spark the wrath of God as well. Is what I'm angry about.

Something that God Himself is angry about too. That's going to help you to discern whether or not you're being ridiculous in your anger. The second thing. What's the purpose in my response? The thing about anger, and the reason it's good for you to recall that the vengeance belongs to the Lord is because I've got two children.

And when Ella just went home after church this morning and she domed Silas in the head with a Nerf gun. Silas did not want to merely return that single nerf shot. He wanted to come back sevenfold with it. That's why you have to trust that vengeance belongs to the Lord. Because your anger does not want reconciliation or evil, it wants an abundance of judgment given.

And so ask yourself, What is the purpose in my response? Is my response to this wrong going to be unjust in the eyes of God? Is my response unjust? Third. Will my response reflect God's glory in me as His image-bearer?

Am I stewarding this emotion? in a way that reflects the fact that I am an image bearer. of the triune God. That's what I want you to consider when confronted with anger. Second.

I want to address the subject of experiencing personal injustices.

Now, I'm going to have two categories here: one's called personal crimes, and one's called personal injustices. And I'll explain why. When you experience personal injustices, such as someone gossiping against you. I want you to ask a few things about this. First, is my heart informed by the gospel?

Second, Have I prayerfully confronted the offender? Or am I stewing over this? And third, Have I considered that vengeance belongs to the Lord?

Now on the other side of things, I want to address dealing with crimes against yourself. There there is a difference here. We want to steward these properly, understanding we live in a society with laws. When dealing with crimes against yourself, the first thing you need to do is you need to look for justice in God's ordained avenues. What's his ordained avenue with dealing with crime against yourself?

The government. who is to bear the sword as a tormentor of evildoers, If someone has sinned against you grievously in a criminal sense, you are to take it to those whose law has been violated. You're to seek and to look for justice in God's ordained avenues. The second thing When you have been, when you were dealing with crimes against yourself, is to lament before God. to lament before God.

One of the great things about the Psalms is that God's not afraid of your emotions. I really get angry when I hear people at funerals try to encourage people to chin up, stop crying. No, it's good to cry. It's good to cry. And same when it comes to those who have wronged us.

Lament that before the Lord. David regularly brings himself before the Lord in the Psalms and admits, Lord, I am righteous. I am sinless in this part. Does that mean that David is saying that I've never committed sin? No.

But he means that as this thing is concerned, Lord, you know that I have not committed a sin here. You know that I am just in this regard, Lord. You know that I have been wronged. And as we lament before the Lord, there is a sense in which his presence is near. He is the man of sorrows.

He knows what it's like to be acquainted with grief. And there's also a sense in which the telos of all things beams with radiant hope, knowing he will return. And as the one who sympathizes with you in your suffering, he's going to make it all right.

So lament. Lament before God. And then latch on to the sympathetic sufferings of Christ. Latch on to the Lord. Latch on to the community of believers that He has.

Given you. And that will help you when you're dealing with these crimes against yourself. And when you're dealing with personal injustices, such as gossip, or those who do not like you. And in some regard like that. It's important that our heart is informed by the gospel, that we extend ready forgiveness.

The thing about anger as we've addressed so far is not only is it damaging to those we direct it towards, but it's also damaging at those who harbor it.

So we must have a heart that's informed. with the gospel. Let's go to the Lord in the word of prayer. Most kind and gracious Heavenly Father, we are thankful. Thankful that you have extended grace unto us.

that your divine and just anger that deserve to be put on us for eternity. has been extinguished. Through the propitiatory sacrifice of your Son. Praise God. For the cross of Jesus Christ.

Lord, you have reconciled us. Poor sinners who were enemies of grace, you have reconciled us to yourself. And Lord, knowing that, we pray that in this life, this life full of hurt and of wrong and of pain, that you would allow forgiveness to flow from us as readily and joyfully as the blood of Jesus flowed for us and for our salvation. Help us to be a people who are motivated to love and to endure like Jesus Christ. But Lord, let us also be genuine.

Let us understand and Recognize that there is a right place for lament. That we know that we can come before you and we can lament the hurt that has befell us in this life. And Lord, may we know that in the midst of those wrongs, we can lament before you, we can latch on to your sympathetic sufferings. We can have hope knowing that you will make all things right. Lord, help us.

Help us, Lord. I want to Pray for anyone who is consumed with bitterness and with anger. And pray that by your Holy Ghost, you might see fit. to convict them and to woo them by the love of Christ. to walk with them.

And to uh put them in community to combat this great and destructive vice. Lord, we pray. that you would be glorified through the preaching of your word. We ask these things in Christ's name. Amen.