Principles of New Life

Christians are to be different. You don't walk as the Gentiles or the heathen walk. You don't walk in the blindness and the darkness and the hardness of heart and the insensitivity and the lasciviousness and the uncleanness. You're different.

You're different. You put off, verse 22, the old man. Verse 23, you put on the new man. Welcome to Grace to You with John MacArthur.

I'm your host, Phil Johnson. Is it okay to be angry when your child is defiant, or when a politician says something that attacks Christian values? How about when you scrape the paint on your car, or when the dog chews up your new shoes, or when your team loses the big game? When is it right to be angry, or is it never right for a Christian to lose his head? John MacArthur examines the issue of anger today, as well as truthful speech, two crucial elements in the portrait of a new life. So follow along now, won't you, as John begins the lesson. Ephesians, chapter 4, verses 25 to 32.

This is a very practical section. This is one of those sections that you really don't need me for. You can just allow the Spirit of God to convict you as you read it, and it says much in and of itself, but I'll do my best to guide a little bit of your thinking to help you to see the impact in its fullness. Verse 25 says, Wherefore, putting away lying, speak every man truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another. Be ye angry and sin not, let not the sun go down on your wrath, neither give place to the devil.

Let him that stole steal no more, but rather let him labor, working with his hands, the thing which is good, that he may have to give to him that needeth. Let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth, but that which is good to the use of edifying, that it may minister grace unto the hearers. And grieve not the Holy Spirit of God, by whom ye are sealed unto the day of redemption. Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and evil speaking be put away from you with all malice. And be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ's sake hath forgiven you. Now keep in mind that in verses 17 to 24, the Apostle Paul gave a general statement. And his general statement is simply this, Christians are to be different. You're to be different. You don't walk as the Gentiles or the heathen walk, verse 17. You don't walk in the blindness and the darkness and the hardness of heart and the insensitivity and the lasciviousness and the uncleanness and the greediness. You're different.

You're different. You didn't so learn Christ. You put off, verse 22, the old man.

Verse 23, you put on the new man. That's general. You're putting on a new lifestyle. You're putting on a new walk, a new pattern of living. So he gave that generality. Based on who you are in chapters 1 to 3, chapter 4 to 6 tell you how to live.

You put off the old, you put on the new. Well, somebody might say, well, what do you mean, John, specifically? Well, he gets very specific in verse 25. This is where you need to activate your will.

This is where you need to say yes. This is where you need to flip the switch that turns it on. The general statement, verses 17 to 24, and now the specifics right beginning in verse 25. And the first thing he does is this. He makes specific the general fact of changing from an old lifestyle to a new one.

And he gives you five categories in which the change takes place, five areas of illustration. Number one, you exchange lying for speaking truth. You exchange lying for speaking truth. Verse 25. Wherefore, in other words, since it is generally true that the old is gone and the new has come, wherefore specifically put away lying, speak every man truth with his neighbor for we are members one of another.

Now remember this. In Revelation chapter 21 and verse 8 we read this. But the fearful and unbelieving and the abominable and murderers and fornicators and sorcerers and idolaters and all liars shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone. Now one thing for sure, liars go to hell.

That's what it says. Conversely it is true, people going to heaven are not what? Liars. That is not characteristic of a believer. Oh, there may be those times when we sin and we fail, but there's no way that you can look at your life and see a constant flow of lies and get any biblical basis for believing you're a Christian because hell is for liars.

And by the way, in John 8 44 it says you are of your father the devil and the devil is the father of all what? Lies. So if you are a liar by character, if your life is a constant lying situation, if you can't deal rightly with the truth, you give indication of having the devil as your source and hell as your destiny and no matter what you claim and no matter how religious you get and no matter how you go to church, you're not going to be a part of God's kingdom because liars don't go to heaven. People who go to heaven aren't liars.

So he says your will has to get involved. Put away lying. Speak every man truth with his neighbor. And by the way, that's a quote from Zechariah 8 16 gives us a little insight into how Paul dealt with the Old Testament.

He quotes the Old Testament. One of the chief characteristics of our human lifestyle today is lying. Do you realize that we have an entire world system based on lying? Can you imagine what would ever happen if for one day everybody in the world told the truth?

We'd have World War III. If the truth ever came out about anything, if everybody all of a sudden decided to operate on truth, our entire system would collapse. We're to put away lying. We're to be different in that sense.

The world, they're not different. Lying is everything to them. The whole thing is lawyers lie, doctors lie, teachers lie, preachers lie, some preachers lie, salesmen lie, secretaries lie, bosses lie, advertisers lie, politicians lie, government lies, everybody lies and it's what keeps the thing going. Nobody has to tell the truth. It doesn't work that way.

That's not how the game is played. It's all built on lies. And if everybody had to tell the truth, the whole system would come down in a big collapse. You do what's expedient and lying is expedient.

It's incredible. People lie about the little things and the big things. It's just an entire way of life.

It is the outworking of a depraved nature. It lies because it is of its father the devil who is the father of lies, who has developed a system of lies. The whole religious system apart from the truth of Christianity is a pile of lies, lies, lies and more lies. Satan lies about life. He lies about death. He lies about God. He lies about Christ. He lies about the Spirit. He lies about the Bible. He lies about heaven. He lies about hell. He lies about good. He lies about bad. Everything, the whole thing is based on lies. And when he develops a religious system, he throws a little tiny truth in the minute, so you think it might be okay. It's like the clock that doesn't work. It's right twice a day.

And that's about it. And the whole system we live in, in terms of economics is based on lies. Our government lies to us all the time. We only hear what they want us to hear.

It's just the way it is in our world. And you go in to buy something and you get a whole song and dance, you know it isn't true, but you stand there and you have no choice. And they sell you stuff on television that if it ever fulfilled those expectations it would be priceless. And all of a sudden God comes into your life and the Bible says God is true and every man a liar. Christ comes into your life and He says, I am the way, the truth and the life. The Holy Spirit takes up residence in your life and He is called the Spirit of truth who will lead you into all truth. And the Word of God is called the truth. John 17, thy word is truth. And all of a sudden when you become a believer you step out of a domain of lies into an element of truth. You know the true God redeemed by the true Messiah, indwelt by the true Spirit, possessing the true Word and living it out in a true kind of life.

And when a believer opens his mouth according to Ephesians chapter 4 verse 15, he should be speaking the truth. We believe in truth and that means lying has to go. I mean all kinds of lying. You say, what do you mean by lying? One kind of lying is just telling what ain't so. That's just a plain old kind of lie. There are a lot of others, shading the truth, exaggeration.

Oh, exaggeration is a real problem. I don't forget who it was that was telling me the other day that a guy used to go around and give his testimony and he said everywhere he went he gave his testimony. He'd speak and give his fantastic testimony.

He did it everywhere he went. And so he was invited to speak somewhere and the guy said to him, are you going to give your testimony? He said, no I don't give my testimony anymore.

I never give my testimony. He says, what do you mean? He says, listen, he said, I gave my testimony for so many years and I kept adding to it I forgot the truth.

Do you know about that? Lying, cheating in your school, looking on somebody else's paper or getting some exam before he's supposed to have it, cheating in your business, cheating in your work, cheating in your taxes, failure to keep your promises even to God, that's lying, betrayal of a confidence, you said you wouldn't say it but you did, flattering somebody, that's lying because you're telling them a bunch of stuff that isn't even true about them so they'll think you're wonderful and give you something. Excuses, you know, I tell you, an honorable man is a man who says, yes, I did that and I was wrong. Most people say, well, you don't understand.

You see, and then you get this long song and dance while you get a bunch of excuses about a certain thing. I think there are a lot of forms of lying. I think sitting in silence when the truth should be spoken is lying. There's no place for this in the Christian life.

It goes all the way back to Exodus 20, don't bear false witness. Tell the truth. Tell the truth. God's economy is based on truth.

It's got to be. And you see, I'm not talking about some sort of psychological honesty. I'm not talking about sensitivity training, you know, well, the best thing for you is to tell the truth. And I remember I got in a group like that one time, I don't know how I ever got in it. I was sitting in it and everybody was supposed to tell about the other person what they didn't like. Somebody says, I just want you to know you make me sick. I hate you. It's your ears and the way you talk.

There's something about you I hate. And you know, the whole idea was, now see, don't you feel better? Listen. Listen. You don't need to deal with honesty on that situation. You need to go back and ask God to take care of the hate in your heart. You've got another problem. You're in the wrong verse.

You've got to get to the next verse, verse 26. You don't have any reason for that. We're not talking about some pseudo honesty that has psychological implications. God isn't dealing with that. That isn't the point. If you don't love somebody, it isn't the kind of honesty that says tell them you hate them.

If you don't love them, you better go back and ask God to help you with love because you're to love people. You're to put off any kind of lying in any relationship but that is not a license for you to expose your hate. That's another problem.

Now you say, well what's the basis of this? Why is it so important to tell the truth? Well look at verse 25, for we are members one of another. We're talking about a body in Ephesians, people. We're talking about the unity of the church.

And if we don't tell the truth with each other, we're going to mess up the fellowship. Give me an illustration. What would happen if your brain started to lie to you?

I'll give you one illustration. What if it switched the signals on hot and cold? Just thought, well I'm just going to lie a little bit here. I'll just switch the hot and cold. You know what happened next time you take a shower? You'd fry yourself.

Next time you're trying to get your coffee hot enough, if it was reversed, it would just keep getting, you'd just get it hotter and hotter and hotter, only it would be coming through as cold, that'd be the end of you. Just that little thing. Let me ask you this. What would happen if your eye decided to deceive you a little bit? Next time you got in your car and took a trip. And your eye said, I think I'll just, I'll shade the truth a little bit. There's not really a curve in the road. Or there's no double-trailered semi passing on the hill.

Goodbye. You are absolutely dependent on the honesty of your nervous system. You're dependent on the honesty of every organ in your body or you'll be dead. And God has even built into you a pain system that the basis of your health is a pain system that's honest enough to tell you when you have a problem. Or a system of revealing diseases. That's what symptoms are. God's given us a whole area of symptoms so that we know when we've got a problem that has to be dealt with. And that's the honesty of the body that allows it to function. Now the body of Christ can't be any less than that. We can't go shading the truth with each other or we can't ever function properly.

How can we minister to each other and bear each other's burdens and care for each other and love each other and lift each other and teach each other and pray for each other if we don't really know what's going on? Be honest. Speak the truth.

You exchange lying for speaking the truth when you became a new creation. That's one of the old things you put away. The word put away, apotithome, means to throw off like an old coat. It's used in Acts to talk about when they threw their coats at Paul's feet.

Get rid of it. Second, you exchange unrighteous anger for righteous anger. Be ye angry and sin not. There's three Greek words for anger, thumos, paragismos, and orge. Thumos has to do with a boiling fury, you know, where you blow a gasket. It literally comes from to go up in smoke.

You just completely lose it. Paragismos is that inside seething, fuming resentment that comes out of jealousy and anger and envy and it just sort of seethes until you become an ugly, moody person with a root of bitterness. And orge is a kind of anger basically, and there's an overlap in these terms, but just giving you shades of meaning. Orge is a kind of word that has to do with a kind of a settled conviction kind of anger. In other words, you have certain priorities in your life, you have certain things you're committed to, and when something violates that, there's a natural response. For example, if you determine with all your heart to love a child that's in your family and you give yourself to that child, you'll hate the one who would come along and hurt that child.

It's that kind of a settled commitment. And these words can be good or bad. You can be angry in sin or be angry in sin not.

But the whole crux of the matter is your motive, isn't it? By the way, thumos doesn't seem to be a word that is tolerated for a Christian. The blowing up kind of a thing is not something that's allowable for those of us who name the name of Christ. Thumos is used to speak of unregenerate man. It's used to speak of a man functioning in a sinful way.

It's used to speak of Satan in Revelation 12, 12, and it's used to speak of God in Romans 2.8, and God literally blows His cork in final judgment. That is used to speak of God's ultimate wrath. Now, only God can literally go to the ultimate end of anger. Thumos would be the extreme anger. Only God can go to the extreme end of anger and still be righteous because everything in God's mind is absolutely under control, in His ultimate anger, you see.

But you and I can't. We can't handle thumos when we get out of control. But sometimes parorgismos, that inner resentment, and sometimes orgej, that settled conviction is tolerable. And it is tolerable when it is anger for other than selfish reasons. We can be angry over that which grieves God.

We can be angry over that which hinders and hurts His cause. After all, the Lord was angry. I see the majestic indignation of Jesus as He cleanses the temple. I see that...that to me is...that's where Jesus just really lashed out. Boy, it was an anger that got out, it came out.

Maybe it's orgej there. It's the idea that He just...He had this conviction that God's holiness was what was at stake. And boy, when He saw the unrighteousness there, He moved against it. I see Him also in John chapter 11. And there it says that Jesus wept. But before it says that, it says He was troubled in His spirit.

And I think it was like parorgismos. I think it was that hatred against the consequence of sin as He saw a dead Lazarus, a direct illustration and symbol of the power of sin, and it brought to His mind the terrible things He would endure in the cross as He bore sin in His own body. And He was angry about sin. He was mad about sin. He had a right to be wrathful.

But for the Christian, there is this injunction. Don't be angry so that it comes to sin. Don't be angry for your own causes. Don't get angry when people offend you. Don't let your anger degenerate into some kind of personal resentment, personal bitterness, personal sullenness, a personal moodiness. That thing is forbidden.

That is forbidden. If you have any justifiable anger, it is that anger which is designed to defend the great, glorious, holy nature of God. It is the anger of Jesus as He weeps in a troubled spirit at the grave of Lazarus. It is the anger of Jesus as He makes a whip and cleans out the temple. It is the wrath of God. It is the righteous fury of God in Deuteronomy and Numbers in the Old Testament. But the wrong kind of anger, according to Matthew 5, is the first step toward murder.

And that's wrong. Sometimes maybe we have to have anger. Sometimes I get angry.

You have a right to be angry about some things. Psalm 97 10 says, Ye that love the Lord hate evil. And Psalm 69 9, David says, zeal for thine house has eaten me up.

The reproaches that are fallen on thee are fallen on me. He's saying, God, I can't tolerate what people do to Your name. It infuriates me. I admit I get angry sometimes. I hope I never get angry about what happens to John MacArthur. I hope I always get angry about what happens to God's holy name. And I hope I never stop getting angry about that.

We should have a basic built-in or gay. That is a programmed anger over sin, a programmed anger over evil that puts us in a beatitude mentality so that whenever I see sin, be it in you or be it in me, I mourn in my spirit. That kind of anger is the sinew of the soul. The anger that is selfish, passionate, undisciplined, uncontrolled, is sinful, useless, hurtful, must be banished from the Christian life. But the disciplined anger that seeks the rightful place of a righteous God is pure and selfless and dynamic. Some of us aren't angry and we ought to be. We ought to be angry about a lot of stuff going on in the world. We ought to be angry about some stuff going on in the church, but not let it degenerate into a wrong kind of anger. So he says, be angry, but sin not.

Don't go to bed. Don't let the sun go down on your wrath. Don't be a resentful, angry person. Deal with it. And I think that second part of the verse has reference to the wrong kind of anger. The point being, if you do have the wrong kind of anger, if you've got anger that is sin, then deal with it now. Don't sleep on it.

Don't go to bed with it. Face it and deal with it. And you know, all through the New Testament we are told that when we face sin, we are to deal with it now, we are to repent, confess, and turn from it. And by the way, that kind of stuff, that kind of unconfessed anger, anger that isn't really dealt with, is really a bad thing. When you have that angry, unforgiving spirit, 2 Corinthians 2 11 says, Satan will get an advantage of you. You should never have any kind of anger in that manner. You want to know why? Here's the key to the whole thing.

Listen. You know why you get angry? You get angry because people do things to you you don't like. The fact of the matter is you don't deserve anything anyway, right?

That's the whole point. What do you deserve? You can't do that to me. Why not? Who are you? I have my rights.

You do? According to God's standards, you're never going to even enter his kingdom unless you're broken in spirit. Unless you're bankrupt and poverty stricken. Listen, if you don't have any rights, you can't get too mad at somebody who steps on them, right? Anger is a retaliating spirit.

And the only time it is ever right is when you defend God's holiness because God does have some rights because of who he is. And he says, if you do this, if you let yourself get angry, verse 27, you will give place to the devil. By the way, diabolos is the word here. It means slanderer.

And watch this. It's a little play on words. If you are angry, inevitably what happens when you get angry is you slander. You slander verbally or you slander in your thoughts and your heart and you have given a place to the slanderer. It's just a repeat of John 8 44. Whenever you start lying, you're of your father the devil. Whenever you start getting mad, you give more evidence of being fathered by Satan. So a person who never seems to have anything but an angry mood and an angry spirit and a bitter resentful heart and an ugly kind of envious jealous mood gives evidence that perhaps he's not a Christian at all and is nothing more than one who has given the devil opportunity to display himself.

Let's pray. Lord, help us to know the victory that only you can give so that on the one hand we never give place to the devil and on the other hand we don't grieve the blessed Holy Spirit who is gracious enough to give us an eternal salvation. Since we have been eternally related to him, help us never to violate that in a way that would grieve him.

And Lord, we know that unless we deal this way with each other, the body can't function. And if the body can't function, Christ can't be manifest. And if Christ isn't manifest, the world can't see and know. May it begin with us, Father, as we obey. Work your work by your Spirit in us in Christ's name.

Amen. That's John MacArthur, chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary. He is currently looking at how you honor and glorify Christ in your daily walk. It's all part of our series titled The Portrait of a New Life.

Now, here's something important that we need to mention. For the past couple of weeks, nearly every Bible and commentary and book that Grace To You sells has been available at 25% off the regular price. And, John, that sale ends tonight. So tell our listeners about a few resources that would make ideal Christmas presents, things they might want to get before this sale ends tonight. Yeah, first I guess I could say go to the gty.org website and you can see the things that are available there.

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So a lot of options there. And then I would suggest a third tool as you think about a new year, Strength for Today. It does just what the title says. It provides a brief, encouraging lesson from God's Word for each day of the year. And it covers 12 important biblical themes, one day at a time.

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That's right. And that's Midnight Pacific Time. This sale is the time to get resources that will enrich your devotions and catapult your worship. And the MacArthur Study Bible, the Daily Bible, and the devotional Strength for Today are great books to start with.

But the sale ends tonight, so don't wait. Place your order now. Call our toll-free number, 855-GRACE, or go to our website, gty.org. The MacArthur Study Bible comes in the New King James, New American Standard, and English Standard versions of Scripture, as well as the many non-English translations John mentioned. Again, to get the MacArthur Study Bible, the MacArthur Daily Bible, Strength for Today, or any other book from Grace to You, call 800-55-GRACE, or go to gty.org. Also, let me highlight the MacArthur New Testament Commentary Series. These are the most comprehensive resources we have for understanding the New Testament. Whenever you wonder what a verse means, you can find the answer in these 34 volumes. And they are not just for pastors. They're for anyone who wants to know God's Word clearly and accurately. To order any volume at 25% off the normal price, call 800-55-GRACE, or go to gty.org. Now for John MacArthur, I'm Phil Johnson, encouraging you to watch Grace to You television this Sunday. Watching it with your family would be a great idea. And then be here Monday when John looks at how you access God's supernatural grace, a grace that leads to freedom from sin. It's another half hour of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, on Grace to You.