Welcome to The Daily Platform from Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina. The school was founded in 1927 by the evangelist Dr. Bob Jones, Sr. His intent was to make a school where Christ would be the center of everything so he established daily chapel services. Today, that tradition continues with fervent biblical preaching from the University Chapel platform. Today on The Daily Platform, Dr. Steve Pettit, President of Bob Jones University, is continuing a study series from Ephesians entitled, New Life in Christ.
Steve has written a study booklet for this series. If you would like to follow along, you can order a printed copy from the website, thedailyplatform.com. Today, Steve will walk us through the concept of righteous anger in Ephesians 4, 26-27. Would you please take your Bibles this morning and turn with me to the book of Ephesians, Ephesians chapter 4. This morning we're going to look at verses 26 and 27 in this passage of scripture where the Apostle Paul deals with an anger that is actually permitted in the life of a believer. And so let's look at these verses this morning. Paul says, be ye angry and sin not. Let not the sun go down upon your wrath, neither give place to the devil. He says, be ye angry.
Does that sound a little different to you? I mean, for most of us, we've heard sermons about anger. Anger has always been viewed as something negative, something that we should not have, we should not be angry. And yet the Apostle Paul here gives us a certain kind of anger that is actually permitted. It's an anger that is actually acceptable and appropriate for Christians to have. And it is an anger that is actually different from another anger that we read about at the end of this chapter.
Look at verse 31. He says, let all bitterness and wrath and anger, by the way, it's the same word in verse 26, let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and evil speaking be put away from you with all malice. Now verse 31 here, he's dealing with a form of anger that is hurtful. It is malicious.
It is intended to get somebody back. This is a kind of an anger that attacks people. And the Bible makes it very clear that that is a sinful anger that is to be put off from God's people.
But when we look at verse 26 is different. He actually is telling us to be angry. You could say this is a holy or a righteous anger.
It's one that doesn't attack people, but it does attack problems. This is an anger that God has commanded us to put on. So as we look today at this kind of righteous or holy anger, one of the first things that we notice in these two simple verses is that Paul gives four direct commands. So he's telling us to do something and he gives it in the present tense.
That's something we're to be doing today because he talks about today. And all four commands are necessary to appropriately handle this kind of an anger. In other words, you just can't say be angry. You've got to have the other commands and it balances it all out. So what are the four commands? Number one, he said be angry. Number two, he said don't sin. Number three, he said let not the sun go down upon your wrath.
Those are all commands. And number four, he said neither give place to the devil. So you can almost look at it as he's telling us how to address anger and how we're to deal with it today. And as we remember the context of these two verses, we have to go back to Paul's general command where he says put off the old man and put on the new man. And so that's what Paul is doing, but he reverses the order. And that is, he says the first command, be angry is something we're to put on. And then he says the last three commands are the charge to put off things. So put on and then the other three are to put off. So I'm going to take them as they appear in commands. There's four of them.
So let's look at each one of them carefully. Notice the first command. He says be ye angry.
Now is that confusing? Well, there are differing views as to whether God here is making a concession to permit anger or he's actually commanding us to be angry. Is God putting up with the natural anger that we would have because of the circumstances of life or is he actually telling us that we're to be angry?
Well, I'd like to take it as a written command because it's an imperative. It is something that he's commanding us to do and I'd like to view this anger as an appropriate response to sin. That is, there are things that should irritate us. There are things that should upset us. That is, if something is unrighteous or unjust or wicked or evil, then simply put, we should hate sin because God hates sin. Now, let me give you an illustration of this.
I find this very interesting. Take your Bibles and turn to Mark chapter three. Mark chapter three, I want us to see an illustration here of the life of Jesus Christ where Jesus actually got angry. Beginning in verse one, Jesus is entering into the synagogue in Capernaum on the Sabbath day. There was a man there in the synagogue who had a withered or a shriveled hand.
It literally means to be dried up. It was probably some kind of deformity that he had from birth or something that maybe happened to him throughout the course of his life. And Jesus calls this man with this withered hand to come and stand in the midst of the crowd in the synagogue. And Jesus knew exactly what the Pharisees were doing.
He knew what they were thinking. He knew that they were looking to see if Jesus would violate their law by healing this man on the Sabbath. And so Jesus asks two questions. They are found in verse four.
Notice what he says. And he saith unto them, question number one, is it lawful to do good on the Sabbath days or to do evil? Question number two, to save life or to kill life? And then notice their response, but they held their peace.
They didn't say anything. Jesus asked two questions. The first question is, is it lawful to do good on the Sabbath days or to do evil? Jesus here is addressing the moral imperative of a human need.
If good needs to be done, that is the man needs to be healed, then there can be no neutrality in your response to that. James chapter four verse 17, therefore for him to know it to do good and doeth it not, to him it is what? Say it. Say it.
It's what? Sin. So here Jesus comes in. Here's this man with the withered hand. Obviously the man has a need. And for Jesus not to respond to that human need would in reality cause him to sin.
If it is within the power of somebody to do good, then we should do it. It was not Jesus to heal this man was not simply permissible, but it was right to heal on the Sabbath whether or not it was lawful for the Jews. So Jesus responds and he heals the man. But then notice the second question.
The second question is to save life or to kill. Here Jesus was looking ahead to what he knew would be the Pharisee's response to Jesus' healing. What did they want to do to Jesus after he healed the man? Look at verse six. The Pharisees went out and immediately held council with the Herodians against him.
How to destroy him? The second question was his ability to read their mind, know where their thoughts were going to go, and when he healed they reacted and they wanted to kill Jesus. He said, is it really right for you to kill me? And these two questions showed the two sins the Pharisees committed. Number one, they did not want for good to be done for this man. And secondly, they plotted how to destroy Jesus. And what was his response to all of this? Look at verse five. And when he had looked around about on them with anger being grieved for the hardness of their hearts. Jesus was angry because of their thinking and their attitude. And by the way right here we see a huge difference between Jesus and the Pharisees. To the Pharisees religion was wrapped up in observing and fulfilling stipulations. To Jesus it was facing human suffering and meeting human needs. So let me say it this way. If theological orthodoxy and moral behavior does not issue into a life that urgently serves others and loves others and seeks to meet their needs, then it is not genuine.
And the truth is we should be upset when there's so many needs to be met and we don't seek to meet them. Let me just say this to you as a student. You're here at Bob Jones University studying.
You're in an orthodox school. We believe in the inspiration of scripture. We motivate and we try to help towards moral behavior. And by the way, all of those things are good.
None of that is to be thrown out. But if that is your whole life and it's not being invested in the service to others, you haven't even gotten to first base in Christian living. Jesus Christ gave himself to serve. So as believers we should be angry with sin. This would include corruption and injustice in the fallen world. This would be angry enough to take a stand against evil in false teaching. This would include legitimate issues that arise because of inconsistencies or negligence or failure or inattention that it would be normal for us to be upset. Do you realize how many ministries in the world have been started by the people of God because they responded to the evil that is in the world? They were irritated.
They were angry. Crisis pregnancy centers, orphanages, addiction programs, Christian schools, universities, relief organizations, mission societies. They are started in response to an anger that they felt when things were wrong and things were not being done right. Back in 2006 an organization was started called St. Bernard's Project. It was started in response to Hurricane Katrina and it affected an area in New Orleans called St. Bernard's Parish. And what happened was that there was such a slow response in helping people get back into their homes that people suffered for a long time.
So basically a couple started what they call the St. Bernard Project. And their mission is to shrink the time between disaster and full recovery by ensuring that disaster impacted citizens and communities recover in a prompt, efficient, and predictable manner. In other words, they're basically helping people get back into their homes. And their statement is this, we can't prevent natural disasters, but we can prevent some of the suffering they cause. And so they started in, they have eight basically locations. So New York, New Jersey, South Carolina, Louisiana, and three in Texas. And of course you recognize all of those are areas that have been hit hard because of hurricanes and storms and so forth. And so they come back in and they help people build houses.
And so it's actually just a service oriented organization that's helping people. They were motivated out of anger. Now the reason I have the picture up there is that girl's my daughter, Rachel. And she's the executive director for the state of South Carolina. And the whole thing was started because somebody got mad. We gotta do something about this.
By the way, if you don't ever get mad enough to do something, what kind of person are you? Should we not be stirred up? Martin Luther King Jr. gave his life for the cause of civil rights. Bob Jones Sr. was concerned about the negative influence of the secular and liberal education of the 1920s. And he saw the spiritual shipwrecks of Christian young people going off to secular institutions and throwing away their faith.
And so in 1927, he started Bob Jones University. Somebody got angry enough at sin to do something about it. Be ye angry. That's the first command.
But notice the second command. And he says, and sin not. Now obviously, there is something about righteous anger that we can't handle. God can. God can be angry for years and years and generations and still not do anything about it.
Because God is able to do that, but we can't. This command is actually a citation from an Old Testament text. Be ye angry and sin not.
Where did it come from? Psalm chapter 4 and verse 4. Listen to what it says. In the King James, stand in awe and sin not. Communion with your own heart upon your bed and be still. The ESV reads, be angry and do not sin.
The context is that the psalmist is distressed in his experience with the vanity and the lying of his enemies. And the command is to trust God with the issues he faced and to not indulge in anger. Getting angry is not wrong.
Indulging in it is. One person said it this way, to be angry and not sin requires that you be angry at nothing but sin. We are to hate the sin, but we are not to hate the sinner. The jump from the initial feelings of holy anger to sinful anger, by the way, are not very far. Things can go down very quickly.
Why? Because we're sinful. So you can easily develop the wrong attitude. You can actually sin. Oftentimes, this is seen in your body language, in your verbal statements that turn into a hardness towards a person and you have an emotional reactionary outburst. Be angry, but don't sin. It could turn into a self-righteous judgment in a pursuit of vengeance. It can turn into resentment and bitterness over a lack of equity and honesty.
One writer expresses it this way. He said of the seven deadly sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances, long paths, to roll over your tongue, the prospect of bitter confrontation still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel, both the pain you're given and the pain you're giving back. In many ways, it's a feast fit for a king.
The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself, for the skeleton at the feast is you. In the end, your own anger, if not dealt with appropriately, can be destructive. We are to hate the sin, but we are not to hate the sinner, especially when the sinner is a saint. Be angry. Don't sin.
Then notice number three. Let not the sun go down upon your wrath. God puts a time limitation upon righteous anger.
Only God can be perpetually angry against sin and not sin. Don't let the sun go down upon your wrath. In the Hebrew world, a day runs from the evening to the next evening. A new day starts when the sun is setting.
So for example, the Sabbath starts on Friday evening and it ends on Saturday evening. So what is Paul saying about our anger? He's not saying that we should stand outside fuming until we see the sun setting in the evening. You're not supposed to go outside and you're so mad, you just stand there and go, and then you see the sun go down and it sets and you go, okay, that's good.
I got it. That's not what he's saying. It's just a simple way to say, deal with something right away. Deal with it. The day of our anger should be the day that we deal with our anger and why is this necessary? Because it's hard to control anger. It can turn into something that is unrighteous very easily. Let not the sun go down upon your wrath. Anger is an internal disposition. Wrath is a festering anger that leads to a reaction or a provocation.
James says the wrath of man does not work the righteousness of God. In 1984, I was 29 years old. I was a youth pastor in Michigan. It was a Sunday night about 1230 and after midnight and I got a phone call. I woke up and it was my mother and she was crying. My first thought is my youngest brother Billy died. What I found out was actually my family died because after 30 years of marriage, my father came to my mother and asked for a divorce. They were married from 1954 to 1984 and my mother's heart was broken. She was shocked and that night forever has changed our family. It never was the same again. Personally, I hate divorce.
You know why? Because I've seen the effects of it in my own family. But I remember very clearly that night crawling in the bed and laying there and quoting the scripture from Ephesians 4.
Be kind one to another, tender hearted, forgiving one another even as God for Christ's sake hath forgiven you. Did I like what my dad did? No. Was I going to change my father? No.
Am I going to fester anger against him for years and years to come? No. And I remember clearly saying, God, I put this into your hands. Lord, you're God. You're able to deal with sin. Be angry. Sin not. Don't let the sun go down upon your wrath.
A good rule for life is to never go to bed mad. And then finally, the fourth command. He says, neither give place to the devil.
The final command is a warning of huge proportions. This phrase shows us the theological reason that Paul is giving behind being angry and not sinning. For Paul is taking us into a spiritual realm where spiritual conflicts take place.
In other words, he's taking us out of the physical and out of the visible and he's taking us into the spiritual and into the eternal. Five times in the book of Ephesians, Paul speaks about heavenly places. Can I just show you those verses real quick? Look at Ephesians chapter one and notice what he says in verse three. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who has blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places. So we have spiritual blessings in the heavenlies. Notice verse 20, which he wrought in Christ when he raised him from the dead and set him at his own right hand in the heavenly places. So not only are blessings in the heavenlies, but Christ is in the heavenlies. Look at verse six chapter two. And he hath raised us up together and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus. So believers are actually seated in a position with Christ in the heavenly places. Then notice chapter three verse 10.
To the intent that now unto the principalities and powers in heavenly places might be known by the church the manifold wisdom of God. He's speaking here about the angels who are in the heavenly places. And then notice if you will please chapter six and verse 12. He says for we wrestle not against flesh and blood but against principalities, against powers, against the rules of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in heavenly places.
So what is the Apostle Paul telling us? He is telling us that there is a spirit world and this anger that we have can actually have an impact in that spirit world. For example in Ephesians chapter four in verse 30 he says we can grieve the Holy Spirit, the unseen spirit.
We can grieve Him by our words. In verse 26 we can give place to the devil, the unseen Satan through anger. And the point is this that the actions and the attitudes of believers in this physical world are directly connected to the responses in the spiritual realm or the heavenly places. What he's saying is by our anger we can actually give Satan an opportunity in our life and in our church.
The word place there means a base of operation, a place where he can work. Satan cannot take possession of a believer but he can oppress a believer. He can influence his thoughts and actions just like he did Peter when Peter told Jesus not to go to the cross and Jesus said to Peter, get behind me Satan because you are a stumbling block to me because your thoughts are not God's thoughts, they're man's thoughts. So according to Paul how does Satan do this specifically? Well the word devil there means slanderer. A slanderer is somebody who makes a false statement with the intent to damage the reputation of another.
The point is this, slander is to cause people to distrust one another who they should be trusting and of all people we should be trusting, it's God's people. Satan seeks to gain a foothold into the church through uncontrolled anger. Anger at things that are wrong. His goal is to create a spirit of distrust among believers with the intention of dividing the fellowship and disrupting the unity that has been created by the spirit.
The devil is an opportunist. Believers must vigilantly deny him the right to work his evil through the unrestrained righteous anger of God's people. We cannot let righteous anger fester. We cannot hold this anger in because inevitably it's going to come out of our mouth, it's going to create conflict and it will cause separation among God's people and it will grieve God's spirit and it will hurt the church.
And so he says to God's people, we all must fight and stand against Satan less he gets a foothold. Number of years ago I was preaching up in the state of Michigan and a lady came forward in a service that I was preaching in and she was just broken hearted and weeping and as I spoke that night on dealing with anger and bitterness. Afterwards she told me why she came and she told me about the disruption in her family, the conflicts that were going on and most of the people in her family, many of them were Christians, but they had not spoken to each other for years. It was a terrible thing. So that week she decided to go back and she went back to every person in the valley where she lived and asked forgiveness of every family member of harboring anger over a long standing period of time.
God began to work in that meeting and on Friday night that lady brought her brother-in-law. He was over 70 years old. He was actually a German. He had fought for Hitler during World War II.
He had spent three years in an English POW camp and then he immigrated to the USA and he was an unsaved man. He came to that service that night and I preached the message. He was as far back in the building as you could sit in the corner, in the far back row of the corner of the building, but I'm glad that God can get people in the back row. That man came forward at the end of the service and he said to the pastor, he said, I've always thought that God did not love me and could not forgive me, but I realize God loves me and I want to be saved. And that night he got saved. Ten days later I was preaching in the state of Wisconsin and I got a message right before I stood up to preach.
And the message essentially said this, that this German man had just was flying back to Germany to go back and see his family and share the good news of his salvation experience and sitting in the airport in Newark, New Jersey, he slumped over and died of a massive heart attack. Here was a man ten days away from hell, didn't even know it, and God saved him. You will never convince me on this side of heaven that that woman's response and humility to deal with anger did not have a direct impact upon God's blessing on the church to work in that man's heart. I don't understand the mysteries of the spiritual world, but I know this, that when we have anger that we do not deal with, then it hinders the blessing and the working of God. I want to say to every one of you, if you're living with unresolved anger in your heart, even over things that are wrong, then I beg you today, do not give the devil an open door into your life. Father, we pray you'll bless your word and use it to sanctify our hearts in Jesus' name. Amen. You've been listening to a sermon from Ephesians chapter 4. This sermon is part of the study series called New Life in Christ by Dr. Steve Pettit, president of Bob Jones University. Thanks again for listening. Join us again tomorrow as we study God's word together on The Daily Platform.
Whisper: medium.en / 2023-11-19 11:26:14 / 2023-11-19 11:35:58 / 10