From Anger to Peace #2

Wouldn't it have been a whole lot better when the problem was the size of a thimble to just deal with it then? That's Jesus' point. Do this quickly before he gets out of hand, before he gets out of control, and then someone else is deciding your conflict for you. Maybe you're driving and someone suddenly cuts you off. And then you lay on your horn, shake your fist, and maybe say a few choice words. And then you allow your anger to affect you the rest of your day. Well, hello, I'm Bill Wright, and today on The Truth Pulpit, Pastor Don Green talks about what it means to go from anger to peace as we continue our teaching series, Why Are You So Angry? You know, Don, it's easy to ignore our anger issues. Perhaps we don't want to acknowledge it's really such a serious sin.

Well, that's right, Bill. And you know, my friend, I suppose we all have the tendency to want to minimize our sin if we're starting to think in carnal ways. And that's why God has given us his Word. His Word has a perfecting influence upon our soul.

And we need to study it consistently so that it can expose areas of sin in our lives and give us that which corrects it. That's what we're going to try to do today as we continue our series, Why Are You So Angry? Thanks for being with us. Thank you, Don.

And friend, we look forward to learning more about this important topic. So let's join our teacher now in The Truth Pulpit. Look over at Matthew chapter 6 and what we commonly call the Lord's Prayer. The Lord's Prayer not because he needed to pray it, but because it's the prayer that he prescribed for his disciples as a pattern for their own praying.

And oh my, does this reinforce what he said earlier, further proof of the internal harmony of the Sermon on the Mount and the fact that he preached this on a single occasion rather than something that was stitched together by a subsequent editor. Matthew chapter 6 verse 9, Jesus says, Pray then in this way, Our Father who is in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven, establishing that vertical priority in prayer. God, I worship you. God, I seek your will. God, I seek the furtherance of your kingdom as I approach you here. God, I come in a spirit of dependence. Verse 11, Give us this day our daily bread.

And God, I come knowing that I come with guilt and forgive us our debts. Amen. Wait a second.

Wait, wait, what do you mean? Amen. I confess my sin. Jesus wasn't done there. Forgive us our debts as in like manner to the way that we also have forgiven our debtors. Look at verses 14 and 15. He says, For if you forgive others for their transgressions, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others, then your Father will not forgive your transgressions. At the very core, beloved, of the way the Lord taught us to pray, is that as you are confessing sin, that you would do so having examined your life first, because he says, Forgive us our debts, as we have already forgiven our debtors. God, I come to you not harboring resentment and bitterness toward another man in my heart. I've been wronged, yes, but, Father, I forgive them. I've sought to the extent possible, I have sought reconciliation with them. I hold nothing against man as my fellow man, as I come to you, O God, and therefore I pray, Father, forgive me of my sins against you in like manner in the way that I have tried to deal with men myself. Jesus intimately links your spirit of forgiveness with whether you are in a position to ask forgiveness for your sins from God or not. That's why he says, You seek peace first. You come to God and remember you've got something against your brother, stop. Kind of like when your clothes are on fire, what is it they tell you?

Stop, drop and roll. You're coming to God with sin in your heart toward another man, stop, drop what you're doing and roll over and do what you can to resolve it. Now, for some, you know, it may be that it's just impossible to get that reconciliation. You know, someone in your past has sinned against you and now they're dead. Nothing you can do about it. You can't go and find them. Or they're removed geographically and it's been 15 years and you have nowhere to find them.

And you're not able to literally carry this out with a face-to-face meeting. Okay, God's gracious, God understands that. But at least you can work it through in your heart and say, God, they did sin against me, but I'm not going to hold on to the bitterness of that any longer. Why would I hold bitterness against someone in my past, Lord, when in the present you've been so gracious to me and and you were guiding my life through all of that and therefore I'm just going to trust you for it. And Lord, to the extent that I've been bitter in the past over these things, please forgive me and wash my heart and make it clean because I know that bitterness is not acceptable before you. But especially if it's someone in your immediate life and you do have access to them and it's a daily matter, you know, look, you need to do the hard spiritual work of sitting down with that person saying, I've been wrong.

But ultimately what provides the power, what provides you the motivation to drop your pride and to confess these things and to be transparent about it is this. Ultimately you realize this is hindering my fellowship with Christ. I'm not right with Christ when it's like this.

I'm living out the warning of 1 Peter 3.7. And because Christ is precious to me, you say to yourself, because I must have a clear conscience before God because that's the priority, and I'll deal with the human aspect of this. And once you deal with that honestly a time or two or three, all of a sudden it has a sanctifying impact on your life in this way. When you're tempted toward anger, you say, I don't want to go there.

I'm just going to let this go now. I'm going to drop the quarrel now before it breaks out because I don't want to be in a position where I have to go through that again. And the sting of past repentance and the past ways that you failed motivate you to keep short accounts in relationships now because it's always about the because, beloved.

It's always about the reason. Because the great desire of the redeemed heart is to live closely with Christ and to live closely with Christ means you let the human conflict go. You forgive people for the way that they've wronged you. You trust Christ for that. And you let it go, and you say, I'm not going to be upset about that any longer. And you guard your heart going forward because this is a priority to your holy God. And so, beloved, this is something that you do on a one-time basis not to establish it as a pattern of your life. I'm saying this as a Christian pastor, as an ordained minister of the gospel of Jesus Christ and what I'm about to say. It would be better for you to reconcile a relationship on a Sunday morning than to be here knowing that you're still hard-hearted about it.

Don't go through the motions. Don't insult God. Don't stain the fellowship of his people with hypocritical worship where you know you're bringing a hard heart in the worship center and you're refusing to reconcile a relationship. Better to just stay away in one sense and at least your absence from the people of God would convict you that you're not living righteously. But the supreme thing what God would really have you do, what Christ would really call you to, is to take the opportunity to go make peace. Better not to do it on Sunday morning. Do it quick.

Go take care of it now. That's what Christ is teaching us here because sin in the heart nullifies the worship of God. You're wasting your time if that's not your hard approach to life. Let's look at a couple of Old Testament passages that would help us see the general principle. Look at Psalm 66. Turn to Psalm 66 just for a simple verse. In verse 18, Psalm 66 verse 18, the psalmist says, if I regard wickedness in my heart the Lord will not hear. And in Proverbs chapter 28, look over at Proverbs chapter 28 just past the Psalms for those of you that are still getting acquainted with your Bible. Proverbs 28 verse 9. He who turns away his ear from listening to the law, even his prayer is an abomination. You see we're all tempted to think that just because we're doing something in worship, just because we're praying, it's automatically acceptable to God.

And Scripture makes it plain that's not the case. Scripture says what's going on in your heart as you pray. And so in light of that priority, Jesus says, you seek peace first. You seek that as the priority of life and realize that this needs to be elevated as an ongoing commitment and principle by which you live. Seek peace first. It's the greater priority over formal worship. Not to say worship's not a priority of course, it's just that there are conditions to acceptable worship before God that we need to honor with our lives. So seek peace first as the priority.

Secondly, what else can we say that Jesus teaches us here in Matthew chapter 5? We said seek peace first. Secondly, seek peace fast. Seek it fast.

Don't wait because the matter is urgent. Look at Matthew 25 verses 25 and 26. Matthew 25 and chapter 5 verses 25 and 26. Jesus says, make friends quickly with your opponent at law while you are with him on the way so that your opponent may not hand you over to the judge and the judge to the officer and you be thrown into prison.

Truly I say to you, you will not come out of there until you have paid up the last cent. Jesus says, do it quickly. In other words, don't wait.

Act on this and say this is what I'm going to get up and do now. You see beloved, what I'm about to say is a true principle of all of spiritual life and matters in other areas, not just this matter of anger. Here's the thing. Here's the thing. When the Word of God convicts you about something, about an area of obedience that you need to pursue or a sin that you need to confess or a thing that you need to say and you're convicted about that, these words are lethal to your spiritual life.

They're lethal. I'll do it later. Not right now. Yeah, that's important and I'm committed to doing that a little bit later. As soon as you accept in your heart that immediate obedience to Christ is something that can be postponed to be done on your timetable, you have just skated onto very thin ice. You see, because for the true disciple of Christ, obedience to Christ is the preeminent priority of life. That is what matters and so whatever the consequences of obedience are is secondary to the fact that I must obey, you say to yourself.

I must do this. Next week we have coming up in the morning service, I'm very excited about this, we have a baptism that we're going to do on Sunday morning right at the start of the service. It reminds me and makes me think maybe for some of you, you've postponed baptism, said I'll do that later, it's not urgent. Yeah, I've come to Christ, but oh wait a second, on what basis when Christ said be baptized, do you say I'll do that later, Lord?

You need to seek that. Saying I'll do it later does this. That attitude that says I'll do it later does this. It's lethal. It'd be better to drink arsenic than to make that the pattern of your spiritual life.

I'm not recommending arsenic for your personal consumption in saying that, just making a point. When you condition your life to say I'll do it later, you are dulling your conscience to the piercing power of the Word of God and you deceive yourself into thinking that delayed obedience is not disobedience. It teaches you, that attitude teaches you to become comfortable with sin. I'll do it later. Okay, nothing happened, this is okay. I'll do it a little bit more later and later and later before all of a sudden you're in a cesspool of life that you never dreamt you'd find yourself in. All because at some point you compromised on timing and said this isn't urgent enough to command my immediate attention. I've got better things to do than obey Christ right now.

Wow, really? I know you'd never say it that way in your words, but that's what you're saying in life. I got better things to do. Please, let's not disgrace Christ. Let's not dishonor him with an attitude that says, I'll do it on my timetable, Lord.

I'll do it when it fits me. To which Scripture would reply, why do you call me Lord, Lord, and not do what I say? I plan to, Lord.

It's kind of self-condemning when you see it in that light, isn't it? When you say I'll do it later, it just allows time for things to fester and worsen, bringing it back to the point of this conflict matter. Go back to verse 25. Jesus says, make friends quickly with your opponent at law while you're with him on the way. And he's talking about in the context of conflict, his real point isn't actual legal litigation, he's using that as an illustration, because the point, the larger point he's making is about anger and broken relationships and conflict. And so his point is, is that here's what litigants do on their way to court, they resolve things before they get there. Says, that's the kind of attitude you need to have with conflict in your life, you deal with it before it can get worse. And here's the point, I can speak about this with just a measure of understanding. In the realm of court litigation, when parties are in a lawsuit with one another, lawsuits always settle more rapidly the closer the trial date gets.

Always. Sometimes they don't settle, but settlement is always more urgent between the two conflicting parties as the trial date gets closer. Why is that? It bears on the point that Jesus is making. When you go into court with a lawsuit, all of a sudden it's out of your hands in the way that it gets resolved. The judge might rule against you, the jury might agree with your opponent and rule against you and you lose everything that was at stake in the lawsuit, rather than agreeing beforehand and saying, hey, I'll give a little if you give a little and we'll find a halfway ground and we can both walk away happy. Lawyers do that, their clients do that so that they can control the risk.

So that all of a sudden they are not subject to things that are outside of their control. We know that we're going there, we know that there's a problem here, we know that there's a lawsuit here, let's settle it because we both win that way. Jesus pictures that kind of situation and says and applies it to your personal conflict. He says, this is urgent for you to do quickly.

Why? Because God disciplines his people and if you don't resolve your conflict now while it's in your control to do, it may burst out into the open. There may be consequences, people may know, God may severely discipline you simply because you didn't resolve the conflict in the first place. So that, think about it this way, a married couple has a little conflict somewhere in the course of their marriage that they never resolve and it just starts to expand and expand and expand and more gets added on to it. And if it's in the church, it becomes known to the whole church.

Maybe a matter of church discipline. Or it spills out and it becomes a matter of public record in a divorce court. And all of a sudden, the consequences of where your conflict go are out of your hands. It's out of your control.

Wouldn't it have been a whole lot better when the problem was the size of a thimble to just deal with it then? That's Jesus's point. Do this quickly before he gets out of hand, before he gets out of control and then someone else is deciding your conflict for you. He says there in verse 26, and he talks about, he's picturing a debtor being taken to debtors prison, says you know you need to settle this before someone else takes you and throws you into prison. He says in verse 26, I'm telling you you won't come out of there until you've paid up the last cent. You know your creditor might have accepted terms, but because you wouldn't resolve it now you're in prison, you've got to deal with it. And now everything has to be paid. With regard to that setting, one writer explains it this way, he said, and I quote, in Jesus's day as in recent centuries, a person who defaulted in his debts could be thrown into a debtor's prison until the amount owed was paid.

Of course, while he was there, he couldn't earn anything, but his friends and loved ones who were eager to get him out might well put forth sustained and sacrificial efforts to provide the cash, end quote. The idea being that this forces the issue to be resolved. You're in prison, now it's forced to be resolved and you're not going to get out until it is. Jesus's point is, is that before your conflict gets to that level, deal with it. Deal with it while you can seek the Lord's grace on your humble efforts to resolve it, rather than waiting until God's discipline becomes more severe. Spiritually speaking, Jesus is saying in the simplest terms I can put it, your anger is sinful, therefore resolve it before you incur greater discipline from God.

In this life, to be sure, possibly his eternal discipline in hell for those who were never born again and it manifested in their perpetually angry spirit. Drawing it back from that to this, beloved, isn't it true, isn't it verified by your experience that many broken relationships could have been saved if there had simply been communication and humble interaction at the right time? Isn't that true? Well, apply that to your life then. Jesus says the right time, the right time for you to act on your conflict is as soon as you are conscious of the fact that you're at odds with a brother. We need to resolve matters when they first come up and not stew on it until you're so upset that the conflict erupts unexpectedly. And beloved, when your private disputes come out into the open, when that happens in the life of people, in their personal relationships, it's because they have disobeyed Christ's command here in Matthew 5. The problem increasingly grew in their mind, they justify themselves, they accuse others, and then it's too late to do anything about it.

And let me say one final thing about this. It is not a solution to the problem to run away from it without talking about it. It's not a solution to run away from your marriage because there's conflict in it and say I'm not going to talk about it. It's not a solution if you've got a problem at work to just clam up and ignore it and whatever. It's not a solution in the church to say I'm unhappy, I'm leaving, I'm not going to talk to anyone about it. That is a direct violation of Matthew 5. That is sinful for us to live that way because Christ says if you have conflict, go and seek to resolve it. And you resolve it not through avoidance but through a humble interaction about it with a person that's at stake. Sinclair Ferguson, whom I love, his books, his writings, his preaching. Sinclair Ferguson kind of puts a bow on this for us when he says this. He says, animosity is a time bomb.

We do not know when it will go off. We must deal with it quickly before the consequences of our bitterness get completely out of control. Most human relationships that are destroyed could have been preserved if there had been communication at the right time. Jesus says the right time is as soon as we are conscious that we are at enmity with our brother. Beloved, do you need to apply this in your personal life, your family life? Does it speak to you about the inner condition of your temperament? Will you use these principles?

I plead with you. Will you use these principles to help protect the unity of our church? Seek peace first and seek it fast if you're angry with someone. And pray that God would bless you as you seek to honor his word.

Anger is sort of a form of slow suicide. We can slowly kill ourselves emotionally and spiritually day by day by allowing Satan to have control of our emotions. However, Christ tells us if we have a conflict to humbly go and resolve it right away. If we handle it God's way, we'll see the rewards spiritually, emotionally, and physically. On our next program, Pastor Don Green will teach from Ephesians as he continues our current series titled Why Are You So Angry? here on The Truth Pulpit. Do join us then.

Right now, though, Don's back in studio with some closing words. You know, friend, we realize that you may not be close enough to our church to be able to join us as you would like to on any given Sunday, so let me invite you to join us on our live stream that you can find at our website, Sundays at 9 a.m. Eastern Time, and also we have a midweek service on Tuesdays at 7 p.m. We would love to have you join us in that way. A lot of people do. You might as well be one more that join us for those special studies of God's word and our church services on Sundays and Tuesdays. Here's Bill with some final information to help you find us. Just visit thetruthpulpit.com. I'm Bill Wright, and we'll see you next time for more from The Truth Pulpit.